I like Taleb's work. It's always good food for thought and frequently insightful. That said, his posture towards academia of late seems a bit juvenile and not a little annoying. Which isn't to say that he doesn't have a point, but it gets pretty frustrating when I pay good money for a book (Antifragile) and every other page is taking potshots at "fragilistas" and talking about how those dumb intellectuals don't actually know anything. In my book you win arguments by winning arguments, not by reframing the discussion so as to portray all of your opponents as hopelessly deluded cowards and fools.
Is there a coherent train of thought in these tweets, other than Taleb's disdain for IQ[1]? I'm struggling to understand why a measurement that appears to have <i>no</i> value "measures best the ability to be a good slave," or why <i>any</i> of this entails the belief that "the only robust measure of "rationality" & "intelligence" is survival."<p>[1]: A position that, as far as I know, is neither controversial nor contentious in academia.
<i>If many millionaires have IQs around 100, & 58 y.o. back office clercs at Goldman Sachs or elsewhere an IQ of 155 (true example), clearly the measurement is less informative than claimed.</i><p>it is important to distinguish the macro from the micro point of view.<p>From the micro point of view, a talented individual has a greater a priori probability to reach a high level of success than a moderately gifted one.<p>On the other hand, from the macro point of view of the entire society, the probability to find
moderately gifted individuals at the top levels of success is greater than that of finding there
very talented ones, because moderately gifted people are much more numerous and, with the
help of luck, have - globally - a statistical advantage to reach a great success, in spite of their
lower individual a priori probability.
Stripping the article of the author (whom I don’t actually know much about other than he seems to have showed up next to Nate Silver at some point), I found this “thread” to be a bunch of personal anecdotes and “intelligent looking formulas and stuff” taken out of context to support the general conclusion that IQ is a bad metric for intelligence, as Taleb would know because he clearly has a very high IQ (note: this is something that he actually brings up as someone else saying about him, to give him credibility?). While I am not opposed to the position he takes, I did not understand the argument he is making the slightest. Could someone explain to me why this is actually legit, rather than what to me looks dangerously close to pseudoscientific rambling?
Part of the challenge with measuring stuff is we usually stop when we have a single measurement. IQ is a repeatable thing but the problem - to my naive self - is that its <i>called</i> intelligence quotient and the idea of giving it a single measurement is ridiculous as there are more factors than one.<p>Intelligence is probably going to be a maximum within the system youre measuring against. Maybe high IQ is great for researchers and professors, but not for investors, or business folks.
Taleb. Love him, hate him. Always a lot of controversy.<p>I like him quite a lot somehow, and there's clearly a good amount of genius in him, although sometimes there are certain positions and affirmations that feel less so (to me at least).<p>For example, his critique of the growing inequality in the world [0] [1] amounts to pointing at dynamic inequality, not static one. This one never convinced me so far.<p>To be clear: I fully understand his point; I simply disagree, especially while living in San Francisco and witnessing homeless people every day, walking next to VC multimillionaires.<p>Anyone able to convince me?<p>[0]: <a href="https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/892351059615789057?lang=en" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/892351059615789057?lang=e...</a><p>[1]: <a href="https://medium.com/incerto/inequality-and-skin-in-the-game-d8f00bc0cb46" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/incerto/inequality-and-skin-in-the-game-d...</a>
I like Taleb's philosophy that he unlike most successful people, downplays the role of hard work and rationality for success and attributes most things to what we call luck and chance. Being a wall street trader, short seller, etc... may require this kind of mentality since all rules and conventions are broken every day and having a 160-IQ in this arena will be even more harmful than useful if you use logic and science for every decision. However, I don't really understand his disdain for academia and theoretical knowledge, his philosophy won't get him anywhere where strict and disciplined logic is needed, the kind of logic that actually advanced the civilization not the one he used to make money off his bets from pointless stock charts
When someone asks me a question in real life I don’t focus on “Why”. I focus on “How” (can I help them).<p>Most arguments down the thread seem just as moot to me, but then again, I’m probably not smart enough for a Twitter IQ thread.
I got two ideas from that writing:
- Is not a good idea to take a single dimensional indicator for a multidimensional capability. I suppose that know about IQs can discuss about that.
- That having a high IQ is not a so great predictor on how well you will solve a real world problem. If we define "real world problems" the ones with feedback loops, plenty of noise, and known and unknown unknowns (his field of work) then he may have a point. But that is a subset of the real world problems, and anyway you may have to solve ideal world problems too.
The fact that some people <i>can’t</i> survive in the market, and other people <i>don’t</i> [even participate], meshes well with his “simple verbal test”: it only works if your subject is playing along. Street smarts are earned, granted. But IQ is not a measure of how many toys you die with. If the test is market survival, anyone who retires is a genius.
FOR THE RECORD,<p>Financial crashes are not "black swan" events. I've never seen a black swan in my life, but I've seen two or three financial crashes. As far as I can tell, Taleb is just a memer.<p>His degeneration of late is hopefully cluing people in, though the compulsion to substitute memes for thought will continue. Hey, maybe that's what IQ is, a person's likeliness to think instead of resorting to memes? Maybe that's why Taleb hates it?