Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

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>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.

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