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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 i

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.

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.