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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 curre

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.

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.