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Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

Frankly, I'm incredibly disappointed in Taleb's recent writing. This article is one of many where the actual point being made is buried beneath unnecessary and divisive ad-hominem attacks.

Does the caption "Mensa members: typically high “IQ” losers in Birkenstocks." usefully contribute to a serious, scholarly conversation on IQ? Is it reasonable or fair-minded to immediately tar opponents to your argument as racists, eugenicists and "psychometry peddlers looking for suckers"?

I am uninterested in engaging with the substance of Taleb's arguments here, because the style is so needlessly vicious. I won't be buying Taleb's next book, because I don't want to endorse this kind of debasement of the public dialogue.

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The substance isn't much better than the style.

He makes substantial claims like IQ is not predictive of performance above 100 which in and of itself could be a whole article. And then just assumes the reader will take his word for it, even though there is a mountain of evidence to the contrary.

>mountain of evidence to the contrary. [citation needed]

https://www.lsac.org/lsat

Here's 10.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Social_c...

Corporations and schools are biased toward IQs in the 115-125 range, so it is likely predictive of advancement. On the other hand, even higher IQs are associated with greater earnings.

Corporations (and schools) are also biased toward Te users (ENTJ, ESTJ, INTJ, and ISTJ) and extrovert + judger types (ENTJ, ESTJ, ENFJ, and ESFJ).

Those personality types are a lot more pseudo-scientific than IQ

Yes, the story of Myers-Briggs is really amazing -- how a system developed by two people with no training in psychology just invented a system with no more basis than astrology and convinced the corporate world to use it. There was a recent book "The Personality Brokers" by Merve Emre that tells the story.

The jung/MB tests are probably the most unscientific drivel that is in wide use. It is insulting to human intelligence that is given any significance at all.

I've often wondered about this, because I can't see how simple categorisation across 4 axis can be either scientific or unscientific. It's just categorisation, it doesn't make predictions.

I enjoy reading the different type descriptions, unlike horoscopes (which are basically barnum phrases) they do seem to describe me with a high degree of accuracy.

Then again, I stopped at this point, and never dived deeper into all that Jungian shadow self stuff which I fully accept started to sound like pseudo-scientific drivel.

> I can't see how simple categorisation across 4 axis can be either scientific or unscientific.

If you pick the axis on scientific criteria, then it can be scientific. If you just make them up, then it's not. Myers-Briggs is the latter.

>It's just categorisation, it doesn't make predictions.

If it doesn't make predictions, it isn't science.

The Big Five model of personality is reasonably scientific, because it has some predictive power. If you give someone a standardised test to measure their Big Five traits, you can make better-than-chance predictions about their behaviour in the real world. If they're high on openness to experience, they're more likely to vote Democrat. If they're low on agreeableness and conscientiousness, they're more likely to have a criminal record. The MBTI has a tiny little bit of predictive power, but it's grossly inferior to most psychometric instruments with similar aims.

IMO the biggest problem with the MBTI is that it presupposes false dichotomies. Most psychological traits are approximately normally distributed, with most people being somewhere near the average. It makes no sense to categorise people as either "Thinking" or "Feeling" while excluding the middle. Knowing that someone is ESTJ or ISFP tells me almost nothing about them; they might be almost completely average on every domain, or they might be extreme on one of them. This false dichotomy also gives the MBTI very poor reliability - someone who is very slightly above average on extraversion might be slightly below average next week or next month.

> If it doesn't make predictions, it isn't science.

This was kind of my point, if it's not science, criticising it as unscientific doesn't seem to be a particularly meaningful activity.

One has to consider how MBTI is used by people in the real world, I've come across two scenarios in my own life:

1) A business does it during some form of team day or off-site. The main purpose is to highlight that people think/operate in different ways and have different value, and an effective team is sensitive to this and works within it rather than trying to fight it. My comment is that the _specifics_ are kind of irrelevant, as long as the message that people are different is communicated effectively.

2) People use it in their personal lives as a form of reassurance, they've found something that they feel describes themselves and perhaps is useful in explaining themselves to others. This won't happen for the people who are close to the centre of the various axis, because they'll feel that more than one of the "types" could apply to them. But for the people who are closer to the extremes (like myself) find them to be rather accurate. And we're the people who'll find value in it. So my comment here is simply that if someone thinks their MBTI type is meaningful, it probably is -- because for the purposes they care about (how do I explain myself to others, or similar), it actually is pretty helpful.

Maybe the high IQ-ers just work harder because there’s higher expectation?

Its true that IQ is only one of many important factors that lead to success. However IQ on its own turns out to be an excellent predictor of success and also happens to be easy to measure. Most other traits are extremely difficult to quantify.

But, how does one remove the bias introduced by the subject (and their social group) knowing of their high IQ score?

For an objective analysis, wouldn’t some of the low-IQ kids have to believe they are high-IQ and vice versa? That is, how much does the act of labelling someone low or high IQ influence their results?

Good question. I suppose to test that you would have to give "placebo" scores to some people to see what impact knowing your score has - if any.

At 115-125, there is an edge over other students. On the other hand, it's not strong enough for others to notice. Also, the typical curriculum is challenging enough to prevent boredom. Then a bias appears to have been institutionalized, as according to corporations, 115-125 equals capable enough to do the job + not smart enough to synthesize (ie, parrot).

Yes, he is correct. IQ is ability to adapt yourself to an environment and not performance.

In an environment where people with higher performance will be killed, higher IQ people will still surive.

For every one person who would rather have a scholarly debate about anything, there are at least a hundred who want some dessert reading, or want to be entertained, or want to get in a fight. A lot of well-respected authors distinguished themselves by not being boring.

I usually use a dry tone on HN because it's a place that's particularly prone to petty pretendo-debate-club arguments, and being boring reduces the chances of getting caught in one of those, which I don't enjoy. But the more entertaining personalities here get a lot more attention.

And fwiw his description of Mensans doesn't seem totally off the mark.

It's funny. Normally I place a high value on civility and decency in discourse.

But I don't have any problem with this style of communication from Taleb.

I think it's because I've read/heard enough of his material over many years, and I understand the game he's playing.

He's not cruel, and he means no harm to people personally. Indeed he cares a lot about the general wellbeing of society and individuals, about avoidance of violence, poverty, oppression etc.

His whole approach designed to cut through bullshit and seek the truth.

That means being ruthless in breaking down the mechanisms people use to hide bullshit or smuggle it into important discussions - e.g., status/authority signals like titles, honorifics, academic/professional qualifications, academic processes, group memberships like Mensa, corporate/academic jargon, and politeness/courtesy when it's used to subdue people's efforts to seek truth.

His abrasive style is also a test: people who care about truth will not be offended, as they will welcome their ideas being challenged and scrutinised, because they'll win either way; either they'll be proven right, or they'll be shown to be wrong and they'll learn something.

People who have something to hide will respond by getting offended at his tone, rather than simply defending/explaining their ideas on their merits.

Related to that, he's fine with people being rude to him; indeed he prefers it, and he hates it when people try to flatter him or build rapport with him, because he knows that's the first step to being bullshitted.

There have been times when he's been savage about issues I hold dear, and that's been uncomfortable. But it's been a signal that I've needed to keep working to understand those issues more deeply so they'd hold up to any scrutiny.

The guy is a fucking primadonna who has built a massive echo chamber around himself by simply ignoring everyone who disagrees with him. It’s pathetically juvenile.

> His whole approach designed to cut through bullshit and seek the truth.

This is not the problem, the problem is that most of what he is saying in this article is bullshit veiled behind enough low level math to fool the masses.

>His whole approach designed to cut through bullshit and seek the truth.

If that's the case, then why did he expend so many words on matters that were irrelevant to his core thesis? Why not just concisely set out the evidence demonstrating the inadequacy of IQ?

>People who have something to hide will respond by getting offended at his tone, rather than simply defending/explaining their ideas on their merits.

There is an overwhelming amount of information and opinion on the internet. Most of it is very bad. Winnowing it down requires some heuristics. The heuristic "do these words look like those of a careful and thoughtful person making a good-faith argument?" has served me well. I do often encounter bad ideas dressed up in faux erudition, but I very rarely encounter good ideas delivered with a string of irrelevant insults and ad-hominem attacks.

More broadly, being polite in your writing is a simple matter of neighbourliness. Causing upset or inflaming anger is occasionally necessary to pierce the veil of indifference, but we should do so only with great caution. There is already more than enough discord in the world without us adding to it. I see abundant evidence for the fact that civilisation is a fragile and precious thing, held together with the glue of civility. We should think twice before discarding the norms of social behaviour that most of us learned in kindergarten.

Yep, it's a heuristic I observe too.

But heuristics, by definition, are imprecise and subject to exceptions, and in my experience he's one of the exceptions.

> Causing upset or inflaming anger is occasionally necessary to pierce the veil of indifference, but we should do so only with great caution.

I think he does. He only attacks people who are powerful enough to be able to handle it.

And the stuff he talks about is important.

The way IQ testing is revered and misused arguably does great harm to many.

And the stuff he's been banging on about for years - the way governments, big corporate execs, academics and media insiders work together to benefit themselves at the expense of the powerless majority is important, and could well lead to another economic crisis in the next few years - is critically important.

That said, you don't have to listen to him, of course.

But it's worth examining if there's some deeper reason why you find his ideas unpalatable, beyond just tone and style.

My own motivation has been to pay attention to what he says, as he turns out to be right when it matters most, and by applying his ideas about things like stoicism and "anti-fragility", my life has vastly improved.

> The way IQ testing is revered and misused arguably does great harm to many.

The problem is that I observe the exact opposite in my environment. Take, for instance, hiring for jobs. People are often hired based on unspecified voodoo like bogus personality tests, years of education or the "feeling" you get about a person from a non-standardised interview, which are methods that have been shown to have a large amount of bias and are unreliable for predicting future job performance.

On the other hand, we have things that have been shown to have positive, moderate-to-high correlation with job performance, such as standardised interviews, standardised job task test (i.e. putting the person in a test situation mimicking the actual job) and IQ tests. In fact, Taleb himself supplies a figure showing this (https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/900/1*RlEAvb8KejpEBFWslw...) and half-relies on it to argue that "IQ measures the ability to be a good slave but ignores all of the other implications. Taken together, these tests are an even stronger predictor of job performance. It seems unwise to discard this knowledge based on the kind of emotional drivel that Taleb seems to be displaying here.

"He only attacks people who are powerful enough to be able to handle it." He was attacking people who politely participated in that Twitter exchange including me, an obscure college professor. Yes, knowing Taleb I wouldn't have challenged him unless I was ready to be insulted, but still I very much doubt that he looked me up to see how powerful or emotionally stable I was.

> His abrasive style is also a test: people who care about truth will not be offended, as they will welcome their ideas being challenged and scrutinised, because they'll win either way; either they'll be proven right, or they'll be shown to be wrong and they'll learn something.

Really? My mental heuristic is that the more aggressive and flowery language someone uses, the less they believe in the strength of their argument; they’re trying to erect barriers to discussion and debate

As I said in my reply to a sibling comment, heuristics, by definition, have exceptions. I also adhere to the heuristic you describe, but Taleb's the lead exception.

> His whole approach designed to cut through bullshit and seek the truth.

The ad hominem attacks (particularly the "losers in Birkenstocks" remark) in this essay are the exact opposite of that.

Comments like that are included for a kind of shock humour effect. It's mostly satirical and designed to get a rise out of people who will take it seriously and get defensive. But nobody would react if it didn't contain at least a grain of truth :)

Again, "shock humor" and satire are antithetical to "cutting through the bullshit".

It’s petty well established that the entire purpose of forms of humour like satire and charicature is to cut through bullshit.

Well then, Mr. Taleb needs to learn how to use satire constructively.

We started with what could have been an interesting discussion about the validity of IQ tests, and suddenly it turned into a passive-aggressive discussion about fashion.

Now the discussion spans multiple disjoint topics, several of which are emotionally charged. Any good points that might have been there are buried in, well, bullshit.

He knows what he's doing, and if trolling the likes of Stefan Molyneux were considered a worthy pursuit, which it is IMO, he seems to be doing great.

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1081309219377369088

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1081336627664961536

Everyone else would do well to be less defensive. Having a reasoned, sober debate about IQ is a worthy aim, but right now there are highly prominent and influential figures like Molyneux using IQ to justify some horrible ideological positions, and that's the fish Taleb is trying to fry.

Good on him, I say.

I'm inclined to agree with you.

> This article is one of many where the actual point being made is buried beneath unnecessary and divisive ad-hominem attacks.

This is consistent with his writing style though, at least since Antifragile. I had a hard time getting into Antifragile due to the constant, unending, and unnecessary ad-hominem attacks throughout the text.

Even worse, by "When someone asks you a question in the real world, you focus first on “why is he/she asking me that?”, [...] Only suckers don’t have that instinct." he pretty much offends everyone on the autism spectrum.

Which of his earlier writing did you enjoy? I’ve completely avoided anything of his since about the first 30 pages of The Black Swan.

Taleb is great. He's always been a crank.

It's his Twitter/Medium blog, he can write as he pleases.

And his book sales do fine, with or without you.

This is interestingly a point of his: what's 'rational' is what survives. Maybe arguments/discussion need emotional draw of some sort to be heard in the first place (in the 21st century). If a philosopher is arguing in a forest to no one, is he really arguing? Etc.

We've seen the same effect of stylistic changes in classical music even. In my city, in order to keep up ticket sales and actually get to play proper classical music, the local symphony has to do renditions of pop songs to occasionally draw a larger audience and boost ticket sales.

Maybe classical music is dying. Maybe dry academic discussions that nobody except academics read, are dying.

[Aside - if you want to argue that maybe the 21st century modern discourse sucks, I'm right there with you. Ditto for changing music tastes.]

It's OK, these things happen. Things change, as driven by the market of human interest and willingness to participate.

That's a non-sensical argument; it turns the question of intelligence into a question of popularity.

An idea that "survives" in the marketplace of ideas isn't per se rational or intelligent. Indeed, anti-science attitudes worldwide have enjoyed a great deal of popularity lately. Certainly anti-vax ideology is surviving just fine at the moment.

If Taleb's argument is that IQ tests are a "swindle" because they don't predict popularity, he's completely off his rocker.

Survival is the ultimate measure of rationality (as per Taleb).

This is a higher order intelligence than stale test taking, or complete trust in the medical establishment, for instance.

Low IQ is predictive of being mentally deficient. Average and above IQ is a predictor of... not much.

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