Nassim Taleb on IQ | Hacker News Reader

Nassim Taleb on IQ

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44 pointsptbello35 comments

I like Taleb's work. It's always good food for thought and frequently insightful. That said, his posture towards academia of late seems a bit juvenile and not a little annoying. Which isn't to say that he doesn't have a point, but it gets pretty frustrating when I pay good money for a book (Antifragile) and every other page is taking potshots at "fragilistas" and talking about how those dumb intellectuals don't actually know anything. In my book you win arguments by winning arguments, not by reframing the discussion so as to portray all of your opponents as hopelessly deluded cowards and fools.

The most salient anecdote Taleb tells about himself is the one where he's going onstage to debate an opponent. He asks his publisher if punching the other guy in the face would be against his contract, and his publisher notes that it would be very good for book sales.

All Taleb does is punch people in the face nowadays. It's probably very good for book sales. He notes elsewhere, rightly I think, that the goal of anybody seeking PR should be to get the attention of somebody more famous then them: since it's much easier to pick fights than make friendships, and either will do, he picks fights with anybody he thinks has prominence. I believe it's a persona, and he's a very good method actor.

It's also really annoying if you think some of his ideas are very good, as I do.

These days if you get in to NYT or Amazon top list, you are talking about windfall in range of $10M. For books like Fifty Shades of Grey this was at $100M for the author. So writing books these days is not poor author trying to getting by but a very very serious business. It's as serious as Series C startup with actual office, roadmap, business plan, marketing plan and even full time employees who would do research, citation collection, word smithing, editing etc for you. People like Tim Ferris and Malcolm Gladwell have made this to an art form and are some of the most successful founders for this type of business. The way they work is by taking couple of known data points in academia and expand it on to 400 page book dishing it out as fundamental insights that everyone is missing out on. Such books are rife with repetitions, personal stories, cherry picked anecdotes, raising underdogs and putting down others that evoke emotions but at the same time tuck away the other side of the story that would have made them more balanced and boring.

I wouldn't be surprised if Taleb has made more money from his books then his hedge fund career and accordingly he might be more aggressive to protect his image as dispenser of great counter-intuitive insights. His assertions in these sets of tweets are obviously overblown. IQ testing is known to be very faulty measure for intelligence but at the same time lot of rebellious personalities including Einstein, Bill Gates, Lady Gaga etc have had high (> 150) IQ. No one would call them people yearning to be obedient salaried drones.

The problem with that strategy is that this isn't boxing. There isn't a sideshow first followed by an objective measure of skill. Arguments are directly judged by their presentation. So I guess you can argue that it's a tradeoff—get your ideas in front of more people by diluting their potency with juvenile antics—but frankly I think that's a short-term strategy and doesn't produce works with staying power. If his goal is just to make money it's probably smart. If his goal is just to carve out a space for other people to carry forward the debate then that's debatably also smart. But if he's really trying to present and defend his ideas in a credible way I think it's counterproductive.

Also known as "attack ideas, not people".

At work, I find it much easier to get support for my ideas if I frame my arguments in a way that leaves those arguing against me a face-saving way to agree with me. If you come out and call them stupid, they have no choice but to argue against you tooth and nail, because to agree with you is to agree that they're stupid. Sometimes it's really tempting to leave a trap in an argument, leading them down a path where they're forced to start making contradictory or ridiculous claims. It feels good, but is counter-productive.

Is there a coherent train of thought in these tweets, other than Taleb's disdain for IQ[1]? I'm struggling to understand why a measurement that appears to have no value "measures best the ability to be a good slave," or why any of this entails the belief that "the only robust measure of "rationality" & "intelligence" is survival."

[1]: A position that, as far as I know, is neither controversial nor contentious in academia.

I couldn’t find any and it was painful to read, no actual argument or a hypothesis just random anecdotes and banter.

For example: “I've spent 34 years working w/"High IQ" quants. I've rarely seen them survive, not blow up on tail events.”

How many “low IQ” quants did he work with? With all due respect to Taleb I’m not sure that anyone who’s even simply above average would make it as a quant or even be attracted to mathematics to this degree.

From my experience with quants not only that they are exceptionally intelligent even if only in a narrow field they also see data and numbers very differently than how “normal” people see them even if these normal people score pretty high on which ever arbitrary scale of intelligence you pick.

I would bet good money on the fact that Taleb likely haven’t worked with any Quant with an IQ lower than say 135 which already makes them exceptional, in fact I’m not sure how much experience a person in his position has with average not to mention low IQ people to begin with considering the social circles he hangs out in.

Another one: “Perhaps the worst problem with IQ is that it seem to selects for people who don't like to say "there is no answer, don't waste time, find something else".“

I’m not entirely sure if we would have deferential mathematics and Newton’s law of motions, yet alone something like GR if everyone followed this attitude, while this might be a reasonable attitude to have to some extent in say business I’m not sure about applying it to our advancement as a species.

IQ might be a poor indicator for intelligence it might be a good one, but his rant offered no arguments or alternatives.

Yes plenty of people can be “obnoxious losers” and have high IQ plenty of them might even be that because of it, however it would be interested to see how much better these people have it than people who chosen to waste their life in just the same manner but who are average or below average and I have a feeling that the basement dwelling Twitter troll unicorn who is indeed correct about their 150 self proclaimed IQ still manages to come on top simply due to the rare occasions when push comes to shove and they have to apply themselves.

In other words, IQ is a statistical parameter (offering no information whatsoever about individuals) but this smart guy quotes local anecdotes and moreover from the vantage point of an environment populated by outliers.

IQ is the most replicated finding in psychology, and almost certainly the most used. It is very far from being of no value.

http://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1997whygmatte...

Why g Matters: The Complexity of Everyday Life

LINDA S. GOTTFREDSON University of Delaware Personnel selection research provides much evidence that intelligence (g) is an important predictor of performance in training and on the job, especially in higher level work. This article provides evidence that g has pervasive utility in work settings because it is essen- tially the ability to deal with cognitive complexity, in particular, with complex information processing. The more complex a work task, the greater the advantages that higher g confers in performing it well. Everyday tasks, like job duties, also differ in their level of complexity. The importance of intelligence therefore differs systematically across differ- ent arenas of social life as well as economic endeavor. Data from the National Adult Literacy Survey are used to show how higher levels of cognitive ability systematically improve individuals’ odds of dealing successfully with the ordinary demands of modem life (such as banking, using maps and transportation schedules, reading and understanding forms, interpreting news articles). These and other data are summarized to illustrate how the advantages of higher g, even when they are small, cumulate to affect the overall life chances of individuals at different ranges of the IQ bell curve. The article concludes by suggesting ways to reduce the risks for low-IQ individuals of being left behind by an increasingly complex postindustrial economy.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.0963-7214.200...

Intelligence Predicts Health and Longevity, but Why?

Large epidemiological studies of almost an entire population in Scotland have found that intelligence (as measured by an IQ-type test) in childhood predicts substantial differences in adult morbidity and mortality, including deaths from cancers and cardiovascular diseases. These relations remain significant after controlling for socioeconomic variables. One possible, partial explanation of these results is that intelligence enhances individuals' care of their own health because it represents learning, reasoning, and problem-solving skills useful in preventing chronic disease and accidental injury and in adhering to complex treatment regimens.

The point was that Talib argues it has no value (above ~85), and then says it’s a good predictor of one’s value as a “slave” (very high IQ makes a good slave).

In any case, he comes off as childish and bitter. It’s all filtered through the idea that success means being a multimillionaire, and everyone else is a failure. His perspective seems limited to finance and academics in that sphere.

Maryam Mirzakhani the High IQ fields medallist lady died from cancer microsoft co founder had cancer 3 times intelligence has nothing to do with cancer occurence

I just see more personal liberty at the high end and therefore more variance in possible outcomes.

That's a plausible mechanism, within modern liberal society anyway, supporting Taleb's claim:

> ... when they say "IQ works well between 70 and 130" it means: "IQ works well between 0 and ~85, maybe"

And why does higher variance imply a shifted mean?

If many millionaires have IQs around 100, & 58 y.o. back office clercs at Goldman Sachs or elsewhere an IQ of 155 (true example), clearly the measurement is less informative than claimed.

it is important to distinguish the macro from the micro point of view.

From the micro point of view, a talented individual has a greater a priori probability to reach a high level of success than a moderately gifted one.

On the other hand, from the macro point of view of the entire society, the probability to find moderately gifted individuals at the top levels of success is greater than that of finding there very talented ones, because moderately gifted people are much more numerous and, with the help of luck, have - globally - a statistical advantage to reach a great success, in spite of their lower individual a priori probability.

Stripping the article of the author (whom I don’t actually know much about other than he seems to have showed up next to Nate Silver at some point), I found this “thread” to be a bunch of personal anecdotes and “intelligent looking formulas and stuff” taken out of context to support the general conclusion that IQ is a bad metric for intelligence, as Taleb would know because he clearly has a very high IQ (note: this is something that he actually brings up as someone else saying about him, to give him credibility?). While I am not opposed to the position he takes, I did not understand the argument he is making the slightest. Could someone explain to me why this is actually legit, rather than what to me looks dangerously close to pseudoscientific rambling?

It's not pseudoscientific buddy completely legitimate

BTW r u a grad student at Cornell ?

Part of the challenge with measuring stuff is we usually stop when we have a single measurement. IQ is a repeatable thing but the problem - to my naive self - is that its called intelligence quotient and the idea of giving it a single measurement is ridiculous as there are more factors than one.

Intelligence is probably going to be a maximum within the system youre measuring against. Maybe high IQ is great for researchers and professors, but not for investors, or business folks.

This is a classic discussion in the intelligence literature. For example, the cattell-horn-carroll theory[1]. Usually meauring general intelligence involves measures along a bunch of different problem domains.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattell–Horn–Carroll_theory

Oh neat! Id never heard of that before.

Taleb. Love him, hate him. Always a lot of controversy.

I like him quite a lot somehow, and there's clearly a good amount of genius in him, although sometimes there are certain positions and affirmations that feel less so (to me at least).

For example, his critique of the growing inequality in the world [0] [1] amounts to pointing at dynamic inequality, not static one. This one never convinced me so far.

To be clear: I fully understand his point; I simply disagree, especially while living in San Francisco and witnessing homeless people every day, walking next to VC multimillionaires.

Anyone able to convince me?

[0]: https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/892351059615789057?lang=e...

[1]: https://medium.com/incerto/inequality-and-skin-in-the-game-d...

Piketty argues for a wealth tax. Taking skin in the game seriously we see that for Taleb, a %1 er and his circle, such a tax would threaten a great deal of skin indeed. Such essays by Taleb are just an auto defense mechanism driven by self interest.

how do you fully understand his point?

i find taleb to be frustratingly incomplete. he likes to play with words but doesn’t string enough material ones together to complete an idea.

yes, i can buy that dynamic and static inequality can be different (e.g., dynamic and static stability in mechanics is different) but he doesn’t really say what he means by that.

or maybe he’s so enamoured with words snd erudition that i get bored long before he finishes the explanation?

I like Taleb's philosophy that he unlike most successful people, downplays the role of hard work and rationality for success and attributes most things to what we call luck and chance. Being a wall street trader, short seller, etc... may require this kind of mentality since all rules and conventions are broken every day and having a 160-IQ in this arena will be even more harmful than useful if you use logic and science for every decision. However, I don't really understand his disdain for academia and theoretical knowledge, his philosophy won't get him anywhere where strict and disciplined logic is needed, the kind of logic that actually advanced the civilization not the one he used to make money off his bets from pointless stock charts

When someone asks me a question in real life I don’t focus on “Why”. I focus on “How” (can I help them).

Most arguments down the thread seem just as moot to me, but then again, I’m probably not smart enough for a Twitter IQ thread.

Nobody's smart enough for a Taleb thread on any topic.

It's weird. Even though I agree with probably 80% of what Taleb is trying to say, he's just such a condescending prick about it that I STILL want to throw rocks at him to make him shut up.

I'm not saying I agree with burning Galileo at the stake, but reading Taleb and knowing how Galileo conducted himself. . . I understand.

That's his schtick. It's how he remains part of the conversation. If he had more than three ideas ("Mandelbrotness", barbell strategy, skin in the game) to bring to the table, he wouldn't be hammering screwdrivers through walls.

I got two ideas from that writing: - Is not a good idea to take a single dimensional indicator for a multidimensional capability. I suppose that know about IQs can discuss about that. - That having a high IQ is not a so great predictor on how well you will solve a real world problem. If we define "real world problems" the ones with feedback loops, plenty of noise, and known and unknown unknowns (his field of work) then he may have a point. But that is a subset of the real world problems, and anyway you may have to solve ideal world problems too.

The fact that some people can’t survive in the market, and other people don’t [even participate], meshes well with his “simple verbal test”: it only works if your subject is playing along. Street smarts are earned, granted. But IQ is not a measure of how many toys you die with. If the test is market survival, anyone who retires is a genius.

I enjoyed reading this thread this morning. Makes some salient points, that IQ is correlated with success in a specific area (physics/academia).

This reads like a desperate rant by someone who scored poorly on an IQ test and took it personally.

Of course, if you submit a piece supporting any other take on these matters, it may not make it on HN.

FOR THE RECORD,

Financial crashes are not "black swan" events. I've never seen a black swan in my life, but I've seen two or three financial crashes. As far as I can tell, Taleb is just a memer.

His degeneration of late is hopefully cluing people in, though the compulsion to substitute memes for thought will continue. Hey, maybe that's what IQ is, a person's likeliness to think instead of resorting to memes? Maybe that's why Taleb hates it?

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