Taleb dunking on IQ “research” at length. Technically a seriouspost I guess.
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This is good:
Take the sequence {1,2,3,4,x}. What should x be? Only someone who is clueless about induction would answer 5 as if it were the only answer (see Goodman’s problem in a philosophy textbook or ask your closest Fat Tony) [Note: We can also apply here Wittgenstein’s rule-following problem, which states that any of an infinite number of functions is compatible with any finite sequence. Source: Paul Bogossian]. Not only clueless, but obedient enough to want to think in a certain way.
Also this:
If, as psychologists show, 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. Probability and statistics confuse fools.
And:
If someone came up w/a numerical“Well Being Quotient” WBQ or “Sleep Quotient”, SQ, trying to mimic temperature or a physical quantity, you’d find it absurd. But put enough academics w/physics envy and race hatred on it and it will become an official measure.
Unlucky 10000: There is an EQ, or emotional quotient, and I was given an EQ test in high school (like age 17-18, don’t remember exactly). Fortunately, it was just done for fun by a lone teacher, but I could see it becoming popular in a future school system.
Testing EQ would probably be opposed as “woke” by conservative parents in the school district.
Nah, they’re okay with it because it reinforces their belief that a person is either high-empathy or low-empathy, with higher EQ being better. In general, conservatives love standardized tests and grades, because it grants the appearance of merit, which is essential for meritocracy.
This shit is just as bad, frankly. The quest to quantify and then rank All The Things is inherently dangerous.
I’ll go one further: “intelligence” as conceived by “IQ” is a mostly meaningless concept and the word, when used in everyday English, mostly just means “agrees with me”
Side note, I know Taleb is widely appreciated, but man this is some badly written stuff. Is all his stuff like this? I realize blog post != book, but c’mon, some pride in craftmanship is in order.
yes, way too much of it is. Taleb is extremely smart, but nobody is as smart as Taleb thinks he is.
High-end stats is kind of Taleb’s thing, so he gets to be as insufferable as he likes dunking on IQiots imo.
Yeah, he needs an editor. But the relentless dunking on IQiots is worth the verbiage imo.
Smart people talk about ideas or hobbies or whatever it is they’re focused on.
Dumb people talk about their IQ and how it means whatever half baked conclusions they decide to jump to.
It was disappointing to see Veritasium not applying much critical analysis to IQ testing in his video.
He really should of downplayed it’s significance more.
I don’t even want to watch that video because I know I’m going to get annoyed by it. Veritasium’s video on self-driving cars was so awful, it was enough for me to just sort them into the Sketchy Pop-Sci YouTube Channels bucket for good. I’ve heard that their videos on electricity and that one physics bet were also pretty shaky.
What books(ideally books pls) would you guys recommend to anyone caught up in IQ stuff? Especially for people outside the US? Ignore if wrong place to ask this, my bad there.
Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man is always a good place to start.
Will find a copy, thank you!
IQ is a relatively recent construct.
My father (b. 1913) was one of the children chosen to calibrate the Stanford Binet IQ test after it moved from Europe to Stanford University.
Having a high IQ didn’t make much difference for an alcoholic manic depressive attorney who could insult you in English, French, German, and Arabic.
He became an embezzler who lost everything and ended up dying in my one-year-old daughter’s bedroom after his last wife threw him out.
A few days before he died, he seemed to confess to murdering his first wife.
IQ may predict other things than it was designed for.
Wtf? When has IQ been purported to be a measure of how well adjusted some is.
it hasn’t but it has been promoted as a predictor of success in education, work and life. The Bell Curve famously claimed that higher IQ people were more likely to finish education, stay in work, stay out of prison and stay married.
