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The frustrating thing from the perspective of an individual differences researcher is that Taleb is not at all correct about IQ becoming less predictive of perf

The frustrating thing from the perspective of an individual differences researcher is that Taleb is not at all correct about IQ becoming less predictive of performance at higher levels! Studies pretty consistently show that IQ is a valid predictor of performance all the way up the scale, so that, for example, someone with an IQ of 145 is likely to perform (at school, on the job, etc) better than someone with an IQ of 135. Here's one good reference, but you can easily find many others: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41038598?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents https://www.jstor.org/stable/41038598?seq=1#page_scan_tab_co... Taleb just seems to make the (incorrect) assumption that IQ is less predictive of performance at the high end--without any evidence--and then builds an extended diatribe on top of that falsehood. This thread is evidence of the damage that someone with very little domain knowledge, very high self-assuredness, and a far-reaching voice can do to the factual basis of public discourse. I just can't get over how misleading it all is. He just made up those figures at the bottom of the article--they aren't based on any actual data at all!

feanaro 8y ago
I'm as surprised as you and I'm glad someone took the time to write that up (I was about to when I saw your comment). I don't understand why someone would call IQ "unscientific" without addressing research showing it to be a good predictor of future performance. Note that this still doesn't invalidate the point that people can be smart in many different ways (yet have the same IQ), which seems like a reasonable position.
- otalp 8y ago
  Just because something is a good predictor doesn't make it scientific. There could be a third variable like wealth which needs to be controlled for, but is rarely done in those studies with few exceptions. In those exceptions, it was generally found that wealth of parents played a much bigger role in future success than IQ.
  - feanaro 8y ago
    > Just because something is a good predictor doesn't make it scientific. What does it mean for a thing to be scientific? > In those exceptions, it was generally found that wealth of parents played a much bigger role in future success than IQ. You are talking about very long term success. It is somewhat obvious that wealth you are born into should be an important factor for overall success. I'm talking about shorter term success, like job performance.
    - otalp 8y ago
      To be scientific would require proving a definite causal relationship between IQ and intelligence, while also convincingly proving that intelligence can be measured with a number
      - feanaro 8y ago
        Why does it have to be causal? A variable can be a real predictor of another without any of them causing the other one (for instance, they may have a common cause). That doesn't mean the predictor is of any less value. I would say that results on certain cognitive ability tests (i.e. "IQ tests") being at least a moderately good predictor for future performance in certain human activities is a rather well proven fact. For instance, the correlation between an IQ score and future job performance on a job with complex requirements is about 0.5. Of course, that does not mean the relationship is 1-to-1 and that it is a perfect predictor (which it obviously isn't).
        vmh1928 8y ago
        Finding bear poop on the trail is a predictor of bear activity, not a cause of the bear.
        feanaro 8y ago
        I vehemently agree, as a careful reading of my previous comment tells.
jf- 8y ago
IQ is one of those topics which is, unfortunately, inescapably political. If important psychometric traits, like intelligence and personality, are highly heritable, then one of the implicit assumptions of left-leaning points of view is undermined: that everyone is inherently equal, that anyone can achieve anything given the right education, environment and resources. Add to this the fact that we know that other heritable traits may be ethnically distributed, and we have a particularly difficult thesis. The solution to this for some, is that IQ cannot be allowed to be meaningful, as the idea is simply too dangerous. The article above and much of this discussion are the result. Simply put, this is a battle of ideology masquerading as a debate over a matter of fact. This is not the kind of discourse you would get if people were discussing the precise atomic weight of hydrogen.
- iron0013 8y ago
  I’m not sure what this has to do with leftists, as the idea that Taleb is a leftist is absolutely risible. He’s a reactionary egomaniac who thinks all of his ideas are correct simply because they are HIS ideas, and obviously HE can never be wrong
  - jf- 8y ago
    I never mentioned leftists, I said words to the effect of assuming a blank slate is one of the implicit assumptions of left-leaning world views. Taleb can share such a belief without explicitly being on the left.
    - api 8y ago
      This is a straw man, sort of akin to asserting that all right leaning people believe that might makes right.
      - jf- 8y ago
        Very well, maybe not everyone who would describe themselves as on the left would have this belief, but in my experience it is very common.
mr_toad 8y ago
> Studies pretty consistently show that IQ is a valid predictor of performance all the way up the scale, so that, for example, someone with an IQ of 145 is likely to perform (at school, on the job, etc) better than someone with an IQ of 135. To be fair, he doesn’t say that high IQ are not correlated with high performance, he conjectures that they ‘decorelate’, by which I presume he means the correlation weakens. (It’s pretty obvious at the end of the post that he’s arguing that). If true, that is concerning for a measure. Heteroscedasticity is a serious problem for accurate prediction - in particular it tends to conceal the inaccuracies of predictions. He also points out other issues, non-monotinicity and intransitivity which would be problematic. If your measure predicts candidate A is better than B and candidate B is better than C, you generally want it to predict candidate A is better than C. If it predicts candidate C is better than A, it creates confusion.
lordlimecat 8y ago
He addresses that, the issue is that you aren't identifying "performance" but rather "performance in the sort of test taking environment that exists at school". His entire point is that, while IQ may identify good, obedient candidates for BS jobs, it is not broadly applicable as anything like a general metric for life.
- repolfx 8y ago
  Does anyone use it like that though? Isn't he arguing with a straw man? Who is using IQ to allocate funding to pop singers? IQ scores aren't used that much and only ever for predicting success of jobs where success is easily measurable (which is what Taleb seems to mean by "obediency-based BS jobs").
  - jeena 8y ago
    Yeah they do, I've seen https://www.worlddata.info/iq-by-country.php https://www.worlddata.info/iq-by-country.php linked in discussions about if Germany should welcome refuges from Africa for example. And the gist was that while getting Asian high achievers is a net win for the country, letting refuges from Africa is, because of the linked map, a loss for the country.
    - insertcredit 8y ago
      Given that not even Taleb disputes IQ effectiveness on the left-end of the spectrum, meaning the low end, letting waves of refugees in from sub-saharan Africa (average IQ below 70 [1][2]) would definitely be a net loss for a first-world country. His first sentence in linked article starts with: '“IQ” is a stale test meant to measure mental capacity but in fact mostly measures extreme unintelligence'. Why would any developed country want hordes of "extremely unintelligent" immigrants? Which is why there exist countries with extremely harsh immigration policies that are first-order eugenic. Singapore is one of them. [1] There are many studies that report similar values, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289609001275 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028960... [2] Anecdotal but informative: https://undark.org/article/in-south-africa-decolonizing-mathematics/ https://undark.org/article/in-south-africa-decolonizing-math...
coldtea 8y ago
>The frustrating thing from the perspective of an individual differences researcher is that Taleb is not at all correct about IQ becoming less predictive of performance at higher levels! Studies pretty consistently show that IQ is a valid predictor of performance all the way up the scale, so that, for example, someone with an IQ of 145 is likely to perform (at school, on the job, etc) better than someone with an IQ of 135 He has already addressed that point early on: "If you renamed IQ , from “Intelligent Quotient” to FQ “Functionary Quotient” or SQ “Salaryperson Quotient”, then some of the stuff will be true." He also includes a graph of "correlation of IQ with different aspects of job performance" pertaining to that: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/750/1*RlEAvb8KejpEBFWslwQuGQ.png https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/750/1*RlEAvb8KejpEBFWslw...
- repolfx 8y ago
  That's not really addressing the point, is it. IQ correlates well with measures of performance. Taleb's point, if we are to generously interpret his screed, is that some classes of valuable mental performance are very hard to generate metrics for or even define at all, and therefore, you would expect them to correlate with IQ less or not at all. For instance the chart that claims IQ correlates well with military performance and poorly with "creativity". But how is creativity being measured? It's going to be far easier to measure the performance of a soldier than a creative person, the latter isn't even a clearly defined category, lots of people consider themselves to be creative but generate unpopular dirge. So all he's doing here is dissing people whose performance is more easily measured by nature of their job. I have to admit the article annoyed me. I actually did believe him when he said IQ doesn't correlate at the upper reaches - I have even studied psychology but it was a long time ago, and wondered if my knowledge was just out of date or forgotten. So I'm glad I read these comments and learned that it's not the case. But it mostly annoyed me because I thought it would be an interesting addition to the ongoing story around poor replication rates and practices in some branches of science. But it seems actually to be some sort of political article targeting conservatives. Even with the wrong parts of his article, I do agree with some of his overall points, but when I got to the end and saw it was tagged "Racism" and "Alt-Right" rather than science related terms, I realised I'd been reading a bog standard rant of the sort that might appear in the Guardian or Vice - just dressed up in a scientific and haughty tone, to make it sound authoritative. The problem with his overall point is that whilst yes, an observer of history might have wondered how Britain went from primitive tribes conquered by the Romans, at the outskirts of known civilisation, to owner of the largest empire the world has ever seen, that was over a very time long period and the average Roman person would have been quite right to stereotype the population of the north at that time - the changes that invalidated those stereotypes took place over far longer than a human lifetime. People using IQ scores to measure certain types of performance today would be entirely valid to do despite the correlation with race, if they were looking for workers whose performance does correlate with IQ. The fact that not all categories of valuable work may be measurable or correlate doesn't detract from that fact.
narrator 8y ago
Taleb is using the idea that in order to create a world where, barring extreme circumstances, such as birth defects and disease, people are of roughly equal ability we have to pretend that, baring extreme circumstances, all people are of roughly equal ability and attack any information that points out anything to the contrary. The idea being that by believing a reality is true and attacking anything that contradicts that belief we can make it true.
peo939 8y ago
Yeah I missed this HN; it's in my area of expertise. I don't mean to be hostile, but I don't know how else to say it: I don't know why or how posts like this, and most of what Taleb posts, get this much attention, because they're so ironically unscientific and poorly written. Taleb doesn't know what he's talking about, he selectively cites research, and makes assertions as if they are citations. The citation you provide is one example; there are scientists (e.g., Lubinski) who have successfully demonstrated over the course of years of research the validity of scores on the upper end of the intelligence distribution. Taleb comes across as an uninformed idiot. Taleb falls into these common fallacy traps regarding intelligence and individual differences research: 1. Some improper use of intelligence theory historically (e.g., racist, overapplication) doesn't mean the idea of intelligence is invalid or not useful. 2. A trait such as intelligence can be highly but not perfectly stable; environment can contribute to stability and genetic factors can contribute to changes. 3. Measures can be imperfect but still useful and valid, throughout the range. 4. The contribution of other factors to outcomes other than intelligence doesn't mean general intelligence isn't contributing as well. 5. The phenomenon of general intelligence doesn't preclude the existence of more specific ways of describing cognitive abilities (e.g., verbal memory, processing speed, visual mental simulation). Someone else posted something about how political IQ and individual differences research is. I feel about these topics how I imagine ecologists must feel about global warming research: lots of gish gallop by people who have a political or narcissistic axe to grind. Another problem is that people want to believe that problems in behavioral sciences can be reduced to really simple black or white positions, or apply analogies from other fields directly without any modification. Yes, you can measure behavioral attributes, but no it's not quite ordinal and not quite ratio, and that's fine. Yes things can be somewhat stable and somewhat not. The list goes on and on. Finally, there's this narcissistic status-asserting behavior that drives a lot of this. It's like the pecking order in science that goes something like physics > chemistry > biology > behavioral science is driven in part by people feeling the need to assert that they're smarter than people lower in the hierarchy. The problem is that this hierarchy is basically wrong, and driven in part by the system complexity of the fields, but it doesn't stop people like Taleb because he needs someone to bully to make himself look smarter.

feanaro 8y ago

I'm as surprised as you and I'm glad someone took the time to write that up (I was about to when I saw your comment). I don't understand why someone would call IQ "unscientific" without addressing research showing it to be a good predictor of future performance. Note that this still doesn't invalidate the point that people can be smart in many different ways (yet have the same IQ), which seems like a reasonable position.

otalp 8y ago
Just because something is a good predictor doesn't make it scientific. There could be a third variable like wealth which needs to be controlled for, but is rarely done in those studies with few exceptions. In those exceptions, it was generally found that wealth of parents played a much bigger role in future success than IQ.
- feanaro 8y ago
  > Just because something is a good predictor doesn't make it scientific. What does it mean for a thing to be scientific? > In those exceptions, it was generally found that wealth of parents played a much bigger role in future success than IQ. You are talking about very long term success. It is somewhat obvious that wealth you are born into should be an important factor for overall success. I'm talking about shorter term success, like job performance.
  - otalp 8y ago
    To be scientific would require proving a definite causal relationship between IQ and intelligence, while also convincingly proving that intelligence can be measured with a number
    - feanaro 8y ago
      Why does it have to be causal? A variable can be a real predictor of another without any of them causing the other one (for instance, they may have a common cause). That doesn't mean the predictor is of any less value. I would say that results on certain cognitive ability tests (i.e. "IQ tests") being at least a moderately good predictor for future performance in certain human activities is a rather well proven fact. For instance, the correlation between an IQ score and future job performance on a job with complex requirements is about 0.5. Of course, that does not mean the relationship is 1-to-1 and that it is a perfect predictor (which it obviously isn't).
      - vmh1928 8y ago
        Finding bear poop on the trail is a predictor of bear activity, not a cause of the bear.
        feanaro 8y ago
        I vehemently agree, as a careful reading of my previous comment tells.

jf- 8y ago

IQ is one of those topics which is, unfortunately, inescapably political. If important psychometric traits, like intelligence and personality, are highly heritable, then one of the implicit assumptions of left-leaning points of view is undermined: that everyone is inherently equal, that anyone can achieve anything given the right education, environment and resources. Add to this the fact that we know that other heritable traits may be ethnically distributed, and we have a particularly difficult thesis. The solution to this for some, is that IQ cannot be allowed to be meaningful, as the idea is simply too dangerous. The article above and much of this discussion are the result. Simply put, this is a battle of ideology masquerading as a debate over a matter of fact. This is not the kind of discourse you would get if people were discussing the precise atomic weight of hydrogen.

iron0013 8y ago
I’m not sure what this has to do with leftists, as the idea that Taleb is a leftist is absolutely risible. He’s a reactionary egomaniac who thinks all of his ideas are correct simply because they are HIS ideas, and obviously HE can never be wrong
- jf- 8y ago
  I never mentioned leftists, I said words to the effect of assuming a blank slate is one of the implicit assumptions of left-leaning world views. Taleb can share such a belief without explicitly being on the left.
  - api 8y ago
    This is a straw man, sort of akin to asserting that all right leaning people believe that might makes right.
    - jf- 8y ago
      Very well, maybe not everyone who would describe themselves as on the left would have this belief, but in my experience it is very common.

mr_toad 8y ago

> Studies pretty consistently show that IQ is a valid predictor of performance all the way up the scale, so that, for example, someone with an IQ of 145 is likely to perform (at school, on the job, etc) better than someone with an IQ of 135. To be fair, he doesn’t say that high IQ are not correlated with high performance, he conjectures that they ‘decorelate’, by which I presume he means the correlation weakens. (It’s pretty obvious at the end of the post that he’s arguing that). If true, that is concerning for a measure. Heteroscedasticity is a serious problem for accurate prediction - in particular it tends to conceal the inaccuracies of predictions. He also points out other issues, non-monotinicity and intransitivity which would be problematic. If your measure predicts candidate A is better than B and candidate B is better than C, you generally want it to predict candidate A is better than C. If it predicts candidate C is better than A, it creates confusion.

lordlimecat 8y ago

He addresses that, the issue is that you aren't identifying "performance" but rather "performance in the sort of test taking environment that exists at school". His entire point is that, while IQ may identify good, obedient candidates for BS jobs, it is not broadly applicable as anything like a general metric for life.

repolfx 8y ago
Does anyone use it like that though? Isn't he arguing with a straw man? Who is using IQ to allocate funding to pop singers? IQ scores aren't used that much and only ever for predicting success of jobs where success is easily measurable (which is what Taleb seems to mean by "obediency-based BS jobs").
- jeena 8y ago
  Yeah they do, I've seen https://www.worlddata.info/iq-by-country.php https://www.worlddata.info/iq-by-country.php linked in discussions about if Germany should welcome refuges from Africa for example. And the gist was that while getting Asian high achievers is a net win for the country, letting refuges from Africa is, because of the linked map, a loss for the country.
  - insertcredit 8y ago
    Given that not even Taleb disputes IQ effectiveness on the left-end of the spectrum, meaning the low end, letting waves of refugees in from sub-saharan Africa (average IQ below 70 [1][2]) would definitely be a net loss for a first-world country. His first sentence in linked article starts with: '“IQ” is a stale test meant to measure mental capacity but in fact mostly measures extreme unintelligence'. Why would any developed country want hordes of "extremely unintelligent" immigrants? Which is why there exist countries with extremely harsh immigration policies that are first-order eugenic. Singapore is one of them. [1] There are many studies that report similar values, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289609001275 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028960... [2] Anecdotal but informative: https://undark.org/article/in-south-africa-decolonizing-mathematics/ https://undark.org/article/in-south-africa-decolonizing-math...

coldtea 8y ago

>The frustrating thing from the perspective of an individual differences researcher is that Taleb is not at all correct about IQ becoming less predictive of performance at higher levels! Studies pretty consistently show that IQ is a valid predictor of performance all the way up the scale, so that, for example, someone with an IQ of 145 is likely to perform (at school, on the job, etc) better than someone with an IQ of 135 He has already addressed that point early on: "If you renamed IQ , from “Intelligent Quotient” to FQ “Functionary Quotient” or SQ “Salaryperson Quotient”, then some of the stuff will be true." He also includes a graph of "correlation of IQ with different aspects of job performance" pertaining to that: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/750/1*RlEAvb8KejpEBFWslwQuGQ.png https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/750/1*RlEAvb8KejpEBFWslw...

repolfx 8y ago
That's not really addressing the point, is it. IQ correlates well with measures of performance. Taleb's point, if we are to generously interpret his screed, is that some classes of valuable mental performance are very hard to generate metrics for or even define at all, and therefore, you would expect them to correlate with IQ less or not at all. For instance the chart that claims IQ correlates well with military performance and poorly with "creativity". But how is creativity being measured? It's going to be far easier to measure the performance of a soldier than a creative person, the latter isn't even a clearly defined category, lots of people consider themselves to be creative but generate unpopular dirge. So all he's doing here is dissing people whose performance is more easily measured by nature of their job. I have to admit the article annoyed me. I actually did believe him when he said IQ doesn't correlate at the upper reaches - I have even studied psychology but it was a long time ago, and wondered if my knowledge was just out of date or forgotten. So I'm glad I read these comments and learned that it's not the case. But it mostly annoyed me because I thought it would be an interesting addition to the ongoing story around poor replication rates and practices in some branches of science. But it seems actually to be some sort of political article targeting conservatives. Even with the wrong parts of his article, I do agree with some of his overall points, but when I got to the end and saw it was tagged "Racism" and "Alt-Right" rather than science related terms, I realised I'd been reading a bog standard rant of the sort that might appear in the Guardian or Vice - just dressed up in a scientific and haughty tone, to make it sound authoritative. The problem with his overall point is that whilst yes, an observer of history might have wondered how Britain went from primitive tribes conquered by the Romans, at the outskirts of known civilisation, to owner of the largest empire the world has ever seen, that was over a very time long period and the average Roman person would have been quite right to stereotype the population of the north at that time - the changes that invalidated those stereotypes took place over far longer than a human lifetime. People using IQ scores to measure certain types of performance today would be entirely valid to do despite the correlation with race, if they were looking for workers whose performance does correlate with IQ. The fact that not all categories of valuable work may be measurable or correlate doesn't detract from that fact.

narrator 8y ago

Taleb is using the idea that in order to create a world where, barring extreme circumstances, such as birth defects and disease, people are of roughly equal ability we have to pretend that, baring extreme circumstances, all people are of roughly equal ability and attack any information that points out anything to the contrary. The idea being that by believing a reality is true and attacking anything that contradicts that belief we can make it true.

peo939 8y ago

Yeah I missed this HN; it's in my area of expertise. I don't mean to be hostile, but I don't know how else to say it: I don't know why or how posts like this, and most of what Taleb posts, get this much attention, because they're so ironically unscientific and poorly written. Taleb doesn't know what he's talking about, he selectively cites research, and makes assertions as if they are citations. The citation you provide is one example; there are scientists (e.g., Lubinski) who have successfully demonstrated over the course of years of research the validity of scores on the upper end of the intelligence distribution. Taleb comes across as an uninformed idiot. Taleb falls into these common fallacy traps regarding intelligence and individual differences research: 1. Some improper use of intelligence theory historically (e.g., racist, overapplication) doesn't mean the idea of intelligence is invalid or not useful. 2. A trait such as intelligence can be highly but not perfectly stable; environment can contribute to stability and genetic factors can contribute to changes. 3. Measures can be imperfect but still useful and valid, throughout the range. 4. The contribution of other factors to outcomes other than intelligence doesn't mean general intelligence isn't contributing as well. 5. The phenomenon of general intelligence doesn't preclude the existence of more specific ways of describing cognitive abilities (e.g., verbal memory, processing speed, visual mental simulation). Someone else posted something about how political IQ and individual differences research is. I feel about these topics how I imagine ecologists must feel about global warming research: lots of gish gallop by people who have a political or narcissistic axe to grind. Another problem is that people want to believe that problems in behavioral sciences can be reduced to really simple black or white positions, or apply analogies from other fields directly without any modification. Yes, you can measure behavioral attributes, but no it's not quite ordinal and not quite ratio, and that's fine. Yes things can be somewhat stable and somewhat not. The list goes on and on. Finally, there's this narcissistic status-asserting behavior that drives a lot of this. It's like the pecking order in science that goes something like physics > chemistry > biology > behavioral science is driven in part by people feeling the need to assert that they're smarter than people lower in the hierarchy. The problem is that this hierarchy is basically wrong, and driven in part by the system complexity of the fields, but it doesn't stop people like Taleb because he needs someone to bully to make himself look smarter.