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

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.