As far as I can see, the analysis presented in the article doesn't account for differences in wealth, education, neonatal care etc. Aside from the (obvious to me) fact that IQ is a very limited measure of intelligence, I don't see any investigation of whether IQ can be altered through nurture (which I think it can).<p>Taleb's original medium post deals with other issues aside from correlation with on-job performance and wealth. Specifically the purported correlation between IQ and race. Therefore, the claim that 'Taleb is wrong about IQ' doesn't seem to follow from the limited analysis provided.
I'm from a small town in North Carolina, and without the benefit of an IQ score my boredom in the classroom would have been interpreted as a condition requiring stimulant medication.<p>Of course these tests may be improved upon, but so far I haven't seen any solutions offered to account for children in my situation if quantitative measures of aptitude are eliminated.
>> Variance explained by IQ<p>The author performs a regression on the WLS dataset. I did not know what that
is so I followed the links provided:<p>>> The Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS) is a long-term study of a random sample
of 10,317 men and women who graduated from Wisconsin high schools in 1957.<p>So, in other words, it is a small dataset that is not representative of most
humans on the planet. It is also specifically populated by high school
graduates which is likely to introduce some unknown bias to the dataset- and
any results drawn from it in particular with regards to IQ.<p>In short, please don't abuse statistics, or if you do, don't do it in an
article that starts by accusing another text of being "just a rant".
It's pretty funny that among the discoveries made in the field of psychology IQ is one of the strongest and most maligned at the same time. Meanwhile unreproducible junk is receiving accolades.
OP is playing with fire. It's quite dangerous to study human intelligence because there's a lot of results that you might accidentally stumble on, which can be mistaken for racism, or worse, be exploited by racists.<p>Even if you stumble on such facts accidentally, it can very well damage your academic prospects (and sometimes non-academic prospects as well ... in places like Silicon Valley).<p>Many years ago I had a friend who was studying an unrelated topic at University (he was trying to figure out how to test for future programming aptitude via a purely paper test). He was administering the paper tests to students with no programming experience before their first programming class, and then studying the correlation between various paper tests and final grades in programming projects in courses (including grad courses) over time.<p>He found some quite good paper tests that correlated quite nicely with future grades on programming projects ... but a faculty advisor pointed out that the results of the paper test were also strongly correlated with some politically sensitive student categories. My friend abandoned the project because when it was pointed out like that, it was quite clear he was producing results that could be exploited to create a selection criteria he was not comfortable with endorsing.
JSMP:
"...this example is a theoretical use case where using IQ testing is not so useful.
To look at something a little more realistic, let’s say a company wants to avoid people with a performance more than 2 standard deviations below the mean. (Perhaps such employees have a risk of causing large harm, which could for instance be an issue in the military.) And we again compare admitting people at random vs only taking applicants with above average IQ."<p>[for reference, if using IQ as an indicator for performance, 2 standard deviations below the mean would be 70 IQ]<p>Taleb:
"The argument by psychologists to make IQ useful is of the sort: who would you like to do brain surgery on you/who would you hire in your company/who would you recommend, someone with a 90 IQ or one with 130 is ...academic. Well, you pick people on task-specific performance, which should include some filtering. In the real world you interview people from their CV (not from some IQ number sent to you as in a thought experiment), and, once you have their CV, the 62 IQ fellow is naturally eliminated. So the only think for which IQ can select, the mentaly disabled, is already weeded out in real life: he/she can’t have a degree in engineering or medicine. Which explains why IQ is unnecessary and using it is risky because you miss out on the Einsteins and Feynmans."
The point is: statistically, having above average IQ can give you some advantage. Maybe 5%, maybe 25%. The same advantage can come from many sources, like: be born on the "right" country, have a certain weight, height, skin color, religious belief, economic background, etc.<p>Think about the USA. The year and city where you're born/raised can outweigh your IQ when trying to predict income, life expectancy, etc.
I can't shake the feeling that every discussion of IQ contains motivated reasoning: either someone doesn't want the idea of IQ to be relevant ("I can work hard enough") or because they do want the idea to be true ("Look at how successful I am, I must be special").
It's depressing how conventional it has become for a relatively intelligent population, like the HN audience, to only know about criticisms of IQ and basically nothing about its positive value. But witness the credulous reception for Taleb's slapdash work in these comments, and the hostility to basic technical criticisms of that work.<p>If you are interested in knowing about the thing itself, and not just criticisms of the thing, I invite you to pick up, for example, Stuart Ritchie's book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-That-Matters-Stuart-Ritchie/dp/1444791877" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-That-Matters-Stuart-Ritc...</a><p>And before you get upset about the title, the book is from a survey series called "All That Matters". It's not claiming that _intelligence_ is "all that matters".
For some jobs, it matters more than others. I wonder if the data also records profession categories and differences become more clear.<p>Also IQ is a sub-
component for general intelligence. There are so many other factors. Claiming it's useless or useful is pointless. It probably depends on how relevant that sub component is for the role and task at hand and therefore requires a case-based understanding.<p>It's like claiming that good body strength is useless. For a programmer that's probably true, but for a professional home mover or pyramid builder, results will be different.
I have one question about IQ (or the <i>g</i> if you prefer to make the distinction): So what? What are you going to do with this information?<p>* IQ is fixed; a test at, say, 16 will give you your intelligence for the rest of your life. (16 is arbitrary because I am uncomfortable with psychological testing of young children, but you can make the argument to roll this back to 6 or 8 if you like.)<p>* IQ is hereditary.<p>* Skin color (and ethnicity in general) is correlated with IQ. Sex is correlated with IQ variance.<p>(Am i missing anything here?)<p>Here's a clarified from of Kantian categorical imperative: Would you like to live in a society based on those principles? (I forgot to add, "given human history".)<p>IQ testing is very valuable at the low end, to identify individuals that need some form of help. I, personally, am a little uncomfortable with other policy extensions.
I think that as a society we’re missing out on a lot of important findings and advances that would improve people’s lives because the IQ research has become somewhat of a taboo in social science. Linking it to eugenics is especially harmful.
The author's argument under the heading, "IQ selection vs random selection" could use some more work. Presently, it supports Taleb's argument presented under the heading, "Correlation only for low IQ."<p>The example shows that an employer gains a significant improvement (450%) in avoiding candidates two sigma below the mean, with only a minor improvement (16%) in obtaining candidates above the mean. A better example (if it exists) would show a very strong improvement in finding candidates at least one sigma above the mean.
> The adjusted R2 is 0.356, so IQ explains ~35%.<p>Ouch... “Explains” is used here in a very strict technical sense whereas I guess Taleb uses it much more roughly (just the statement “between 5-13%” must make you pause).
Taleb tweeted his response, mentioning also this HN topic: <a href="https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1320433476345176066" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1320433476345176066</a>
You can't win in discussions about IQ for this reason:<p>A school like Harvard admits rich people who are maybe 1 SD above the mean and poor people who are 3-4 SD above the mean.<p>It's a form of "achievement laundering". You might be 22 years old and the only remarkable thing about you is that your parents are rich (either they achieved something or their parents achieved something or got lucky or stole or...) You took classes that weren't graded harshly with some really bright kids, and for the benefit of both groups, rich kids and bright kids are blended together so that newspaper commentators and other pundits will look at them with 80/20 vision and think they are looking at a "meritocracy".<p>A threat to this is that some alumni families have a strong sense of entitlement and insist on their spawn with inferior IQ (and often inferior moral character in general) get admission.<p>Some of these children benefit a lot from test prep, some benefit a little, other ones can at best make up a story like "I must have skipped a row and put all the right answers in the wrong rows".<p>So there is a lot of hate for standardized tests and circa 1970-1980 somebody must have hired a public relations agency, done some polling, figured that you couldn't get sympathy for low-IQ rich kids but maybe you could get sympathy for low-IQ black people and that makes it a little easier for people like Stephen J. Gould to get funding to drop what they are doing and write on the topic of "racial bias in IQ testing".<p>---<p>Effective political movements usually have a combination of an elite sector that supplies resources and a mass sector that supplies footsoldiers. The elite is too small to win at anything on it's own, and it is next-to-impossible for mass groups to organize in the long term:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action</a><p>---<p>An interesting phenomenon is that you'll often see something in People magazine to the effect that "(Rosanne Barr|Sylvester Stallone|...) has a 148 IQ" and wonder who it is that trains celebrities to ace this this test:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven%27s_Progressive_Matrices" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven%27s_Progressive_Matrices</a><p>which is has to be, because with just 60 questions, somebody with an IQ > 100 or so should be able to memorize the answers. Maybe you can't really a fault an actor for this because an actor doesn't have to be a genius, they just have to play one on TV.
Normally I would point out that income doesn't mean much, that we should focus on wealth instead... But the modern global economy is so bubbly that as soon as enough people retire or decide to actually start spending their money, most of that nominal wealth will quickly evaporate and so it's not really meaningful either.<p>The problem now is that a huge amount people who think of themselves as wealthy are thinking in nominal dollar terms, but there are so many of such people today, and they're so conformist in their investment and lifestyle choices that when they retire (likely all at the approximately same time, in approximately the same way), there is no way that the real economy will be able to support their retirement without driving up salaries/incomes and inflation.<p>Economic conformity is fragility.
This analysis doesn't engage very well with Taleb's key argument about symmetry. Distilling an R^2 ≈ 0.1 correlation from a massive dataset isn't very good evidence of anything.<p>But part of the blame rests with Taleb for arranging his arguments in a series of colloquial blog posts with exaggerated claims of both the relevance of this debate to psychology and unjustified speculation about what IQ actually measures — which would never survive peer review. He's invited low-quality debate like this rather than contributing to the development of standards and techniques that could improve the field, maybe out of laziness or just the desire for immediate publicity.
I read something once from Warren Buffett, that for any job, a person needs enough IQ to do it, but more doesn't help, and too much more hurts. And for nearly all jobs that involve working with other people, (including investing), an IQ of 120 is enough. That agrees with the correlation between IQ and income breaking down as IQ increases.
Ok, so Taleb's argument was:<p>> “IQ” is a stale test meant to measure mental capacity but in fact mostly measures extreme unintelligence (learning difficulties), as well as, to a lesser extent (with a lot of noise), a form of intelligence, stripped of 2nd order effects<p>Right before the conclusion, the author shows us this chart comparing incomes in IQ cohorts:
<a href="https://www.jsmp.dk/posts/2019-06-16-talebiq/iq_files/figure-html5/unnamed-chunk-20-1.png" rel="nofollow">https://www.jsmp.dk/posts/2019-06-16-talebiq/iq_files/figure...</a><p>Maybe it's because I'm not a high-IQ, R-programming brain-genius,
but it seems like the low-IQ distribution has a very distinct shape with a low mean and leftward skew,
whereas the mid and high-IQ distributions look pretty similar,
with a modest advantage to the high-IQ cohort.
That seems to confirm Taleb's claim that IQ mostly measures unintelligence,
and has a much smaller impact on the higher end.
I read so many different things about IQ.<p>It's crap.<p>It's the only good thing that came from psychology.<p>If the army uses it, it can't be so bad.<p>It stays the same, your whole life.<p>You can train it.<p>It's right, but it doesn't help you much because if you look at the world, the people with the highest IQ aren't the most successful.<p>What's right?
Funny how many people believe Taleb’s claims are true even though no ones, including Taleb himself could prove them. On the contrary, at least the author of the article could point out specifically where Taleb’s claims cannot hold water.
When it comes to the template - it totally looks like Distill for R Markdown (<a href="https://rstudio.github.io/distill/" rel="nofollow">https://rstudio.github.io/distill/</a>).
What about the claim that IQ is only useful at the low end where it's a detector for intellectual disability? And the possibility that this may explain most of the correlation between IQ and performance?
I think Taleb still makes a very strong point when you compare the chart shown in this article (which shows very weak linear growth at best) with charts which show income percentiles (which show exponential growth). That's not even going into wealth distribution which is even worse.
IQ is a measure of how willing you are to do something extremely boring and pointless. A perfect predictor for success in the average office job and education.
If you could control for desire you would get very different data. The Unabomber was extremely smart and extremely interested in not making a lot of money.
Musk,Gates,Jobs,Bezos are extremely smart and extremely interested in changing the world through capitalist endeavors.