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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

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

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