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IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle (2019)

68 points by primroot 6y ago

iratewizard 6y ago
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 "stale" IQ tests still predict criminal behavior more accurately than any sociological theories of crime. It just doesn't predict whether someone will end up in a "menial job" or as a C-level executive.
- danharaj 6y ago
  The author is much better at probability than you. Maybe you're too stupid to notice? Oh? Is insulting you not a good argument? Pot meet kettle.
  - iratewizard 6y ago
    I'm much better at debating than you are. Maybe you're too stupid to notice? Using a simile to describe a poorly written blog post isn't the same as an ad hominem. Good try, though.
    - danharaj 6y ago
      No, no, I'm not debating you. I'm genuinely asking you to examine the possibility that you aren't competent to evaluate Taleb's arguments. Do you even have a basic background in probability? Statistics is garbage in garbage out. If you misuse it you will get utter nonsense. Your flaccid appeal to another statistical correlation when we're talking about the misapplication of statistics to complex phenomena just demonstrates that you're not engaging with the ideas. It seems that IQ is one of your sacred cows. Why is that?
      - jcranmer 6y ago
        > I'm genuinely asking you to examine the possibility that you aren't competent to evaluate Taleb's arguments. I'll admit that I gave up reading the article (due to its invective) and skimmed the rest of it, but I don't recall there being much in the way of firm, mathematical arguments for his arguments, instead being a lot of "look, this correlates! look this correlates! clearly I'm right!" (along with mocking various groups of people). So it's not a question of being competent to evaluate the arguments, but rather having the patience to actually find the arguments (should they exist) in the article.
- paulpauper 6y ago
  He has a greatly inflated perception of his accomplishments and intellect. Recently he has been trying to get his Mathematica PDFs published in actual journals, but good luck with that. Rendering fat tails does not make for meritorious scholarly research. Fat tail distributions long predate Taleb.
zug_zug 6y ago
I can'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's going to be objective. "There is no significant statistical association between IQ and hard measures such as wealth." So... you're saying that people with an IQ of 60 are equally wealthy as those with an IQ of 110? I understand getting frustrated about misapplication of tests. But it'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's simply a method to ascertain facts, entirely indifferent to our human affairs and feelings.
- pavlov 6y ago
  IQ is not science.
  - JamesBarney 6y ago
    IQ is probably more well studied than any other phenomenon in the social sciences or psychology. Also IQ is not science, it is something that is studied scientifically.
    - foolrush 6y ago
      https://via.library.depaul.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1270&context=law-review https://via.library.depaul.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...
      - JamesBarney 6y ago
        That is an article about eugenics. No one is arguing for eugenics. Eugenics was awful, but just because something was used as a tool for evil does not make it untrue. If I light someone on fire with gasoline this makes it no less useful for fueling a car.
        foolrush 6y ago
        Read it. Learn history. Learn how sociology works. Nah don’t bother. It’s HN.
abnry 6y ago
Ever since Taleb blocked me on twitter for such a minor pushback I gave in the replies of one of his tweets, I've lost interest reading anything he writes. His unbridled emotion is uncouth. And it's not that I think IQ is "the most perfect psychometric ever created(TM)".
- paulpauper 6y ago
  just make a new account and block him so he cannot read your tweet but his readers will still see it
brenden2 6y ago
IQ is just a metric from taking a standardized test. I don't know why people have a hard time understanding that. It's like being mad about people's SAT scores. It's not like IQ is even used for anything important, people don't put it on their resumes or anything.
- jmauritz 6y ago
  I've done a few "aptitude" tests for interviews, and so has people in my closest circle. It seems common across business sectors and taken as a major indicator of employee "success" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4557354/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4557354/
- rglullis 6y ago
  > IQ is just a metric from taking a standardized test. I don't know why people have a hard time understanding that. It's like being mad about people's SAT scores. Metric for what? That is the point. The main argument as I understand is that "intelligence" is not something one-dimensional that can be measured with a number. If IQ tests were a simple pass/fail filter for detecting some kind of learning disability, sure. The problem is when you have a whole army of people trying to infer something tremendously complex from a single scalar point. > It's not like IQ is even used for anything important, people don't put it on their resumes or anything. Yet, how many psychologists rely on IQ data and IQ "science" to justify their research grants, their books and their consulting fees from companies? How many people parrot Charles Murray to justify their racism with "science"?
  - dennis_jeeves 6y ago
    >Metric for what? Metric for capability. Even though imperfect, IQ appears to reasonable good predictor of how capable a person is in learning a new task. The better way is of course to actually tech the person to find out how well he can learn it, which is time consuming. High IQ people can easily learn and do most jobs, low IQ people cannot. >How many people parrot Charles Murray to justify their racism with "science"? Charles Murray just says that races have statistically different IQ. This is different from my understood definition of racism which manifest as: "I will not hire you because you belong to race X"
crazygringo 6y ago
This article is written so polemically it's hard to take it seriously. Also Taleb seems to be constructing so many straw men I wouldn't even know where to start. IQ isn't a swindle, it's a very real thing. However, it is only one factor among many in determining most practical real-world outcomes, and it is well-known to be affected by environmental variables at population levels. But IQ isn't a "fraud" or "immoral". These are bizarre claims Taleb makes, with zero evidence or even definition of what he means. What a strange article.
- virmundi 6y ago
  He has to make such moral claims because it is in keeping with his world view that individuals are replaceable cogs. If it is shown that modernity requires advanced problem solving skills and that IQ is a reasonable, but not perfect measure of such skills, then the idea that you can take a below average person and use them in these advanced spaces is destroyed. If he loses that, he loses many of the policies being pushed from an immigration and population control perspective.
  - empath75 6y ago
    Are you saying that certain races are genetically inferior? Because that really seems like what you are saying. Which sort of proves his point. The people that loudly disagree with him are racists.
    - virmundi 6y ago
      You do know how bell curves work, right? Whites are included in that. The trouble with many policies that ignore genetic differences in intelligence is that it ignores science. If you want a modern advanced society, you’ll have to look to your genetics.
      - lern_too_spel 6y ago
        > You do know how bell curves work, right? It seems you don't realize that you're talking about a heavily criticized book instead of a mathematical concept. There is no fixed place for different races to always appear on a plot of IQ distribution. Koreans were once thought to be stupid. Not anymore. Population level genetic differences in IQ are dwarfed by environmental factors, and many studies have shown this effect: https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/6/15/15797120/race-black-white-iq-response-critics https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/6/15/15797120/race-bla...
omarhaneef 6y ago
There is a part I really like about this and a part I don’t. 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. This is — you can argue with it — an interesting observation. 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.)
- JamesBarney 6y ago
  > 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. If this were true you would expect the average IQ of really accomplished individuals to be 110. But this isn't the case, if you look at Supreme Court Justices, scientists, CEO's they all have average IQs higher than what would be expected if IQ only correlated at the low end.
  - omarhaneef 6y ago
    I don't know the average IQ of a CEO or a supreme court justice. Do you know what it is? Why 110? 1 sd is 115, 2sd would be 130. Anyway for supreme court justices we have a straightforward explanation: the schools they are selected from (Yale and Harvard, primarily) themselves use a proxy IQ test (the SATs, or LSATs or whatever) to select for.
    - JamesBarney 6y ago
      I saw numbers for supreme court justices a couple years ago but I can't find it. https://pumpkinperson.com/2015/07/26/anne-roes-study-of-extremely-eminent-scientists/ https://pumpkinperson.com/2015/07/26/anne-roes-study-of-extr... Says Nobel prize winners had an average IQ of 155, which is a 1 in 4000 score that couldn't be driven by just sub 100 effects. Hard to find IQ scores on really high performers, I guess it's hard to convince a CEO or a supreme court justice to take an IQ test.
technothrasher 6y ago
"It does correlate to very negative performance (as it was initially designed to detect learning special needs)" 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't score him, and put him in the "he's not taking the test correctly" 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.
- vlovich123 6y ago
  Which ones?
- Jommi 6y ago
  Hey, sorry for the situation with your son and how IQ tests failed us here, but could we stray away from clear anecdotes on HN comments?
- jacknews 6y ago
  Exactly, the standard IQ tests measure a very narrow ability in abstract reasoning. This is certainly something we call 'smart', but I don't think it's at all predictive of success, except perhaps in academia.
jacknews 6y ago
did he 'fail' an IQ test? taleb sometimes makes some great and interesting arguments, but I can't take rabid monologues like this seriously.
generalpass 6y ago
A fine example of an expert in one field believing he is an expert in every field. In reading the section describing psychometricians, he clearly is not actually reading what they publish.
- danharaj 6y ago
  Taleb is an expert in statistics. This is an analysis of the statistics of a metric and the statistical methodology of the field it is part of.
  - generalpass 6y ago
    > Taleb is an expert in statistics. This is an analysis of the statistics of a metric and the statistical methodology of the field it is part of. If he doesn't understand their definitions within their sphere of expertise, how can any analysis of such be valid?
mgn01 6y ago
Place some skin in the game and hire a bunch of 87 IQ people as financial advisors.
- dennis_jeeves 6y ago
  That indeed is a good idea. Should put the debate partially to rest.
empath75 6y ago
Oh man, can't wait for the conversation about this one. So much of people'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're concerned about your IQ very much over the age of about 12 years old, that's a sign that you probably aren't focusing on the right things in your life.
- non-entity 6y ago
  Anytime IQ is brought up on HN, the comment section is gonna get interesting. I mean hell this thread is already full of snide remarks about the author, people getting emotionally charged about emotion, personal attacks from people on both sides of the argument in "clever" attempts to prove who's smarter, and occasional and questionable views.
- kuschku 6y ago
  I got tested at 3 psychiatrists, as part of tests for other neurological issues. Not just some shitty web test. All results were in the ballpark of 160. And yet, it doesn’t matter at all in my daily life. In fact, I only really mention those results for one reason: so others don’t reply with "you only disagree with using IQ as score because you’d lose". IQ just tells you how fast you adapt to new challenges — and in a very roundabout way which isn’t really reliable. And that’s aside from the whole "if a metric becomes a target, it ceases being a useful metric" stuff. But in the real world, persistence and discipline is what really matters for success — you can have a startup with the most intelligent people in this world, but they won’t be able to actually make any progress without persistence. In fact, they’ll likely be bored by any task you give them quite quickly, and spend their time on something else. Persistence is key for success, not just in our capitalistic world, but in anything — be it in learning a new skill, completing university successfully, or doing a new startup from start to finish. As Stephen Hawking already said: "People who boast about their I.Q. are losers"
longtom 6y ago
Flagged in 3, 2, 1...
- paulpauper 6y ago
  i wish this wasn't flagged because even though taleb is wrong, the discussion is useful
georgewfraser 6y ago
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.
Gustek 6y ago
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. 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. In short, it is a fun exam if you like riddles and no other value.
- paulpauper 6y ago
  >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. Correlations are what matter. It just so happens that success at solving such seemingly trivial riddles is correlated with important tasks such as coding and life outcomes. If IQ didn't correlate with anything there would be no reason to have IQ tests. It would be as useful as astrology.
- theamk 6y ago
  IQ is only good for solving riddles? Have you heard of g-factor by any chance?
ashtonkem 6y ago
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.
danharaj 6y ago
There are a lot of posts complaining about Taleb'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. 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. 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's paradox. Taleb is just pointing out more sophisticated traps of probability that plague amateurs, and most of us who apply statistics are amateurs. 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.
- theamk 6y ago
  > If a manager ranked you based on a statistic of your lines of code produced per day, you would rightly be derisive Yes, but this wouldn't make "lines of code" metric "pseudoscience" or "swindle". The metric is real, even if its applications are not correct.
tgb 6y ago
This article motivates an extension of yesterday's xkcd comic [1]. A Type X error: a correct result, interpreted correctly but communicated so poorly that no one wants to listen. [1] https://xkcd.com/2303/ https://xkcd.com/2303/
voodooranger 6y ago
> If you want to detect how someone fares at a task, say loan sharking, tennis playing, or random matrix theory, make him/her do that task; we don’t need theoretical exams for a real world function by probability-challenged psychologists. ^ horrible job interviews in a nutshell
paulpauper 6y ago
Taleb's article is debunked here https://greyenlightenment.com/wealth-and-iq-part-3-continued/ https://greyenlightenment.com/wealth-and-iq-part-3-continued... Studying popular subs such as /r/wallstreetbets, /r/investing, /r/personalfinance, /r/fatfire, and /r/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. 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's not so much that IQ predicts absolute outcomes, but rather relative outcomes among a homogeneous population who have similar goals/aspirations for g-loaded activities whether it's writing, publishing, stock trading, law, math, FIRE, etc. 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..
- empath75 6y ago
  > Studying popular subs such as /r/wallstreetbets, /r/investing, /r/personalfinance, /r/fatfire, and /r/financialindependence is useful Promising start, lol...
therealdrag0 6y ago
>> “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.” 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.
dang 6y ago
Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18803533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18803533

68 points by primroot 6y ago

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 "stale" IQ tests still predict criminal behavior more accurately than any sociological theories of crime. It just doesn't predict whether someone will end up in a "menial job" or as a C-level executive.

danharaj 6y ago
The author is much better at probability than you. Maybe you're too stupid to notice? Oh? Is insulting you not a good argument? Pot meet kettle.
- iratewizard 6y ago
  I'm much better at debating than you are. Maybe you're too stupid to notice? Using a simile to describe a poorly written blog post isn't the same as an ad hominem. Good try, though.
  - danharaj 6y ago
    No, no, I'm not debating you. I'm genuinely asking you to examine the possibility that you aren't competent to evaluate Taleb's arguments. Do you even have a basic background in probability? Statistics is garbage in garbage out. If you misuse it you will get utter nonsense. Your flaccid appeal to another statistical correlation when we're talking about the misapplication of statistics to complex phenomena just demonstrates that you're not engaging with the ideas. It seems that IQ is one of your sacred cows. Why is that?
    - jcranmer 6y ago
      > I'm genuinely asking you to examine the possibility that you aren't competent to evaluate Taleb's arguments. I'll admit that I gave up reading the article (due to its invective) and skimmed the rest of it, but I don't recall there being much in the way of firm, mathematical arguments for his arguments, instead being a lot of "look, this correlates! look this correlates! clearly I'm right!" (along with mocking various groups of people). So it's not a question of being competent to evaluate the arguments, but rather having the patience to actually find the arguments (should they exist) in the article.
paulpauper 6y ago
He has a greatly inflated perception of his accomplishments and intellect. Recently he has been trying to get his Mathematica PDFs published in actual journals, but good luck with that. Rendering fat tails does not make for meritorious scholarly research. Fat tail distributions long predate Taleb.

zug_zug 6y ago

I can'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's going to be objective. "There is no significant statistical association between IQ and hard measures such as wealth." So... you're saying that people with an IQ of 60 are equally wealthy as those with an IQ of 110? I understand getting frustrated about misapplication of tests. But it'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's simply a method to ascertain facts, entirely indifferent to our human affairs and feelings.

pavlov 6y ago
IQ is not science.
- JamesBarney 6y ago
  IQ is probably more well studied than any other phenomenon in the social sciences or psychology. Also IQ is not science, it is something that is studied scientifically.
  - foolrush 6y ago
    https://via.library.depaul.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1270&context=law-review https://via.library.depaul.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...
    - JamesBarney 6y ago
      That is an article about eugenics. No one is arguing for eugenics. Eugenics was awful, but just because something was used as a tool for evil does not make it untrue. If I light someone on fire with gasoline this makes it no less useful for fueling a car.
      - foolrush 6y ago
        Read it. Learn history. Learn how sociology works. Nah don’t bother. It’s HN.

abnry 6y ago

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

paulpauper 6y ago
just make a new account and block him so he cannot read your tweet but his readers will still see it

brenden2 6y ago

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

jmauritz 6y ago
I've done a few "aptitude" tests for interviews, and so has people in my closest circle. It seems common across business sectors and taken as a major indicator of employee "success" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4557354/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4557354/
rglullis 6y ago
> IQ is just a metric from taking a standardized test. I don't know why people have a hard time understanding that. It's like being mad about people's SAT scores. Metric for what? That is the point. The main argument as I understand is that "intelligence" is not something one-dimensional that can be measured with a number. If IQ tests were a simple pass/fail filter for detecting some kind of learning disability, sure. The problem is when you have a whole army of people trying to infer something tremendously complex from a single scalar point. > It's not like IQ is even used for anything important, people don't put it on their resumes or anything. Yet, how many psychologists rely on IQ data and IQ "science" to justify their research grants, their books and their consulting fees from companies? How many people parrot Charles Murray to justify their racism with "science"?
- dennis_jeeves 6y ago
  >Metric for what? Metric for capability. Even though imperfect, IQ appears to reasonable good predictor of how capable a person is in learning a new task. The better way is of course to actually tech the person to find out how well he can learn it, which is time consuming. High IQ people can easily learn and do most jobs, low IQ people cannot. >How many people parrot Charles Murray to justify their racism with "science"? Charles Murray just says that races have statistically different IQ. This is different from my understood definition of racism which manifest as: "I will not hire you because you belong to race X"

crazygringo 6y ago

This article is written so polemically it's hard to take it seriously. Also Taleb seems to be constructing so many straw men I wouldn't even know where to start. IQ isn't a swindle, it's a very real thing. However, it is only one factor among many in determining most practical real-world outcomes, and it is well-known to be affected by environmental variables at population levels. But IQ isn't a "fraud" or "immoral". These are bizarre claims Taleb makes, with zero evidence or even definition of what he means. What a strange article.

virmundi 6y ago
He has to make such moral claims because it is in keeping with his world view that individuals are replaceable cogs. If it is shown that modernity requires advanced problem solving skills and that IQ is a reasonable, but not perfect measure of such skills, then the idea that you can take a below average person and use them in these advanced spaces is destroyed. If he loses that, he loses many of the policies being pushed from an immigration and population control perspective.
- empath75 6y ago
  Are you saying that certain races are genetically inferior? Because that really seems like what you are saying. Which sort of proves his point. The people that loudly disagree with him are racists.
  - virmundi 6y ago
    You do know how bell curves work, right? Whites are included in that. The trouble with many policies that ignore genetic differences in intelligence is that it ignores science. If you want a modern advanced society, you’ll have to look to your genetics.
    - lern_too_spel 6y ago
      > You do know how bell curves work, right? It seems you don't realize that you're talking about a heavily criticized book instead of a mathematical concept. There is no fixed place for different races to always appear on a plot of IQ distribution. Koreans were once thought to be stupid. Not anymore. Population level genetic differences in IQ are dwarfed by environmental factors, and many studies have shown this effect: https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/6/15/15797120/race-black-white-iq-response-critics https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/6/15/15797120/race-bla...

omarhaneef 6y ago

There is a part I really like about this and a part I don’t. 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. This is — you can argue with it — an interesting observation. 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.)

JamesBarney 6y ago
> 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. If this were true you would expect the average IQ of really accomplished individuals to be 110. But this isn't the case, if you look at Supreme Court Justices, scientists, CEO's they all have average IQs higher than what would be expected if IQ only correlated at the low end.
- omarhaneef 6y ago
  I don't know the average IQ of a CEO or a supreme court justice. Do you know what it is? Why 110? 1 sd is 115, 2sd would be 130. Anyway for supreme court justices we have a straightforward explanation: the schools they are selected from (Yale and Harvard, primarily) themselves use a proxy IQ test (the SATs, or LSATs or whatever) to select for.
  - JamesBarney 6y ago
    I saw numbers for supreme court justices a couple years ago but I can't find it. https://pumpkinperson.com/2015/07/26/anne-roes-study-of-extremely-eminent-scientists/ https://pumpkinperson.com/2015/07/26/anne-roes-study-of-extr... Says Nobel prize winners had an average IQ of 155, which is a 1 in 4000 score that couldn't be driven by just sub 100 effects. Hard to find IQ scores on really high performers, I guess it's hard to convince a CEO or a supreme court justice to take an IQ test.

technothrasher 6y ago

"It does correlate to very negative performance (as it was initially designed to detect learning special needs)" 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't score him, and put him in the "he's not taking the test correctly" 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.

vlovich123 6y ago
Which ones?
Jommi 6y ago
Hey, sorry for the situation with your son and how IQ tests failed us here, but could we stray away from clear anecdotes on HN comments?
jacknews 6y ago
Exactly, the standard IQ tests measure a very narrow ability in abstract reasoning. This is certainly something we call 'smart', but I don't think it's at all predictive of success, except perhaps in academia.

jacknews 6y ago

did he 'fail' an IQ test? taleb sometimes makes some great and interesting arguments, but I can't take rabid monologues like this seriously.

generalpass 6y ago

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

danharaj 6y ago
Taleb is an expert in statistics. This is an analysis of the statistics of a metric and the statistical methodology of the field it is part of.
- generalpass 6y ago
  > Taleb is an expert in statistics. This is an analysis of the statistics of a metric and the statistical methodology of the field it is part of. If he doesn't understand their definitions within their sphere of expertise, how can any analysis of such be valid?

mgn01 6y ago

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

dennis_jeeves 6y ago
That indeed is a good idea. Should put the debate partially to rest.

empath75 6y ago

Oh man, can't wait for the conversation about this one. So much of people'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're concerned about your IQ very much over the age of about 12 years old, that's a sign that you probably aren't focusing on the right things in your life.

non-entity 6y ago
Anytime IQ is brought up on HN, the comment section is gonna get interesting. I mean hell this thread is already full of snide remarks about the author, people getting emotionally charged about emotion, personal attacks from people on both sides of the argument in "clever" attempts to prove who's smarter, and occasional and questionable views.
kuschku 6y ago
I got tested at 3 psychiatrists, as part of tests for other neurological issues. Not just some shitty web test. All results were in the ballpark of 160. And yet, it doesn’t matter at all in my daily life. In fact, I only really mention those results for one reason: so others don’t reply with "you only disagree with using IQ as score because you’d lose". IQ just tells you how fast you adapt to new challenges — and in a very roundabout way which isn’t really reliable. And that’s aside from the whole "if a metric becomes a target, it ceases being a useful metric" stuff. But in the real world, persistence and discipline is what really matters for success — you can have a startup with the most intelligent people in this world, but they won’t be able to actually make any progress without persistence. In fact, they’ll likely be bored by any task you give them quite quickly, and spend their time on something else. Persistence is key for success, not just in our capitalistic world, but in anything — be it in learning a new skill, completing university successfully, or doing a new startup from start to finish. As Stephen Hawking already said: "People who boast about their I.Q. are losers"

longtom 6y ago

Flagged in 3, 2, 1...

paulpauper 6y ago
i wish this wasn't flagged because even though taleb is wrong, the discussion is useful

georgewfraser 6y ago

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.

Gustek 6y ago

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. 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. In short, it is a fun exam if you like riddles and no other value.

paulpauper 6y ago
>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. Correlations are what matter. It just so happens that success at solving such seemingly trivial riddles is correlated with important tasks such as coding and life outcomes. If IQ didn't correlate with anything there would be no reason to have IQ tests. It would be as useful as astrology.
theamk 6y ago
IQ is only good for solving riddles? Have you heard of g-factor by any chance?

ashtonkem 6y ago

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.

danharaj 6y ago

There are a lot of posts complaining about Taleb'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. 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. 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's paradox. Taleb is just pointing out more sophisticated traps of probability that plague amateurs, and most of us who apply statistics are amateurs. 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.

theamk 6y ago
> If a manager ranked you based on a statistic of your lines of code produced per day, you would rightly be derisive Yes, but this wouldn't make "lines of code" metric "pseudoscience" or "swindle". The metric is real, even if its applications are not correct.

tgb 6y ago

This article motivates an extension of yesterday's xkcd comic [1]. A Type X error: a correct result, interpreted correctly but communicated so poorly that no one wants to listen. [1] https://xkcd.com/2303/ https://xkcd.com/2303/

voodooranger 6y ago

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

paulpauper 6y ago

Taleb's article is debunked here https://greyenlightenment.com/wealth-and-iq-part-3-continued/ https://greyenlightenment.com/wealth-and-iq-part-3-continued... Studying popular subs such as /r/wallstreetbets, /r/investing, /r/personalfinance, /r/fatfire, and /r/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. 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's not so much that IQ predicts absolute outcomes, but rather relative outcomes among a homogeneous population who have similar goals/aspirations for g-loaded activities whether it's writing, publishing, stock trading, law, math, FIRE, etc. 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..

empath75 6y ago
> Studying popular subs such as /r/wallstreetbets, /r/investing, /r/personalfinance, /r/fatfire, and /r/financialindependence is useful Promising start, lol...

therealdrag0 6y ago

>> “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.” 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.

dang 6y ago

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18803533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18803533