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Comment by jcranmer | Hacker News Reader

Even as someone who agreed in large part with the conclusion before coming to this article, I find this virtually unreadable. It's just so full of vindictiveness and pettiness that it loses sight of its argument, and the images and graphs it uses aren't particularly coherent in their framing.

> you're saying that people with an IQ of 60 are equally wealthy as those with an IQ of 110?

Actually, if I understand his point correctly, he's arguing that the test "correctly" identifies the low tail of intelligence (because they would fail at any task), but is pure noise for people of average or above-average intelligence.

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> ...but is pure noise for people of average or above-average intelligence.

Maybe not pure noise. He pointed out in many paragraphs that further to the right of the distribution you would find "nerds", salarymen, and other sorts of boring people that would never write such revolutionary medium articles as this one. People ill-adapted for "real life"; academics and their lot. Oh, and "suckers" who don't have the instinct, "why is he/she asking me that question?"

The impression I got from the article was not that Taleb believes that IQ is useless, but rather that all the ideal people are at the middle of the distribution. Too low and you're genuinely unintelligent. Too high and you're "in on it", one of those "lifeless bureaucrat" metrics-obsessed pocket-protector types.

My Google-fu is failing me, but I swear I've read before a quote from some business guy (I want to say Peter Drucker) that is similar to this: You don't want those with a 4.0 GPA because they will never think for themselves, and don't get those 2.0 GPA because they will just do enough to go by.

You have a point re: vindictiveness and pettiness. I clicked the link and immediately scrolled into the article failing to notice the author. After about 30 seconds I had the following reaction, “wait! Is this Taleb?” Despite the severe flaws in his prose, he makes some points that I think are worth considering. The chief one is that it’s kind of dumb to attempt a measure of total mental capacity. At best it will result in gross over generalization of the individual’s potential. So what’s the point if not to serve as a means for separating people into developmental tracks as early as possible. Put another way, IQ is simply another way people get evaluated not as individuals but as cogs in the machine. I rather like this critique of IQ and I’m appreciative for Taleb bringing it up (though I doubt he’s the first).

Two thoughts.

Firstly if that's his point, his conclusion should match. Saying there is "no correlation" is a reach.

Secondly, I'm not convinced I even believe that point. So is he saying that if I took an IQ test from nobel prize winners they would be equally distributed to a normal population sample (assuming a 100 minimum cutoff)?

Yes, in fact.

http://nautil.us/issue/65/in-plain-sight/your-iq-matters-les...

Sorry, I don't want to read that whole thing. Is there a linked journal article about IQs of nobel winners?

The article basically says when you look at a 1000 really smart 11 year olds you don't get any Nobel prize winners. Which is a pretty obvious straw man because the base rate of Nobel prize winners is 1 in a million, plus childhoold IQ doesn't perfectly correlate with adult IQ. For instance a group of children with an average IQ of 150 will have an average IQ of 130 as adults.

https://pumpkinperson.com/2015/07/26/anne-roes-study-of-extr...

Basically the average Nobel prize winners have IQ's in the 150's.

There were two future Nobel prize winners that were excluded from the group he studied because they didn't score high enough.

Who both also had very high iqs, just not quite high enough at the age of 11 to be included.

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