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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 m

• 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.
    • MauranKilom 6y ago
      Following the scientific method, you need to make testable claims for your hypothesis to hold any merit. All testable (well, quantifiable) claims made by Taleb have been shown to be wrong here. This means whatever proposals Taleb makes are either unfalsifiable or wrong, both of which are not very useful for advancing scientific understanding. To be clear, not following the scientific method does not mean your hypothesis must be wrong. But to convince the community at large, that's what you should do.
      • leto_ii 6y ago
        A number of Taleb's testable claims not addressed by the author: - Let us return to the point of the correlation test-retest. Unlike measurements of height or wealth, which carry a tiny relative error, many people get yuugely different results for the same IQ test (I mean the same person!) - National IQ is a Fraud. From engaging participants (who throw buzzwords at you), I realized that the concept has huge variance, enough to be uninformative. [...] Some people use National IQ as a basis for genetic differences: it doesn’t explain the sharp changes in Ireland and Croatia upon European integration, or, in the other direction, the difference between Israeli and U.S. Ashkenazis. - If, as psychologists show (see figure) MDs and academics tend to have a higher “IQ” that is slightly informative (higher, but on a noisy average), it is largely because to get into schools you need to score on a test similar to “IQ”. The mere presence of such a filter increases the visible mean and lower the visible variance. > But to convince the community at large, that's what you should do. I don't agree. I don't think that only scientific (or at least scientific-looking) arguments should be considered valid. Why would that be the case? There are a lot of empirical observations that we can draw useful knowledge from, without resorting to mathematical theories and quantifiable experiments. Not to mention that science itself is far less of a rigorous field than it may seem at first sight.
        • MauranKilom 6y ago
          > Why would that be the case? There are a lot of empirical observations that we can draw useful knowledge from, without resorting to mathematical theories and quantifiable experiments. Because we humans are excellent at convincing ourselves of seeing or believing things that are simple untrue[0]. It turns out that numbers - while they can still be messed with knowingly or unknowingly - are a very useful tool for not only combating your own biases but also convincing others that our conclusions avert these. Empirical observations are certainly immensely useful - for forming a hypothesis. If the hypothesis can successfully predict certain non-trivial effects, that elevates it over hypotheses that cannot do so. > I don't think that only scientific (or at least scientific-looking) arguments should be considered valid. As I said, arguments can be valid without being scientific. But mere human perception is a very fallible thing to build research, results and, eventually, policy on. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
  • fractionalhare 6y ago
    If we're being charitable we can say that the core thrust of Taleb's point remains unchallenged, while the details he quantified are either wrong or lacking in sufficient rigor to be refuted. The author makes good points, but realistically it's a fool's errand trying to disprove tweets using a litany of R^2 incantations. There are important caveats to what the author's done here: 1. Taleb's real point is that IQ is mostly useful for avoiding (extreme) incompetence rather than selecting for competence. Taleb constructed his argument using statistics which are either incorrect or underspecified, which invites the kind of analysis the author made. But that also means the author isn't substantially engaging with what Taleb means, because Taleb is abrasive and doesn't care to be specific. 2. You should be skeptical of any statistical analysis which leads with Pearson's r (or Spearman's rho, or whatever correlative measure) or the associated R^2. It is a top line measure which is useful but incomplete. You may miss out on the nonlinear relationship or nonperiodic relationship entirely, either of which could hold most of the variance. There are also many ways in which the variance of two things can be associated without there being a predictive relationship. Simply stated: as a statistician would tell you, if all we needed was R^2 then there would be no papers, only abstracts. A little bit of statistics can be a dangerous thing. I'm not defending Taleb per se; rather I'm saying that both sides are arguing past each other and we probably shouldn't draw a conclusion from either.
    • DougBTX 6y ago
      > If we're being charitable we can say that the core thrust of Taleb's point remains unchallenged, while the details he quantified are either wrong or lacking in sufficient rigor to be refuted. It seems we could put this a little stronger, as the article claims to refute all the quantifiable evidence for the core point. As far as I can tell, it does so.
    • candiodari 6y ago
      Euhm, the jsmp post certainly seems more rigorous than Taleb, not less. I also don't understand how your first point works. It contradicts itself. Look, either statistics (because this is a problem with statistics, not with IQ specifically) can predict individuals or not. So either IQ is useful in classifying both success and failure. Or it can't be used for either. Generally using statistical values for predicting individual success or failure is, first, very unreliable in the individual case, and second, not considered "just", for good reason. If you statistically show a group of 10 people has a 90% chance of being criminal, it is considered impossibly hard to pick out the innocent from among them using statistics. Therefore the correct way to respond to statistics is to group people by IQ bands, not to give specific individuals advantages (which, granted, is often done). Of course, this will magnify differences over time, which you may not consider socially just. Your second argument essentially states that "measures that don't take time into account ... don't take time into account". It is wrong insofar that IQ usually does take time (time since birth) into account, but nothing else. That's not a coincidence, that's because they tried other factors and they didn't matter, but obviously a tautology is always right. The point is wrong because it's useless, not because it's untrue. There are many other factors that could be evaluated against IQ, and there has been a ton of research that did so, and never found much correlation. And frankly, it boils down to this: "being good at X" correlates across X. That's to a large extent what IQ is. Everybody has seen that incompetence extends beyond any individual skill an individual might or might not have. Research shows that competence does too. It makes sense to some extent: having exceptional skill at one particular thing allows you to advance quicker when it comes to other skills. When those skills are related this is considered "trivially true" (e.g. learning piano to learn violin quicker), but what's harder to see is that this is in reality almost universally true, and this is in fact what our school system turns out to be based upon. Skills you learn in school aren't generally meant to be generally useful, but to allow you to learn "real" skills that can't be effectively learned in school much faster.
• derefr 6y ago
  > I don't see any investigation of whether IQ can be altered through nurture (which I think it can) IIRC, one thing that we have studied pretty thoroughly, is that IQ — that is, the number IQ tests spit out — goes up when people are under the effects of stimulant drugs during the test. (Even neurotypical people, whose executive functioning is just fine without such drugs.) This is one major reason that IQ is considered a separate thing from the g factor. Essentially, g factor is "trait intelligence", while IQ is "state intelligence." While IQ might be altered by nurture/environment/situation, g factor cannot be, by definition. g factor is supposed to be what you get down to when you remove all the state-intelligence confounders. That's why it's a more interesting number to study. ----- To couch IQ vs. g factor in a cute analogy: think of ability scores in Dungeons & Dragons, vs. savings throws in that same game. g factor is essentially your INT ability score. It's defined at character creation, and it's effectively static (for regular humans; the only things that alter it in the game are supernatural.) But you don't use your INT ability-score directly for anything in the game. Instead, you use your INT modifier — which has your INT ability-score as its base value, but then aggregates on top all other temporary or semi-permanent bonuses/maluses from magical effects, equipment, etc. If you do a number of "saving throws vs. INT" at a calibrated difficulty level, and average them together, what you'll get is a measure of your character's current INT modifier, not their INT ability score. Their IQ, not their g factor. (The analogy is surprisingly even tighter than this: people who go into INT-based classes get a proficiency bonus on their INT modifier, somewhat like people who do lateral-thinking puzzles all day get a proficiency bonus on IQ tests. And there are situational modifiers to difficulty, just like there are confounders in the questions to an IQ test.)
• YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
  You're right, I forgot about race- I forgot how much of the "controversy" around IQ is about race. A lot is, because many of the people who did the early groundwork on statistical techniques that are used today in extracting conclusions from IQ data were hell-bent on categorising "races" according to their intellectual ability, with the white race usually either at the pinnacle, or close, of the hierarchy and with the "negro" "race" at the very bottom. People like Karl Pearson (of the Pearson correlation coefficient), Francis Galton (who coined the term "eugenics"), Ronald Fisher (head of eugenics at University College London in his time), and others. But all that and a lot more is discussed in Stephen J. Gould's The Mismeasurement of Man, a text to read before reading random posts with graphs on the internets.
  • leto_ii 6y ago
    > But all that and a lot more is discussed in Stephen J. Gould's The Mismeasurement of Man, a text to read before reading random posts with graphs on the internets. I was actually looking into some of Gould's work just a few days ago; mostly on punctuated equilibria, but The Mismeasurement of Man is on my reading list too :D
  • bJGVygG7MQVF8c 6y ago
    It's the The Mismeasure of Man, and it's not well-regarded. Neither is Gould taken seriously — by anyone who is taken seriously, at least — at this point.
• api 6y ago
  Taleb’s most incisive claim is that IQ becomes less predictive as you go up the scale, and that it is therefore more useful as a diagnostic of deficiency (<100) than a predictor of genius. It’s sort of like how very low or high levels of certain things on blood tests can predict illness, but not wellness. I don’t see that claim addressed very well here.
  • himinlomax 6y ago
    It's been a while since I read (some of) Taleb's arguments, but it's pretty clear to everyone supporting IQ's value in that respect that it displays more of a potential for genius than actual genius. People with high conscientiousness and high IQ are extremely likely to be successful. But there are other factors. To wit, consider how most famous serial killers have high or very high IQ (120 and above). The reason is simple: you don't get to kill that many people if you're dumb ... because you get caught quickly.
    • api 6y ago
      That’s sort of what he is arguing. As you go up from 100, “other factors” become more and more significant and IQ becomes less significant as a predictor of health or success. Go below 100 though and very low IQs seem to be predictive alone of various poor outcomes. So it’s more useful as a diagnostic for deficiency than a predictor of exceptionality.
  • tupputuppu 6y ago
    Did you not read the article or did I misunderstood what was written there? It exactly shows via several statistics that IQ is a good predictor even above the average.
• rbecker 6y ago
  > I don't see any investigation of whether IQ can be altered through nurture (which I think it can). Nurture accounts for 20-43% of the differences in adult IQ scores: "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
• Balgair 6y ago
  > I don't see any investigation of whether IQ can be altered through nurture (which I think it can). Invert, always invert. Looking at 'nurture' as a positive action may not cover all the cases of increased IQ. Generally, yes, I think that investing more time into others is going to increase the IQ score (for many reasons). I think this is a great thing we all should invest in. However, there is the edge case where a lack of nurture will also increase it. The adversity is overcome and the person becomes more 'IQ-y' as a result. Ramanujan come to mind as a perfect example of a person overcoming large adversity to achieve great status. These edge cases aren't particularly repeatable, of course, but they are instructive. These people are the very end of the 'long tail' of these statistical constructs and give great insight into what it takes besides pure luck. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan#Early_life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan#Early_life