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IQ is undoubtedly overemphasized by some factions, especially those with an axe to grind and a dog whistle to blow, if it helps them feel less guilty about thei

• diminoten 8y ago
  At this point I would accept it if someone told me that 100% of what I perceive as "smarts" when interacting with someone is explained by confidence and other learned social behaviors.
  • Jedi72 8y ago
    Just to clarify, are you making the claim that everyone has the same mental capacity for thinking/deduction/memory/etc, it's just our perception of that based on various external cues which makes us think these levels exist? Because I would disagree with that statement. Even if I had 50 years of study I would not think on the level of say Terrance Tao.
    • objektif 8y ago
      Think about what? Think about poems with Terrence or music or movies or stochastic calculus?
    • kibwen 8y ago
      Rather I'd say that "intelligence" in practice is an enormous grab-bag of different skills and qualities, some broad, some specific, some learnable, some inherent. A brilliant mathematician like Terence Tao may still very well consider themselves a dullard when faced with, say, the musical intuition of a piano virtuoso, or the effortless foresight of a chess grandmaster, or the rapt attention commanded by master storyteller, or the social intelligence of a smooth-talking Jobsian entrepreneur. For these kinds of intelligence, the IQ test is ill-suited, which is fine as long as we don't conflate IQ with the be-all end-all of intelligence (which has arguably happened in the popular imagination).
      • zorga 8y ago
        > A brilliant mathematician like Terence Tao may still very well consider themselves a dullard when faced with, say, the musical intuition of a piano virtuoso, or the effortless foresight of a chess grandmaster, or the rapt attention commanded by master storyteller, or the social intelligence of a smooth-talking Jobsian entrepreneur. I'd bet all of those people would score high in IQ. > For these kinds of intelligence, the IQ test is ill-suited That's not what the science tells us. > which is fine as long as we don't conflate IQ with the be-all end-all of intelligence There is only one G. There's little to no evidence in support of the theory of multiple intelligence's; it's not really science, IQ is actual science with lots of evidence to support it.
        • diminoten 8y ago
          > IQ is actual science with lots of evidence to support it. ...did you read the submission? Don't worship science blindly; it's not nearly as black/white as you're framing it to be. IQ can have evidence to support it and still be deeply flawed/incomplete/entirely wrong.
  • Itsdijital 8y ago
    Except (hopefully) when you are interacting with someone on your field of expertise. I'm sure everyone here has run into someone talking about a topic with great confidence, a topic you yourself are actually intimately knowledgeable of, and you realize that they really have no fucking idea what they are talking about.
  • hyperpallium 8y ago
    The smartest people I've known almost never come across as smart when interacting with them. Perhaps the most easily observed indicator of smarts is humility. The learned learn.
    • soufron 8y ago
      Could you expand with examples?
      • johnsonjo 8y ago
        I’m not the parent commenter but I’ll chime in, because when I was younger I recognized what the parent is talking about. One way to think of humility is as the ability to see that you may be wrong and having the courage to accept it take action and change your thoughts and self to become right. Now you may say so what I do that all the time I learn new things and am corrected occasionally, that’s good, but sometimes learning and reason fall to dogma. Really humility brings about a great opportunity to learn and steers away from dogmatic thinking. This doesn’t mean thoughts coming from dogma are always wrong it means reason with yourself and others for truth and be open to change your mind. When your humble you are curious to learn from others, because you know you don’t know everything and separately you know that almost anyone can teach you something important if you just listen. I think one indicator of humility is empathy in a sense trying to put yourself in their shoes emotionally. A big part of humility when it comes to casual debate is understanding the argument of who your conversing with and finding common ground so that you can relate. In my religion humility is often related in different terminology as “an open heart and mind” where the opposite pride is described as being of “a closed heart and mind”. So, that shows you that it has both a feeling and thinking aspect as described above. Honestly I feel if people were truly and fully humble then we wouldn’t have as much toxicity in online debate like there is spread all across my Facebook feed and in other chat streams all across the internet heck we might even learn a lot more from it too. By the way one thing humility is not is thinking less of yourself as too often people might think. You can be confident and humble. In conclusion, humility is a catalyst for learning whereas pride (in this context) just helps you stay where you’re at and stop progressing to further knowledge which may even lead to degradation of knowledge. Of course it’s not binary there is a continuum.
• dqpb 8y ago
  I'll admit I spend probably greater than average time brooding over how dumb most people are. But I don't think this is inherent in those people. I think it's mostly a result of their prior knowledge, sleep, energy level, stress/anxiety, and give-a-shit. I think most people are fundamentally capable of great intelligence.
  • viraptor 8y ago
    > energy level, stress/anxiety, and give-a-shit. I think most people are fundamentally capable of great intelligence. This sounds like there's a missing link where "most people are fundamentally capable of higher energy level, less anxiety, more give-a-shit" may not be taken for granted.
    • 80386 8y ago
      High energy and low anxiety seem more trainable than IQ, although even then they aren't infinitely trainable. Thomas Edison, by the common accounts, slept four or five hours a night plus a few short naps; most people couldn't do that. There are some other important factors that aren't as flattering to modern Western society. I know some smart people who are stuck in dead-end jobs because their parents didn't know the right hoops to jump through to get them into an environment conducive to socioeconomic advancement and a good college, and some who aren't going anywhere because they just can't buy into the BS they're supposed to buy into. If you can't suck it up and agree with your professors, even when they're obviously wrong, you're going to have a hard time. On the other hand, I know a guy who isn't very smart but got into Harvard because his parents were rich and he's the sort of person who reflexively identifies with and agrees with authority.
  • yourapostasy 8y ago
    > I think most people are fundamentally capable of great intelligence. If the real world distribution of IQ closely approximates the Gaussian distribution IQ tests are meant to model, then in the US alone there are about 44 million people in the range from about 70-85. World wide, about 1 billion people in that cohort of 1-2 standard deviations. Even if actual real world results are half of what the models predict, we're still talking really large numbers of people. Finding ways to bring them up to "just" average intelligence would be astounding for the species, and I'd aim for that first instead of setting ourselves up for failure by defining a goal of "great intelligence". Right now, the best we can prescribe with even a semblance of consistent results is intensive educational intervention and family assistance from early childhood onward. Actually doing that in our current economic model would be on the order of ditching the MIC and somehow transferring the spending to those activities. That's a pipe dream with current established stakeholders.
• mikemotherwell 8y ago
  The original tweetstorm and this post aim to show something very specific, namely that IQ misses the mark as a measure of intelligence the further away from IQ 70 one ventures. In other words, stupid is stupid, but smart seems to come in many flavors. The title of the article itself points to this fact, as the word "largely" is inserted. Nassim Nicholas Taleb himself can see the value at the lower levels. If the goal was to find people that can, say, program, I think IQ works as a perfectly fine metric. If one wants to find someone who can make revolutionary break throughs, possibly less so, but even then, if IQ can exclude 50+% of people, you are onto a good thing.
  • barrkel 8y ago
    IQ is definitely not a good measure of value, contribution, quality of thought. I think it's probably correlated, and for some contributions may be a gating factor, but I've seen plenty of smart people examining the wrong things, for sure. Meta-analysis of focus doesn't seem to come free with IQ. I think it's a skill.
    • mikemotherwell 8y ago
      IQ is an EXCELLENT measure of "value, contribution, quality of thought". The idea it isn't is weird to me. What IQ fails at is being an ABSOLUTE measure of those things, e.g. John Nash is a genius, but his schizophrenia likely made a lot of what he did and said questionable. Just taking IQ and ignoring other factors would lead you awry. Even then, John Nash came up with the Nash Equilibrium. I think the mistake is thinking that one measure will be absolutely predictive. Nassim Nicholas Taleb's point is that IQ is a great measure of stupid people, almost absolute at < 70 IQ levels, but as you progress upwards it's predictive power wanes. Which is GOOD. Success is defined by many parts. Genetics, culture, training, hard work, timing aka luck. That there is no one metric that predicts everything is a good thing. However, while we should be clear on the limits of each of our measures, and not over state their individual value, that is not to say that these metrics are useless.
      • FakeComments 8y ago
• pps43 8y ago
  The point Taleb is making is that IQ works well in the lower half of the distribution, but not in the upper half. Which makes sense, considering that questions for IQ tests are created by people with close to average intelligence. Imagine third-graders writing college-level math tests, or beginner chess players coming up with chess problems to separate masters from grandmasters.
  • chillacy 8y ago
    But many of the tests aren’t binary in outcome, like ravens progressive matrices or N back.
    • pps43 8y ago
      The problem is not whether the answer is binary. The problem is that the author of the test needs to have at least the same level of intelligence (and probably even higher) than what the test is measuring. Otherwise how can you tell if the answer is correct? So to get a good IQ score one needs to be able to figure out what a test designer (with average IQ) thought the correct answer should be.
      • catskul2 8y ago
        > The problem is that the author of the test needs to have at least the same level of intelligence (and probably even higher) than what the test is measuring. What makes you believe that?
        • pps43 8y ago
          I gave an example above. Imagine you ask second graders to write math tests for college. They might extrapolate from their experience like this "We started working with single-digit numbers, like 2+3 or 4*2. Then we learned to work with two-digit numbers, 23+17 or 17-73. High school math should probably be three-digit numbers, college will be four-digit numbers, and math professor must be able to work with eight-digit numbers." This is actually a reasonable approach (extrapolating from known data), but do you think this test will separate math ability well among college students?
• skywhopper 8y ago
  The fact that there are people who are better performers, communicators, creators, producers, or whatever does not point to the viability of IQ as commonly conceived, nor is it evidence that there could be any single one dimensional scale constructed to measure whatever that quality is. In fact I suspect it’s multiple traits interacting in complex ways that make up the results we attribute to “intelligence”. The IQ test I have taken as part of a psychometric examination given to me to diagnose ADHD was an interesting experience but unless there are far deeper subjective meta-layers involved, the test itself measured lots of learned skills—including spatial reasoning, memorization, and of all things English vocabulary. There is no way the test that I took could be an unbiased measure of inborn potential.
• golemiprague 8y ago
  If anything it is the opposite, IQ measure whatever it measures, the problems is that some people don't want to accept the correlation to other things, for example to the rate of success in academic studies. So you can ignore those correlations as much as you want and put millions into educating people with low IQ but it doesn't and won't help. You try to shame people for looking at the clear data and coming to conclusions while coming to the exact same conclusions and wrapping it with different semantics. Yes there are also other parameters in life, nobody denies it but IQ is pretty good indication for certain things.
  • commandlinefan 8y ago
    Yeah, he’s not even harping on any specific IQ test – he seems to be rejecting any attempt to assign a quantifiable, objective measure to intelligence in general. Ultimately, in spite of having a lot of sources, he ends up saying that intelligence shouldn’t be measured because we might not like what we find.
• jesssse 8y ago
  IQ and civilization seems commingled. IQ is a good tool for sociological observations.