IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle (2019)

This article is written so polemically it&#x27;s hard to take it seriously. Also Taleb seems to be constructing so many straw men I wouldn&#x27;t even know where to start.<p>IQ isn&#x27;t a swindle, it&#x27;s a very real thing. However, it is only one factor among <i>many</i> in determining most practical real-world outcomes, and it is well-known to be affected by environmental variables at population levels.<p>But IQ isn&#x27;t a &quot;fraud&quot; or &quot;immoral&quot;. These are bizarre claims Taleb makes, with zero evidence or even definition of what he means.<p>What a strange article.

There are a lot of posts complaining about Taleb&#x27;s tone. I find it refreshing. Too often are statistics and stupid measurements applied to give a veneer of quantitative rigor to stupid ideas or ineffective systems.<p>If a manager ranked you based on a statistic of your lines of code produced per day, you would rightly be derisive. It turns out that such stupid quantification infects a great deal of society, especially the sciences.<p>There are many examples of statistical phenomena that starkly illustrate how subtle and counterintuitive probability can be: by no means a transparent and straightforward subject. Think of Monty Hall or Simpson&#x27;s paradox. Taleb is just pointing out more sophisticated traps of probability that plague amateurs, and most of us who apply statistics are amateurs.<p>Why is he so mad? He hates it when stupid ideas are granted importance because of nonsense statistics, especially when they have consequences for people and society as a whole. I hope Taleb never stops being mad.

There is a part I really like about this and a part I don’t.<p>The part I like: the linearity in IQ vs ability is driven by the low end. People who have cognitive challenges cannot complete the test and cannot perform the task. At the high end the correlation disappears.<p>This is — you can argue with it — an interesting observation.<p>The part I don’t like is the attack on “nerds.” Come on! I don’t even have to explain why it’s okay to wear socks with sandals. (Am I defending my own sloppy sense of style? You’ll probably never know.)

&gt;&gt; “The same people hold that IQ is heritable, that it determines success, that Asians have higher IQs than Caucasians, degrade Africans, then don’t realize that China for about a Century had one order of magnitude lower GDP than the West.”<p>Lol what. National gdp seems like an absurd thing to associate with with IQ. This doesn’t prove or disprove a thing. What a waste of ink.

This is a fascinating case study on how a reasonable point—IQ is not a terribly useful psychometric in most cases—can be completely lost in the conversation due to your writing style.

I think the only valid interpretation of the IQ test is that you are good at solving some riddles and spotting patterns. In no way, it can be used as a generic metric of who is better or worse.<p>I took the MENSA test last year just for fun, I did not get in :) The examiner before explained as well that the exam measures an only small part of what is considered an intelligence.<p>In short, it is a fun exam if you like riddles and no other value.

Taleb&#x27;s article is debunked here <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;greyenlightenment.com&#x2F;wealth-and-iq-part-3-continued&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;greyenlightenment.com&#x2F;wealth-and-iq-part-3-continued...</a><p><i>Studying popular subs such as &#x2F;r&#x2F;wallstreetbets, &#x2F;r&#x2F;investing, &#x2F;r&#x2F;personalfinance, &#x2F;r&#x2F;fatfire, and &#x2F;r&#x2F;financialindependence is useful because we have a generally homogeneous population in which everyone tends to have similar individual preferences, that being the accumulation of wealth, so we have already controlled for that important variable. To a high degree of statistical significance, regarding the aforementioned subs, members who accumulate a lot of money at an early stage in life such as through investing and or STEM, again, tend to high high IQs. Even inheriting a lot wealth at an early age is positively correlated with IQ, because of the correlation between between family wealth and IQ.</i><p>Taleb fails to account for individual preferences as it concerns the accumulation of wealth. Obv. if you compare aspiring actors to aspiring t lawyers, IQ will not be as useful versus comparing aspiring physicists. It&#x27;s not so much that IQ predicts absolute outcomes, but rather relative outcomes among a homogeneous population who have similar goals&#x2F;aspirations for g-loaded activities whether it&#x27;s writing, publishing, stock trading, law, math, FIRE, etc.<p>Aspiring lawyers who have high IQs will have high LSAT scores and GPAs and get into competitive programs, whereas low-scoring applicants may quit or find it harder to get into good programs and make as much money. On trading and investing Reddit subs , top traders almost invariably have higher IQs than traders who lose money. An extreme example of this is Renaissance Technologies, founded and staffed by some of the smartest people in the world, and by a huge margin the most successful hedge fund ever..

I think we all know what happened here: Nassim Taleb took an IQ test, it didn’t show him to be the great genius he knows himself to be, and so the entire concept of IQ must be invalid.

Ever since Taleb blocked me on twitter for such a minor pushback I gave in the replies of one of his tweets, I&#x27;ve lost interest reading anything he writes. His unbridled emotion is uncouth.<p>And it&#x27;s not that I think IQ is &quot;the most perfect psychometric ever created(TM)&quot;.

Oh man, can&#x27;t wait for the conversation about this one. So much of people&#x27;s identity can be wrapped up in being intelligent, which makes sense when you are still in the phase of your life where what you _can_ do is more important than what you _have_ done. If you&#x27;re concerned about your IQ very much over the age of about 12 years old, that&#x27;s a sign that you probably aren&#x27;t focusing on the right things in your life.

This comes off like an angry rant by a person who scored 100 but thinks of himself as highly gifted. IQ as a concept is a useful metric and predictor. Our current &quot;stale&quot; IQ tests still predict criminal behavior more accurately than any sociological theories of crime. It just doesn&#x27;t predict whether someone will end up in a &quot;menial job&quot; or as a C-level executive.

&gt; If you want to detect how someone fares at a task, say loan sharking, tennis playing, or random matrix theory, make him&#x2F;her do that task; we don’t need theoretical exams for a real world function by probability-challenged psychologists.<p>^ horrible job interviews in a nutshell

I can&#x27;t even bring myself to read this. After perusing and seeing it gets so emotional (bringing up eugenics, morality, etc), I have a hard time believing it&#x27;s going to be objective.<p>&quot;There is no significant statistical association between IQ and hard measures such as wealth.&quot;<p>So... you&#x27;re saying that people with an IQ of 60 are equally wealthy as those with an IQ of 110?<p>I understand getting frustrated about misapplication of tests. But it&#x27;s absolute that science must measure what is, not what we wish to be. Science is never unfair, never has an agenda, never backward -- it&#x27;s simply a method to ascertain facts, entirely indifferent to our human affairs and feelings.

IQ is just a metric from taking a standardized test. I don&#x27;t know why people have a hard time understanding that. It&#x27;s like being mad about people&#x27;s SAT scores. It&#x27;s not like IQ is even used for anything important, people don&#x27;t put it on their resumes or anything.

Discussed at the time: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18803533" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18803533</a>

&quot;It does correlate to very negative performance (as it was initially designed to detect learning special needs)&quot;<p>It did a crap job detecting learning special needs with my son. Because he has a weird intelligence profile of being above 98% on some tasks and below 10% on other tasks, the IQ test simply wouldn&#x27;t score him, and put him in the &quot;he&#x27;s not taking the test correctly&quot; category. Yeah, not at all useful, thanks. There were plenty of other more useful tests however that teased out his learning difficulties and actually gave us useful information to help his education.

This article motivates an extension of yesterday&#x27;s xkcd comic [1]. A Type X error: a correct result, interpreted correctly but communicated so poorly that no one wants to listen.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;2303&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;2303&#x2F;</a>

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did he &#x27;fail&#x27; an IQ test?<p>taleb sometimes makes some great and interesting arguments, but I can&#x27;t take rabid monologues like this seriously.

Place some skin in the game and hire a bunch of 87 IQ people as financial advisors.

A fine example of an expert in one field believing he is an expert in every field.<p>In reading the section describing psychometricians, he clearly is not actually reading what they publish.