13 ms·

Taleb is wrong about IQ (2019)

136 points by saadalem 6y ago

konjin 6y ago
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.
- H8crilA 6y ago
  Also correlates with lifespan, probability of divorce, crime. All such boring stuff. PS. I am wondering whether it correlates with the belief in IQ testing itself :)
  - konjin 6y ago
    >Also correlates with lifespan, probability of divorce, crime. All such boring stuff. Yes, doing pointless soul crushing work makes you the money you need to create the next generation of automatons that do the same.
    - darkhorse13 6y ago
      For a lack of a better word, your ideas seem really misguided to me.
      - bongobongo 6y ago
        They are ultimately correct though.
      - konjin 6y ago
        Describing reality is not disgusting.
  - UncleMeat 6y ago
    So does wealth. Yet I'd hope that people would shudder at school admissions and hiring pipelines that explicitly separate people based on wealth and choose the richest ones.
    - chongli 6y ago
      Tons of schools separate implicitly by wealth simply by charging high tuition and not offering (enough) financial aid to every student who can’t afford it.
      - tartoran 6y ago
        You’d be surprised at what lenghts rich people go in order to reduce the tuition or get financial aid for their offspring. The rich are well informed and know how to use all the loopholes..
      - UncleMeat 6y ago
        Yes. And many people agree that's bad. I'm not saying this doesn't happen. I'm saying that "High IQ is correlated with lower crime rates and higher test scores" shouldn't be the end of the discussion when people are arguing that IQ should be used to divide populations in public policy and corporate behavior.
    - nkingsy 6y ago
      I’d prefer it to be explicit. Would be nicer for the really smart poor kids who just miss the genius level required to get in to a Harvard without being rich. I’d rather think “if my family had money, I would’ve gotten in” than “I’m just not good enough”. These silent double standards are a curse. Saying it out loud is the first step to stopping it.
- PaulHoule 6y ago
  I think Raven is fun, but Raven is just 60 questions you can cram on.
- vergessenmir 6y ago
  I think what you're referring to is conscientiousness, the ability to stick to a task to completion regardless of how exciting it is. So you can get people with higher intelligence and low conscientiousness being overtaken by less smart people high in conscientiousness who actually finish the task. My understanding is that with a higher IQ you finish a task quicker . So smarter people tend to get to success quicker but doesn't mean that lower IQ folk are denied successes if both groups have similar levels of conscientiousness. IQ is not the strongest predictor of success.
  - naveen99 6y ago
    only if lower iq correlated with longevity. Also success compounds. You want faster compounding.
- bko 6y ago
  It would be more accurate to say "Performance on an IQ test" as opposed to "IQ". That's the main criticism I have of IQ. So if you do well on tests, then you probably would do well on the IQ test as well as tests in school, which means you are more likely to have attained a higher level of educations, which is associated with a higher income. To actually prove to me that IQ is a thing, you would have to show me that what you call IQ is innate. Meaning that you can't do better on an IQ test if you study, which I don't believe is true. All written tests I have ever taken have tricks or patterns that you can exploit after some practice. And then you'd have to show me that IQ is a better predictor than some other rote test to tease out general test taking ability or ability to sit still. A lot of people just work off the basis that IQ is a thing that we can measure, which I don't believe to be true, hence the pseudoscientific swindle
  - rbecker 6y ago
    > To actually prove to me that IQ is a thing, you would have to show me that what you call IQ is innate. "Twin studies of adult individuals have found a heritability of IQ between 57% and 73% with the most recent studies showing heritability for IQ as high as 80%." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
    - bko 6y ago
      I wasn't talking about innate in the context of heredity. I meant produced by the mind as opposed to experience. I am not convinced that someone can't learn to score better on IQ tests through practice
  - chongli 6y ago
    To actually prove to me that IQ is a thing, you would have to show me that what you call IQ is innate This does not follow. IQ is a thing because they test children on it without warning and without any prep and their performance on these tasks they’ve never seen before in their lives predicts their performance in school better than many other tests. You can’t say the same thing about, say, a language test for a child unfamiliar with the language because the kid won’t understand it at all. The IQ test is designed to be as unrelated to experience as possible in order to measure the capacity for abstract thinking and the ability to solve novel problems when you first encounter them. Since you’re undermining a test of your ability to solve something novel, studying for an IQ test is cheating.
- deleted 6y ago
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- WhompingWindows 6y ago
  IQ is a psychometric number derived by a standardized instrument to measure some form of intelligence. "Boring" is a feeling that has as much to do with intelligence as all the other feelings like sad, happy, etc. "Pointless" is a value judgment you're making right here that's extremely subjective, each person can find purpose in their job if they re-frame and tell themselves a better story about it. I don't think IQ is a perfect predictor for basically anything. It's a very myopic metric that helps explain, but any statistician today is going to use dozens of variables in their model, not just one.
PaulHoule 6y ago
You can't win in discussions about IQ for this reason: 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. 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". 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. 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". 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". --- 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: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action --- 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: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven%27s_Progressive_Matrices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven%27s_Progressive_Matrices 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.
- Swizec 6y ago
  What if instead of actors faking the test, we consider it takes high IQ to reach the top 0.5% of any field?
nyrulez 6y ago
For some jobs, it matters more than others. I wonder if the data also records profession categories and differences become more clear. 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. 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.
- x87678r 6y ago
  > Also IQ is a sub- component for general intelligence. This is the bit that is more important to me and something I dont see in the IQ debates. Some "smart" people are fast learners, others quick witted, some have great memory, others can distill lots of conflicting data, some are great communicators, others just work really hard. One IQ number is supposed to reflect all of that?
  - blfr 6y ago
    Yes, this is one of the surprising things about human intelligence, most intellectual/cognitive abilities are positively correlated. Hence the g factor.
    - vsskanth 6y ago
      Serious Q: I remember taking an IQ test long back and it was a bunch of pattern matching questions. How did they figure out that good performance in this correlates with cognitive abilities that translates to real life intellect at tasks ?
      - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
        This is a great question! You probably took one of the Raven's matrices, which are a culture-blind test of g (the presumed construct underlying IQ). Essentially, each new test is normed against the previous tests, so the Stanford-Binet test would have been the first, and then when a new measure is developed, we'd administer both tests to a sample (hopefully many samples) and use the correlation between the tests to determine whether or not or new test worked. It's not really a great method, but it's the best we've got for most individual difference variables.
fractionalhare 6y ago
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." 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.
- tartoran 6y ago
  IQ metric is not necessary to make this assment, a regular job interview could weed out the two sigma below the mean candidates. I think it’s common sense at this level. On the other hand it really depends on the job. You don’t need a hugh IQ to be a supermarket bagger. Low IQ people in low responsibility positions don’t pose much risk, I’d actually think high IQ in highly responsible positions may pose a higher risk: think of hiring a high IQ malefic narcissist who would ruin your business just for fun
- sokoloff 6y ago
  I don’t favor giving IQ tests to candidates for private sector employment, but a 16% improvement in candidate outcomes would seem to be massive overall, not minor, for many companies where company outcome is highly correlated with employee performance (SpaceX tech, self-driving tech, EV/battery tech, some areas in many other science disciplines)
deleted 6y ago
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bob33212 6y ago
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.
- WhompingWindows 6y ago
  Luck would get you just as far as desire, too. For every Gates and Bezos, there are 100's of failed entrepeneurs who may have been just as smart, but for whatever reason (binned as "luck"), their idea fell flat.
deleted 6y ago
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- kurtv 6y ago
  I think this assumes a correlation between high IQ and fringe personality, which is a bit of a hollywood myth. I remember reading in "Understanding Psychology as a Science: An Introduction to Scientific and Statistical Inference" by Zoltan Dienes that there is little correlation between IQ and mental illness. This study seems interesting in correlating IQ and personality traits: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6480832/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6480832/
leto_ii 6y ago
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). 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.
- Ensorceled 6y ago
  Certainly we can admit that it is true that "Taleb is wrong about [several] IQ [claims]"? The article makes no attempt to make any analysis about differences in wealth or education. It is VERY SPECIFICALLY addressing some of Taleb's claims about IQ and is VERY SPECIFIC that that is the goal.
  - mcguire 6y ago
    I think you can go so far as to say Taleb is wrong about stuff without much argument.
    - polotics 6y ago
      Which would be ad-hominem, right?
      - Mary-Jane 6y ago
        Sure, but to be fair Taleb's post is full of them, so he's inviting them. Glass houses and all that.
  - leto_ii 6y ago
    > It is VERY SPECIFICALLY addressing some of Taleb's claims about IQ and is VERY SPECIFIC that that is the goal. Not sure this is the case at all. The conclusion states: > Conclusion > All the claims from the article that I looked at, that can be interpreted as something specific and tested in a real data set, turned out not to be correct. It's true that Taleb's article is a bit of a rant, in his specific style, and that it might not get its quantitative claims precisely right. However, I think that his core points are valid and that the current paper, by focusing on relatively minor quantitative claims, doesn't actually provide relevant counter-arguments.
rvr_ 6y ago
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. 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.
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  It is entirely unsurprising and unrelated to me that the year you were born helps predict income.
pfortuny 6y ago
> The adjusted R2 is 0.356, so IQ explains ~35%. 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).
- fractionalhare 6y ago
  Yes, and it's somewhat irresponsible for the author to present it this way. Taleb is not being specific that he's talking about variance of performance in his claim. That is only one way to measure the relationship between two things (via covariance and then correlation). But it's not the only way. In fact Taleb's claim is actually underspecified here, so in lieu of rebutting it with a calculation of Pearson's r, the author should try to critique it more holistically. As it stands, an R^2 of 0.356 is not actually a refutation of Taleb's "5 - 13%". Taleb probably shouldn't have quantified his point without some rigor behind it, but the author's single counterexample doesn't substantively respond to it.
  - tgv 6y ago
    Yes, it is a rebuttal. Without further information, you have to assume the default meaning of "explains x%", so Taleb's claim is wrong.
    - fractionalhare 6y ago
      I don't have to assume anything, and to be charitable I'm not going to assume anything. I would afford the author the same charitability. Taleb's point is underspecified and needs further clarification before we can meaningfully engage with it by citing statistics. You risk beating up a strawman by tossing a quick calculation of R^2 at it and saying it's wrong. Using R^2 this way is like saying someone's wrong in an online debate by citing a logical fallacy. I guess, sure, you successfully rebutted them in a shallow sense. But nothing of value has been achieved (yet). We haven't arrived at a better understanding of the truth.
      - 6y ago
blfr 6y ago
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.
- cultus 6y ago
  IQ isn't a "result." It's just a test whose results were specified to be Gaussian with mean 100 and std dev 15. Whether that is a useful thing is a different consideration.
  - lopmotr 6y ago
    The fact that you can use so many diverse tests as IQ tests and still get well correlated scores is itself a discovery. So is the fact that those scores correlate with various other life outcomes and that we can't find any lasting intervention (beyond very early childhood) to improve people's IQ. These are all important results about how humans work. It's not just made-up.
    - runarberg 6y ago
      Is it though? I bet you get similar correlation with wealth. Many different measures of wealth give correlated scores. People that are born in wealth usually stay wealthy. People that have more wealth generally occupy higher status work. Sure wealth is an interesting thing to look at societally, but it offers no insight into human psychology.
      - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
        That argument makes no sense. IQ is something that we have created a scale for, that correlates with lots of life outcomes (as well as being useful in predicting school success, which was the original goal). Wealth is not a feature internal to an individual, it's something defined by a society/particular social structure and as such, it doesn't make a lot of sense to compare it to IQ (an individual difference variable measured by a test).
parsadotsh 6y ago
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." [for reference, if using IQ as an indicator for performance, 2 standard deviations below the mean would be 70 IQ] 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."
- in3d 6y ago
  “Which explains why IQ is unnecessary and using it is risky because you miss out on the Einsteins and Feynmans." Einstein and Feynman would certainly not be rejected if you automatically rejected people with below average IQs, so I don’t really get this part of the argument. We have no number for Einstein and a supposed 125 for Feynman but he did extremely well (the best in the nation) on Putnam, so his nonverbal (or at least “quant”) score was likely very high.
  - nullc 6y ago
    You do risk weeding out those parties: The tests aren't perfect and can give low results from people who are otherwise intelligent. 125 wouldn't pass the above conjectured 130. A piece of intuition is that if you select a population based on a criteria, the correlation between that criteria and the target in the selected subpopulation is usually greatly diminished, and sometimes reversed. Imagine you know that being very tall is very good for basketball... so you select very tall people to be players. You will likely find that among the selected players height is not very correlated with performance, or even inversely correlated because your initial selection wiped the correlation out and potentially noise or other effects (like agility) which are correlated with being short begin to dominate the differences within that population. This also holds for correlated traits-- e.g. if you select very tall players it may wipe out or reverse the correlation shoe-size has with performance. As a result if you first select people for an intelligence requiring task specific capability and also select for IQ you're likely selecting for noise, and potentially selecting for people who are just really good at taking tests and which weren't actually as good at the task specific capability as a randomly selected person in your first selection would be.
in3d 6y ago
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.
- mcguire 6y ago
  But IQ research has actually been linked with eugenics throughout its history.
  - travisoneill1 6y ago
    So if eugenicists selected for height, then measuring how tall people are would be "linked to eugenics?"
    - yedava 6y ago
      Eugenicists work backwards from a conclusion - that their race is superior. So they look for or invent measures that only their race exhibits. So why would they even measure height? They know other races can be just as tall their own race. So that measure is obviously disqualified.
    - mcguire 6y ago
      "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." By "linked with eugenics" I mean IQ research was used to provide the scientific basis for eugenics policies, including being designed to demonstrate that undesirable groups had lower intelligence.
civilized 6y ago
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. 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 https://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-That-Matters-Stuart-Ritchie/dp/1444791877 https://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-That-Matters-Stuart-Ritc... 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".
- mcguire 6y ago
  What policy changes does Ritchie recommend? I saw a mention of IQ testing for job interviews (and can imagine the kerfuffle if Google or Facebook a test score of 130 before an initial interview).
- disown 6y ago
  > like the HN audience I think most of the HN audience is well aware of the positive aspects of IQ. It's just that the power structure here protects the vocal minority who espouse solely the negative side. Like so much of media/social media/politics/culture/etc, it's censorship that tips the scale and skews discourse towards the extreme.
- jameslk 6y ago
  > 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. What do you consider it's positive values? All I'm aware of is how it's used to judge people. Unless you consider that a positive thing.
  - civilized 6y ago
    Here are just a couple examples: 1. We can quantitatively study environmental factors that influence intelligence. For example, we know that even low concentrations of lead in the blood are linked to lower IQ. Knowing what can hurt our mental abilities allows us to protect ourselves via environmental policy. 2. It's not uncommon that a child who is inattentive at school is high IQ and is understimulated by going at the normal classroom pace. Testing allows identification and targeted enrichment opportunities.
scythe 6y ago
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. 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.
YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
>> Variance explained by IQ The author performs a regression on the WLS dataset. I did not know what that is so I followed the links provided: >> 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. 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. 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".
- tgv 6y ago
  The article quoted doesn't even mention the data or the test.
  - vsskanth 6y ago
    > I already have prepared the WLS data set here, and it has a good IQ test, so I will use that. It's linked in the second paragraph
    - tgv 6y ago
      Taleb's article doesn't mention the data used, as far as I can see.
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago
  I dunno, this is probably the best-case for IQ, to be honest. Remember kids, IQ was developed to predict which children would perform best in school so that they could be streamed, and that's what it's best at. I don't think that the author is abusing statistics here at all, as the variance explained by IQ on grades is always pretty large (in psychology, 35% explained is super, super good), and if I really cared (i.e. you reply and ask for this) I could probably dig up another few datasets that show the same or higher association.
abnry 6y ago
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").
- mcguire 6y ago
  Or, "Look at how special I am; if I'm not successful it must be because I'm being held back."
  - rch 6y ago
    Imagine how offensive your comment would sound if we were discussing the relatively small percentage of people who experience dyslexia.
    - mcguire 6y ago
      I'm afraid I don't understand your comment. Is dyslexia directly correlated with measures of success? Dyslexia is a good use of IQ testing; either you do worse than expected (because of the difficulty reading) or better (compared to your grades) and in either case further investigation could lead to a diagnosis and useful help.
- spookybones 6y ago
  Agreed. Debating IQ is a particularly boring fetish and is far too prevalent on forums like HN.
- Ingosla 6y ago
  Or "look how smart I'am, my race must be better than other races, everyone else is beneath me". How about people just be humble about how smart they are, and start using their "intelligence" to help others and be a good example.
  - whimsicalism 6y ago
rch 6y ago
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. 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.
runarberg 6y ago
Previous discussion (150 points, 268 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20555229 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20555229
deleted 6y ago
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ryanmarsh 6y ago
The iq_group vs income chart shows a bump in incomes at $150k for IQ’s < 80 This cohort is most certainly comprised entirely of programmers.
stared 6y ago
When it comes to the template - it totally looks like Distill for R Markdown (https://rstudio.github.io/distill/ https://rstudio.github.io/distill/).
TheMagicHorsey 6y ago
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. 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). 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. 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.
- obvthrowaway195 6y ago
  I find it depressing that you seem to be okay with the suppression of truth which contradicts the reigning ideology.
  - TheMagicHorsey 6y ago
    I'm not opining on whether such suppression is good or bad. I'm just stating its a reality.
k__ 6y ago
I read so many different things about IQ. It's crap. It's the only good thing that came from psychology. If the army uses it, it can't be so bad. It stays the same, your whole life. You can train it. 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. What's right?
- MadSudaca 6y ago
  Having a high IQ is a tool you can use to get ahead in life. If you have a lot of it, you’ll generally have more choices. If you don’t have it, life will probably be tougher for you. In a similar way in which being ugly or unsocial could mean some doors are closed for you. The essence is that it’s generally an asset you’re born with, and in the increasingly complex world we live in, not having it can be a liability. If you have a good amount of it, count yourself as a lucky one.
H_Pylori 6y ago
A high IQ seems a necessary, but not sufficient, condition to be intellectually successful. If we take the extreme case of Nobel Prizes we see that most of them have IQs 3SD above the mean. We can infer that there is a minimum IQ score requirement to do a certain job, for example: - Nobel Prize level scientist ~150 IQ - College professor ~130 IQ - Engineer ~120 IQ - Machinist ~110 IQ - Heavy machinery operator ~90 IQ The trouble with IQ, and the discussion that surrounds it, is very simple. IQ seems to have a strong genetic (read unchangeable) component. The reality of IQ is a big F.U. to the concept of free will and a big F.U. to the narrative of "poor people are just oppressed, it they weren't they'll be just as successful as Bill Gates and Elon Musk". The reality of IQ is, in my opinion, the greatest taboo of our society. The narrative of the entire modern left rests on this taboo not being broken. Now you can start downvoting, but if you do it, please explain why there aren't highly successful people with low IQs (except in sports, maybe).
mcguire 6y ago
I have one question about IQ (or the g if you prefer to make the distinction): So what? What are you going to do with this information? * 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.) * IQ is hereditary. * Skin color (and ethnicity in general) is correlated with IQ. Sex is correlated with IQ variance. (Am i missing anything here?) 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".) 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.
- obvthrowaway195 6y ago
  The reason why the validity of IQ as a measure of intelligence (and even the concept of "intelligence" itself in some cases) is so vociferously denied by many is precisely due to its very important implications for social policy (answers to the "So what?" question). That IQ is a valid measure of intelligence, is rooted in an individual's genetics, and that individuals and ethnic groups vary in their IQ (or average IQ, for the latter), would necessarily have to imply a complete re-evaluation of the interpretation of social inequality, and of the approaches towards mitigating it. I personally think that this re-evaluation is absolutely necessary, because the current model of social inequality, in which any differences between individuals and groups are attributed to environmental or cultural factors, cannot hope to ever lead to constructive policies aimed towards helping all people - regardless of their genetic potential for intelligence - to achieve their best. Even worse, certain policies which are now being advocated - such as the elimination of standardized testing - are actively harmful. To answer your categorical imperative: yes, I would much prefer to live in a society where genetic differences in the intelligence potential between individuals and groups is acknowledged, because it would lead to far more sensible social policies which would benefit all - high IQ or low IQ. Finally, even if you consciously choose not to care about IQ, eventually reality will rear its ugly head and force you to take it into consideration if current social policies cause a lowering of average IQ. If there is such a drift towards a lowering of IQ of the general population, whether through higher reproduction rates of the low IQ segments of the population or immigration, many of the amenities which you take for granted, such as a functioning infrastructure, which can only be supported by a population which is above a certain IQ threshold, will start to deteriorate to such a degree that the IQ problem will become impossible to ignore.
ogogmad 6y ago
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?
- MauranKilom 6y ago
  Did you read the article? Specifically the section "Correlation only for low IQ"?
cryptica 6y ago
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.
sinuhe69 6y ago
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.
cryptica 6y ago
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. 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. Economic conformity is fragility.
pjdemers 6y ago
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.
amai 6y ago
There is definitely one correlation: People with a measured high IQ defend IQ measurements. People with a measured low IQ don‘t .
- username90 6y ago
  In my experience there are basically no people with measured low IQ making good posts on forums. If there were we would see way more people speaking up about it. Throughout my entire life reading posts on many different forums I only saw a single person admit he had below 100 IQ, and he wasn't a good poster. If IQ didn't matter we would see tons of people say things like "I have an IQ of 85 and still am a software engineer at Google, IQ is total bullshit!", but we don't.
pgcj_poster 6y ago
Ok, so Taleb's argument was: > “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 Right before the conclusion, the author shows us this chart comparing incomes in IQ cohorts: https://www.jsmp.dk/posts/2019-06-16-talebiq/iq_files/figure-html5/unnamed-chunk-20-1.png https://www.jsmp.dk/posts/2019-06-16-talebiq/iq_files/figure... 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.
dgudkov 6y ago
Taleb tweeted his response, mentioning also this HN topic: https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1320433476345176066 https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1320433476345176066

136 points by saadalem 6y ago

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.

H8crilA 6y ago
Also correlates with lifespan, probability of divorce, crime. All such boring stuff. PS. I am wondering whether it correlates with the belief in IQ testing itself :)
- konjin 6y ago
  >Also correlates with lifespan, probability of divorce, crime. All such boring stuff. Yes, doing pointless soul crushing work makes you the money you need to create the next generation of automatons that do the same.
  - darkhorse13 6y ago
    For a lack of a better word, your ideas seem really misguided to me.
    - bongobongo 6y ago
      They are ultimately correct though.
    - konjin 6y ago
      Describing reality is not disgusting.
- UncleMeat 6y ago
  So does wealth. Yet I'd hope that people would shudder at school admissions and hiring pipelines that explicitly separate people based on wealth and choose the richest ones.
  - chongli 6y ago
    Tons of schools separate implicitly by wealth simply by charging high tuition and not offering (enough) financial aid to every student who can’t afford it.
    - tartoran 6y ago
      You’d be surprised at what lenghts rich people go in order to reduce the tuition or get financial aid for their offspring. The rich are well informed and know how to use all the loopholes..
    - UncleMeat 6y ago
      Yes. And many people agree that's bad. I'm not saying this doesn't happen. I'm saying that "High IQ is correlated with lower crime rates and higher test scores" shouldn't be the end of the discussion when people are arguing that IQ should be used to divide populations in public policy and corporate behavior.
  - nkingsy 6y ago
    I’d prefer it to be explicit. Would be nicer for the really smart poor kids who just miss the genius level required to get in to a Harvard without being rich. I’d rather think “if my family had money, I would’ve gotten in” than “I’m just not good enough”. These silent double standards are a curse. Saying it out loud is the first step to stopping it.
PaulHoule 6y ago
I think Raven is fun, but Raven is just 60 questions you can cram on.
vergessenmir 6y ago
I think what you're referring to is conscientiousness, the ability to stick to a task to completion regardless of how exciting it is. So you can get people with higher intelligence and low conscientiousness being overtaken by less smart people high in conscientiousness who actually finish the task. My understanding is that with a higher IQ you finish a task quicker . So smarter people tend to get to success quicker but doesn't mean that lower IQ folk are denied successes if both groups have similar levels of conscientiousness. IQ is not the strongest predictor of success.
- naveen99 6y ago
  only if lower iq correlated with longevity. Also success compounds. You want faster compounding.
bko 6y ago
It would be more accurate to say "Performance on an IQ test" as opposed to "IQ". That's the main criticism I have of IQ. So if you do well on tests, then you probably would do well on the IQ test as well as tests in school, which means you are more likely to have attained a higher level of educations, which is associated with a higher income. To actually prove to me that IQ is a thing, you would have to show me that what you call IQ is innate. Meaning that you can't do better on an IQ test if you study, which I don't believe is true. All written tests I have ever taken have tricks or patterns that you can exploit after some practice. And then you'd have to show me that IQ is a better predictor than some other rote test to tease out general test taking ability or ability to sit still. A lot of people just work off the basis that IQ is a thing that we can measure, which I don't believe to be true, hence the pseudoscientific swindle
- rbecker 6y ago
  > To actually prove to me that IQ is a thing, you would have to show me that what you call IQ is innate. "Twin studies of adult individuals have found a heritability of IQ between 57% and 73% with the most recent studies showing heritability for IQ as high as 80%." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
  - bko 6y ago
    I wasn't talking about innate in the context of heredity. I meant produced by the mind as opposed to experience. I am not convinced that someone can't learn to score better on IQ tests through practice
- chongli 6y ago
  To actually prove to me that IQ is a thing, you would have to show me that what you call IQ is innate This does not follow. IQ is a thing because they test children on it without warning and without any prep and their performance on these tasks they’ve never seen before in their lives predicts their performance in school better than many other tests. You can’t say the same thing about, say, a language test for a child unfamiliar with the language because the kid won’t understand it at all. The IQ test is designed to be as unrelated to experience as possible in order to measure the capacity for abstract thinking and the ability to solve novel problems when you first encounter them. Since you’re undermining a test of your ability to solve something novel, studying for an IQ test is cheating.
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WhompingWindows 6y ago
IQ is a psychometric number derived by a standardized instrument to measure some form of intelligence. "Boring" is a feeling that has as much to do with intelligence as all the other feelings like sad, happy, etc. "Pointless" is a value judgment you're making right here that's extremely subjective, each person can find purpose in their job if they re-frame and tell themselves a better story about it. I don't think IQ is a perfect predictor for basically anything. It's a very myopic metric that helps explain, but any statistician today is going to use dozens of variables in their model, not just one.

PaulHoule 6y ago

You can't win in discussions about IQ for this reason: 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. 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". 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. 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". 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". --- 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: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action --- 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: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven%27s_Progressive_Matrices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven%27s_Progressive_Matrices 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.

Swizec 6y ago
What if instead of actors faking the test, we consider it takes high IQ to reach the top 0.5% of any field?

nyrulez 6y ago

For some jobs, it matters more than others. I wonder if the data also records profession categories and differences become more clear. 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. 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.

x87678r 6y ago
> Also IQ is a sub- component for general intelligence. This is the bit that is more important to me and something I dont see in the IQ debates. Some "smart" people are fast learners, others quick witted, some have great memory, others can distill lots of conflicting data, some are great communicators, others just work really hard. One IQ number is supposed to reflect all of that?
- blfr 6y ago
  Yes, this is one of the surprising things about human intelligence, most intellectual/cognitive abilities are positively correlated. Hence the g factor.
  - vsskanth 6y ago
    Serious Q: I remember taking an IQ test long back and it was a bunch of pattern matching questions. How did they figure out that good performance in this correlates with cognitive abilities that translates to real life intellect at tasks ?
    - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
      This is a great question! You probably took one of the Raven's matrices, which are a culture-blind test of g (the presumed construct underlying IQ). Essentially, each new test is normed against the previous tests, so the Stanford-Binet test would have been the first, and then when a new measure is developed, we'd administer both tests to a sample (hopefully many samples) and use the correlation between the tests to determine whether or not or new test worked. It's not really a great method, but it's the best we've got for most individual difference variables.

fractionalhare 6y ago

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." 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.

tartoran 6y ago
IQ metric is not necessary to make this assment, a regular job interview could weed out the two sigma below the mean candidates. I think it’s common sense at this level. On the other hand it really depends on the job. You don’t need a hugh IQ to be a supermarket bagger. Low IQ people in low responsibility positions don’t pose much risk, I’d actually think high IQ in highly responsible positions may pose a higher risk: think of hiring a high IQ malefic narcissist who would ruin your business just for fun
sokoloff 6y ago
I don’t favor giving IQ tests to candidates for private sector employment, but a 16% improvement in candidate outcomes would seem to be massive overall, not minor, for many companies where company outcome is highly correlated with employee performance (SpaceX tech, self-driving tech, EV/battery tech, some areas in many other science disciplines)

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bob33212 6y ago

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.

WhompingWindows 6y ago
Luck would get you just as far as desire, too. For every Gates and Bezos, there are 100's of failed entrepeneurs who may have been just as smart, but for whatever reason (binned as "luck"), their idea fell flat.

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kurtv 6y ago
I think this assumes a correlation between high IQ and fringe personality, which is a bit of a hollywood myth. I remember reading in "Understanding Psychology as a Science: An Introduction to Scientific and Statistical Inference" by Zoltan Dienes that there is little correlation between IQ and mental illness. This study seems interesting in correlating IQ and personality traits: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6480832/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6480832/

leto_ii 6y ago

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). 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.

Ensorceled 6y ago
Certainly we can admit that it is true that "Taleb is wrong about [several] IQ [claims]"? The article makes no attempt to make any analysis about differences in wealth or education. It is VERY SPECIFICALLY addressing some of Taleb's claims about IQ and is VERY SPECIFIC that that is the goal.
- mcguire 6y ago
  I think you can go so far as to say Taleb is wrong about stuff without much argument.
  - polotics 6y ago
    Which would be ad-hominem, right?
    - Mary-Jane 6y ago
      Sure, but to be fair Taleb's post is full of them, so he's inviting them. Glass houses and all that.
- leto_ii 6y ago
  > It is VERY SPECIFICALLY addressing some of Taleb's claims about IQ and is VERY SPECIFIC that that is the goal. Not sure this is the case at all. The conclusion states: > Conclusion > All the claims from the article that I looked at, that can be interpreted as something specific and tested in a real data set, turned out not to be correct. It's true that Taleb's article is a bit of a rant, in his specific style, and that it might not get its quantitative claims precisely right. However, I think that his core points are valid and that the current paper, by focusing on relatively minor quantitative claims, doesn't actually provide relevant counter-arguments.

rvr_ 6y ago

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. 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.

whimsicalism 6y ago
It is entirely unsurprising and unrelated to me that the year you were born helps predict income.

pfortuny 6y ago

> The adjusted R2 is 0.356, so IQ explains ~35%. 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).

fractionalhare 6y ago
Yes, and it's somewhat irresponsible for the author to present it this way. Taleb is not being specific that he's talking about variance of performance in his claim. That is only one way to measure the relationship between two things (via covariance and then correlation). But it's not the only way. In fact Taleb's claim is actually underspecified here, so in lieu of rebutting it with a calculation of Pearson's r, the author should try to critique it more holistically. As it stands, an R^2 of 0.356 is not actually a refutation of Taleb's "5 - 13%". Taleb probably shouldn't have quantified his point without some rigor behind it, but the author's single counterexample doesn't substantively respond to it.
- tgv 6y ago
  Yes, it is a rebuttal. Without further information, you have to assume the default meaning of "explains x%", so Taleb's claim is wrong.
  - fractionalhare 6y ago
    I don't have to assume anything, and to be charitable I'm not going to assume anything. I would afford the author the same charitability. Taleb's point is underspecified and needs further clarification before we can meaningfully engage with it by citing statistics. You risk beating up a strawman by tossing a quick calculation of R^2 at it and saying it's wrong. Using R^2 this way is like saying someone's wrong in an online debate by citing a logical fallacy. I guess, sure, you successfully rebutted them in a shallow sense. But nothing of value has been achieved (yet). We haven't arrived at a better understanding of the truth.
    - 6y ago

blfr 6y ago

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.

cultus 6y ago
IQ isn't a "result." It's just a test whose results were specified to be Gaussian with mean 100 and std dev 15. Whether that is a useful thing is a different consideration.
- lopmotr 6y ago
  The fact that you can use so many diverse tests as IQ tests and still get well correlated scores is itself a discovery. So is the fact that those scores correlate with various other life outcomes and that we can't find any lasting intervention (beyond very early childhood) to improve people's IQ. These are all important results about how humans work. It's not just made-up.
  - runarberg 6y ago
    Is it though? I bet you get similar correlation with wealth. Many different measures of wealth give correlated scores. People that are born in wealth usually stay wealthy. People that have more wealth generally occupy higher status work. Sure wealth is an interesting thing to look at societally, but it offers no insight into human psychology.
    - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
      That argument makes no sense. IQ is something that we have created a scale for, that correlates with lots of life outcomes (as well as being useful in predicting school success, which was the original goal). Wealth is not a feature internal to an individual, it's something defined by a society/particular social structure and as such, it doesn't make a lot of sense to compare it to IQ (an individual difference variable measured by a test).

parsadotsh 6y ago

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." [for reference, if using IQ as an indicator for performance, 2 standard deviations below the mean would be 70 IQ] 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."

in3d 6y ago
“Which explains why IQ is unnecessary and using it is risky because you miss out on the Einsteins and Feynmans." Einstein and Feynman would certainly not be rejected if you automatically rejected people with below average IQs, so I don’t really get this part of the argument. We have no number for Einstein and a supposed 125 for Feynman but he did extremely well (the best in the nation) on Putnam, so his nonverbal (or at least “quant”) score was likely very high.
- nullc 6y ago
  You do risk weeding out those parties: The tests aren't perfect and can give low results from people who are otherwise intelligent. 125 wouldn't pass the above conjectured 130. A piece of intuition is that if you select a population based on a criteria, the correlation between that criteria and the target in the selected subpopulation is usually greatly diminished, and sometimes reversed. Imagine you know that being very tall is very good for basketball... so you select very tall people to be players. You will likely find that among the selected players height is not very correlated with performance, or even inversely correlated because your initial selection wiped the correlation out and potentially noise or other effects (like agility) which are correlated with being short begin to dominate the differences within that population. This also holds for correlated traits-- e.g. if you select very tall players it may wipe out or reverse the correlation shoe-size has with performance. As a result if you first select people for an intelligence requiring task specific capability and also select for IQ you're likely selecting for noise, and potentially selecting for people who are just really good at taking tests and which weren't actually as good at the task specific capability as a randomly selected person in your first selection would be.

in3d 6y ago

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.

mcguire 6y ago
But IQ research has actually been linked with eugenics throughout its history.
- travisoneill1 6y ago
  So if eugenicists selected for height, then measuring how tall people are would be "linked to eugenics?"
  - yedava 6y ago
    Eugenicists work backwards from a conclusion - that their race is superior. So they look for or invent measures that only their race exhibits. So why would they even measure height? They know other races can be just as tall their own race. So that measure is obviously disqualified.
  - mcguire 6y ago
    "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." By "linked with eugenics" I mean IQ research was used to provide the scientific basis for eugenics policies, including being designed to demonstrate that undesirable groups had lower intelligence.

civilized 6y ago

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. 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 https://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-That-Matters-Stuart-Ritchie/dp/1444791877 https://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-That-Matters-Stuart-Ritc... 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".

mcguire 6y ago
What policy changes does Ritchie recommend? I saw a mention of IQ testing for job interviews (and can imagine the kerfuffle if Google or Facebook a test score of 130 before an initial interview).
disown 6y ago
> like the HN audience I think most of the HN audience is well aware of the positive aspects of IQ. It's just that the power structure here protects the vocal minority who espouse solely the negative side. Like so much of media/social media/politics/culture/etc, it's censorship that tips the scale and skews discourse towards the extreme.
jameslk 6y ago
> 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. What do you consider it's positive values? All I'm aware of is how it's used to judge people. Unless you consider that a positive thing.
- civilized 6y ago
  Here are just a couple examples: 1. We can quantitatively study environmental factors that influence intelligence. For example, we know that even low concentrations of lead in the blood are linked to lower IQ. Knowing what can hurt our mental abilities allows us to protect ourselves via environmental policy. 2. It's not uncommon that a child who is inattentive at school is high IQ and is understimulated by going at the normal classroom pace. Testing allows identification and targeted enrichment opportunities.

scythe 6y ago

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. 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.

YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago

>> Variance explained by IQ The author performs a regression on the WLS dataset. I did not know what that is so I followed the links provided: >> 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. 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. 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".

tgv 6y ago
The article quoted doesn't even mention the data or the test.
- vsskanth 6y ago
  > I already have prepared the WLS data set here, and it has a good IQ test, so I will use that. It's linked in the second paragraph
  - tgv 6y ago
    Taleb's article doesn't mention the data used, as far as I can see.
disgruntledphd2 6y ago
I dunno, this is probably the best-case for IQ, to be honest. Remember kids, IQ was developed to predict which children would perform best in school so that they could be streamed, and that's what it's best at. I don't think that the author is abusing statistics here at all, as the variance explained by IQ on grades is always pretty large (in psychology, 35% explained is super, super good), and if I really cared (i.e. you reply and ask for this) I could probably dig up another few datasets that show the same or higher association.

abnry 6y ago

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").

mcguire 6y ago
Or, "Look at how special I am; if I'm not successful it must be because I'm being held back."
- rch 6y ago
  Imagine how offensive your comment would sound if we were discussing the relatively small percentage of people who experience dyslexia.
  - mcguire 6y ago
    I'm afraid I don't understand your comment. Is dyslexia directly correlated with measures of success? Dyslexia is a good use of IQ testing; either you do worse than expected (because of the difficulty reading) or better (compared to your grades) and in either case further investigation could lead to a diagnosis and useful help.
spookybones 6y ago
Agreed. Debating IQ is a particularly boring fetish and is far too prevalent on forums like HN.
Ingosla 6y ago
Or "look how smart I'am, my race must be better than other races, everyone else is beneath me". How about people just be humble about how smart they are, and start using their "intelligence" to help others and be a good example.
- whimsicalism 6y ago

rch 6y ago

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. 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.

runarberg 6y ago

Previous discussion (150 points, 268 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20555229 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20555229

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ryanmarsh 6y ago

The iq_group vs income chart shows a bump in incomes at $150k for IQ’s < 80 This cohort is most certainly comprised entirely of programmers.

stared 6y ago

When it comes to the template - it totally looks like Distill for R Markdown (https://rstudio.github.io/distill/ https://rstudio.github.io/distill/).

TheMagicHorsey 6y ago

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. 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). 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. 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.

obvthrowaway195 6y ago
I find it depressing that you seem to be okay with the suppression of truth which contradicts the reigning ideology.
- TheMagicHorsey 6y ago
  I'm not opining on whether such suppression is good or bad. I'm just stating its a reality.

k__ 6y ago

I read so many different things about IQ. It's crap. It's the only good thing that came from psychology. If the army uses it, it can't be so bad. It stays the same, your whole life. You can train it. 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. What's right?

MadSudaca 6y ago
Having a high IQ is a tool you can use to get ahead in life. If you have a lot of it, you’ll generally have more choices. If you don’t have it, life will probably be tougher for you. In a similar way in which being ugly or unsocial could mean some doors are closed for you. The essence is that it’s generally an asset you’re born with, and in the increasingly complex world we live in, not having it can be a liability. If you have a good amount of it, count yourself as a lucky one.

H_Pylori 6y ago

A high IQ seems a necessary, but not sufficient, condition to be intellectually successful. If we take the extreme case of Nobel Prizes we see that most of them have IQs 3SD above the mean. We can infer that there is a minimum IQ score requirement to do a certain job, for example: - Nobel Prize level scientist ~150 IQ - College professor ~130 IQ - Engineer ~120 IQ - Machinist ~110 IQ - Heavy machinery operator ~90 IQ The trouble with IQ, and the discussion that surrounds it, is very simple. IQ seems to have a strong genetic (read unchangeable) component. The reality of IQ is a big F.U. to the concept of free will and a big F.U. to the narrative of "poor people are just oppressed, it they weren't they'll be just as successful as Bill Gates and Elon Musk". The reality of IQ is, in my opinion, the greatest taboo of our society. The narrative of the entire modern left rests on this taboo not being broken. Now you can start downvoting, but if you do it, please explain why there aren't highly successful people with low IQs (except in sports, maybe).

mcguire 6y ago

I have one question about IQ (or the g if you prefer to make the distinction): So what? What are you going to do with this information? * 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.) * IQ is hereditary. * Skin color (and ethnicity in general) is correlated with IQ. Sex is correlated with IQ variance. (Am i missing anything here?) 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".) 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.

obvthrowaway195 6y ago
The reason why the validity of IQ as a measure of intelligence (and even the concept of "intelligence" itself in some cases) is so vociferously denied by many is precisely due to its very important implications for social policy (answers to the "So what?" question). That IQ is a valid measure of intelligence, is rooted in an individual's genetics, and that individuals and ethnic groups vary in their IQ (or average IQ, for the latter), would necessarily have to imply a complete re-evaluation of the interpretation of social inequality, and of the approaches towards mitigating it. I personally think that this re-evaluation is absolutely necessary, because the current model of social inequality, in which any differences between individuals and groups are attributed to environmental or cultural factors, cannot hope to ever lead to constructive policies aimed towards helping all people - regardless of their genetic potential for intelligence - to achieve their best. Even worse, certain policies which are now being advocated - such as the elimination of standardized testing - are actively harmful. To answer your categorical imperative: yes, I would much prefer to live in a society where genetic differences in the intelligence potential between individuals and groups is acknowledged, because it would lead to far more sensible social policies which would benefit all - high IQ or low IQ. Finally, even if you consciously choose not to care about IQ, eventually reality will rear its ugly head and force you to take it into consideration if current social policies cause a lowering of average IQ. If there is such a drift towards a lowering of IQ of the general population, whether through higher reproduction rates of the low IQ segments of the population or immigration, many of the amenities which you take for granted, such as a functioning infrastructure, which can only be supported by a population which is above a certain IQ threshold, will start to deteriorate to such a degree that the IQ problem will become impossible to ignore.

ogogmad 6y ago

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?

MauranKilom 6y ago
Did you read the article? Specifically the section "Correlation only for low IQ"?

cryptica 6y ago

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.

sinuhe69 6y ago

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.

cryptica 6y ago

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. 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. Economic conformity is fragility.

pjdemers 6y ago

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.

amai 6y ago

There is definitely one correlation: People with a measured high IQ defend IQ measurements. People with a measured low IQ don‘t .

username90 6y ago
In my experience there are basically no people with measured low IQ making good posts on forums. If there were we would see way more people speaking up about it. Throughout my entire life reading posts on many different forums I only saw a single person admit he had below 100 IQ, and he wasn't a good poster. If IQ didn't matter we would see tons of people say things like "I have an IQ of 85 and still am a software engineer at Google, IQ is total bullshit!", but we don't.

pgcj_poster 6y ago

Ok, so Taleb's argument was: > “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 Right before the conclusion, the author shows us this chart comparing incomes in IQ cohorts: https://www.jsmp.dk/posts/2019-06-16-talebiq/iq_files/figure-html5/unnamed-chunk-20-1.png https://www.jsmp.dk/posts/2019-06-16-talebiq/iq_files/figure... 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.

dgudkov 6y ago

Taleb tweeted his response, mentioning also this HN topic: https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1320433476345176066 https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1320433476345176066