Prestigious black national merit finalist G-man (and others) wanted me to comment on Nassim’s Taleb’s recent tirade against IQ.
It’s amazing how much publicity this issue is getting in the HBD community. Taleb is famous for attacking mathematical models and for attacking “intellectuals”, so it was only a matter of time before he attacked IQ.
But because a lot of Taleb’s fans are high IQ people who love numbers, and thus love IQ, they may be shocked that their hero doesn’t share their enthusiasm.
Taleb writes:
“IQ” is a stale test meant to measure mental capacity but in fact mostly measures extreme unintelligence (learning difficulties), as well as, to a lesser extent, a form of intelligence, stripped of 2nd order effects. It is via negativa not via positiva. Designed for learning disabilities, it ends up selecting exam-takers, paper shufflers, obedient IYIs (intellectuals yet idiots), ill adapted for “real life”. The concept is poorly thought out mathematically (a severe flaw in correlation under fat tails, fails to properly deal with dimensionality, treats the mind as an instrument not a complex system)
Well he’s right that intelligence tests were originally created to identify the learning disabled, not the brilliant, and that the concept was not mathematically well thought out (IQ was originally measured in mental age units, ignoring the fact that the developmental trajectory is not linear, and that newborn babies do not have zero intelligence). However neither of these problems strike me as especially important, especially since IQ testers admit their tests are ordinal scales (or at best interval scales) and not absolute scales. Meanwhile the ceiling on IQ scales have since been extended to better measure giftedness.
But Taleb seems to think the flawed mathematical model of IQ tests is a severe problem under fat tails. I wish he would elaborate on this point. Modern IQ tests are forced to fit a bell curve and when the variable being correlated with IQ does not have a perfectly Gaussian distribution (i.e. income), one can either normalize the distribution as I did here, or one can take the logarithm of income.
But maybe I’m missing the point. Taleb is famous for writing about black swan events:
A black swan is an event or occurrence that deviates beyond what is normally expected of a situation and is extremely difficult to predict. Black swan events are typically random and unexpected.
So maybe Taleb is talking about all the times IQ predictions go wildly wrong, like when when Richard Feynman scores “only” 125 on an IQ test, despite being one of the greatest physicists of all time. Perhaps he’s saying these events are so unpredictable they can’t be foreseen from the correlation between IQ and achievement using the bivariate normal distribution and thus render IQ tests useless in some of the most important cases.
IQ enthusiasts will counter that Feynman’s IQ can easily be explained by the fact that the test may not have measured math ability, however this supports Taleb’s point that test’s fail to “to properly deal with dimensionality”.
Taleb also has a point when he says tests treat “the mind as an instrument not a complex system” if he means what I think he means. Even the best IQ tests like the WAIS measure cognitive abilities in isolation and your final score is just a composite of all your strengths and weaknesses. But in real life, intelligence is a dynamic system that maximizes strengths and minimizes weaknesses. On an IQ test, you’ll lose points for sucking at spatial ability no matter how brilliant you are verbally, but in real life, your spatial disability is irrelevant if you’re smart enough to avoid spatial situations.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m still a huge IQ enthusiast, but IQ testing has room for improvement.
Pumpkin Person 
My guess is that something went wrong in the administration of Feynman’s childhood IQ test, or he just blew it off. In a 2002 interview, Arthur Jensen said:
“I have had personal encounters with three Nobelists in science, including Feynman, who attended a lecture I gave at Cal Tech and later discussed it with me. He, like the other two Nobelists I’ve known (Francis Crick and William Shockley), not only came across as extremely sharp, especially in mathematical reasoning, but they were also rather obsessive about making sure they thoroughly understood the topic under immediate discussion. They at times transformed my verbal statements into graphical or mathematical forms and relationships. Two of these men knew each other very well and often discussed problems with each other. Each thought the other was very smart. I got a chance to test one of these Nobelists with Terman’s Concept Mastery Test, which was developed to test the Terman gifted group as adults, and he obtained an exceptionally high score even compared to the Terman group all with IQ>139 and a mean of 152.”
I’m almost positive he was referring to Feynman. Shockley said in a 1974 episode of Firing Line that he didn’t qualify for the Terman study and Crick doesn’t strike me as being THAT exceptionally smart.
Here’s the link to the entire interview:
Click to access Discussions%20of%20Genius%20-%20Interview%20with%20Arthur%20Jensen.pdf
It seems like crick to me. Wasbt he the person 10 years ago that did a mel gibson and stated publicly he believed that blacks were dumbet? This is something either a vety high or very low iq person would do (for differing reasons obviously).
I think that was Watson, but Crick said similar things back in the 60s and 70s:
https://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/01/francis-crick-james-watsons-partner-was.html
It very well might’ve been him. Feynman was never as interested in IQ as Crick was.
Considering he discovered DNA Id say so. I can’t list anything Feynman has done off the top of my head and I would be someone with a pretty good level of general knowledge. If I remember right, Feynman did a popular science tv programme. And now the 1 black with a PhD in astrophysics is doing the show, thus proving Crick wrong !!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA IN YOUR FACE RACIST.
Crick apparently had a 115 IQ.
IQ is kind of like lifting weights. It can tell you how strong you are but that’s about it. It’s not showing what physical factors are contributing to the success and the factors it does measure are extremely localized.
Intelligence as a concept needs a reworking. As well as the way we measure it.
I think the best test would be a genetic test. All the genes for intelligence should be identified. 1000 genes for intelligence have been identified but there could be a lot more. Also these genes need to be verified if they are the same for intelligence in all ethnicities. And if they are, IQ could be measured by determining the number of these genes a person has. As the number of these genes, could also play a huge role in determining brain size, connectome, brain composition. NPD, number of neurons in the cerebral cortex etc
I think more than IQ tests, a genetic IQ test result could have a bigger correlation with intelligence.
This doesnt nake any sense. Iq is an impression. Genetically testing for it is a bit like using physical measurements of a persons face t9 decide whether they are good looking or not.
phil people thats how plastic surgery is done.
”This doesnt nake any sense. Iq is an impression. Genetically testing for it is a bit like using physical measurements of a persons face t9 decide whether they are good looking or not.”
People are prone to be delusional or inacurate about their an others looks. So that would be cool. What you need to take into accountedge is that there is some variance in taste, so it would be much like an ”platos form”.
Genetic test tests for number of genes for intelligence, doesnt measure body measurements.It would be the best measure of intelligence. Ofcourse education level, nutrition quality, sleep quality, practice also influences ones ability, but i meant when all other factors are the same. When the exact same people are tested using all the above testing methods, genetic test would be the most accurate.
That was a reply to phil.
I think a good IQ test would use fMRI to measure parieto-frontal connectivity while doing a complex task (like studying calculus if one is a beginner to that, or solving a scenario involving both divergent and convergent thinking) and then somehow giving an “index” of “overall cognitive output / sophistication”.
Analogous areas might be rating the connectivity of digital networks, for instance. Or advanced financial measures from economic disciplines.
It still wouldn’t hit the full dimensionality of intelligence, but it would be better than what we currently have. You’d be able to say “person X is essentially doing Zmodem between their lobes at 9600 baud, while person Y is doing TCP/IP at DSL speed”.
Maybe im being naive, but why would IQ tests need to mensuren some Notion of ”Intelligence” when it could be considered an variable that causes variance in behaviour? G doesnt need to mean that you are acting more ”Intelligent” but that you are more likely to be able to do certain tasks in cetain environments. Im looking foward to Your future parts PP.
The math Olympiad test is the best counter-example : very poor on knowledge, very high on perspicacity, extremely high correlation on being a Field Medal, the further you can go on the tail. It’s an IQ test for math.
The 3 kids with a perfect score each year have done better than all Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Caltech, Chicago and Berkeley students admitted into college on a given year. 3 > 6 000.
I don’t see any objection to that. No street smart, no industriousness, no mentoring, not anything. Just 3 best scorer out of 600. And to a lesser extent, it’s the same for the 50 who get a gold medal. They take a third of the medal. 50 do as well as maybe 300K new sophomores studying math each year worldwide (a third of around 900K).
Well since there are no black math olympians it must be a racist competition in my view.
Yes but its perfectly adapted to Medal Fields where there is neither black. One can notice that girls do better at math olympiads than at Medal Fields (only 1) wich may mean they are less motivated or they are discriminated against.
There were 8 women perfect scorer out of 240 since the beginning of IMO, 1 in 30. For Medal Fields, it’s 1 in 64. The only Fields laureate was one of those 8. The % of perfect scorers who get a medal field is around 8%.
So it’s the abolsute predictive IQ test.
A math IQ test that predicts who will get a math medal seems a bit redundant to me, kind of like a chess tournament predicting who will be a chess champion or writing contest predicting who will be a great author.
If the IMO predicted success in politics or business or the arts, it would be more meaningful
A PhD in math has around 1 chance out of 10 000
to get the medal. And a math university professor around 1 in 1000.
No Pumpkin, it’s not redundant because the math problems are based on a very limited amount of knowledge (high school advanced math). And there is a world among this and mathematic research. It’s even wider than SAT to college or GMAT to MBA.
It’s like if you had a MCAT with the same level of biology, chemistry and physics, that was so g loaded on reasoning that it would predict future Nobel prizes in medicine.
So we have that in math but nobody is connecting the dots. On the contrary, IMO are criticized to be mental play without relationship to mathematic beauty and knowledge. That’s because it is a math « g » test. The most g loaded test.
Bruno,
Women as a percentage are more likely to study harder in high school and college. Also to win a fields medal one needs to be involved in math research after college. And also one needs to come up with novel big impactful solutions to math problems or problems where math can be applied.
In real world intelligence more women are smarter and creative than more men, but in academics its the other way round.
They are more likely to practice for longer time math problems for olympiads.
Its pretty amusing. I just read this long article about a state official in russia who recorded all his conversations with the secret police and put them on youtube. Its a great story. Lots of corruption and it makes russia seem like a mafia movie. But its sad that the people reading won’t know about the [redacted by pp, jan 7, 2019] that do the exact same sorts of things in the West. Arguably worse. They can print more of these insider stories on putin but I have no doubt life in Russia is better under putin than Rothschilds oligarch buddies (Economist is owned by Rothschild/Agnellis).
Another amusing thing to note is how the agnellis have ‘influenced’ all the referees in Serie A to support Juventus their club. I stopped wathcing italian football when I noticed it.
The game has higher levels of entropy in the West because the majority of the population in the west are totally unaware that a [redacted by pp, jan 7, 2019] exists. But in Russia even the dumbest serf is fully aware of who is in charge and who is not (i.e Putin and people ‘in’ with the FSB).
Russia is also a really goof example of why libertarianism is for mental retards.
The alt right people love Russia long time.
Not just the social policies either. But the economic ones (i.e. ayn rand type capitalism).
Russia is a good example of a country that may be poor and corrupt, but at least its not secretly colonised!
I would love to see the statistics on the number of russian children diagnosed with aspergers pre 1990s. And then in the Putin Wild West era. If you have autism in Russian society you will not survive (assuming that autism is genetically passed down and not something that goes wrong in the womb like downs syndrome).
The numbers would be meaningless because of different diagnostic and referral standards
A long time ago I had a ‘platonic form’ of the ‘average man’ that was pretty sympathetic. Im like Marx in that I believe in the proles. And I thought the problem was the way people were arranged, not the people in and of themselves. Now Im a lot more deterministic. Its the people that ‘decide’ the arrangement. In other words, Putin is a reflection of what the people in Russia will tolerate. Just like how dirty a city or town is is a reflection of their aesthetic preferences. One thing that is a big difference between Asian cities and Western cities is how dirty Asian cities are, but the asian cities have taller buildings and better public transport.
This theory doesnt hold for colonisations though.
Which is most countries.
East asia got cleaner streets. Kigali is an city were the government told Rwandan barbarians to clean their streets, and it succeeded.
Thinking mouse does not even know how many countries are on the planet without google-ing up the answer. Yet claims most like he knows what hes talking about
There is not an official number of that value. I would have guessed 254, and there’s 249 areas with iso codes. There’s like 200 confirmed states that are commonly recognized.
“I would have guessed 254” “Would have” So you did look up the answer as soon as you read my comment. Focus more on actually Thinking, mouse and not just googling.
I noticed my writing wasnt as formal as it tends to be but I imagined readers would understand that I meant that it was my initial guess. I mean how would I guess wrong if I had the right awnser right Infront of me (according to your interpretation)?
How would I know I would do it if I hadn’t already done it earlier when pressed in an similar scenario (being asked it with no awnser in sight)?
“Focus more on actually thinking”
I knew there was no official definition on nationhood so I thought outside of the box there.
How would one think that awnser through without any data? That like you wanting me to think how many teeth an specific lizard species has without any previous knowledge. I guess you mean in general, But I do think often.
What is your first language?
writing your responses in your native language and then under in English would help. i’ll use a translator.
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/jan/07/kevin-spacey-indecent-assault-charge-nantucket-court
WOW. Kevin Spacey in court for groping a kid. I actually like Kevin Spacey’s work as an actor.
Maybe he caught the kids from the Children’s Online Daycare…
Hello Pumpkin, I am new here. I have a question about the current SAT (2016-present). Is there any correlation between this test and IQ, especially since there has been a change in content?
I’m sure the current SAT has a decent correlation with IQ because the college board is not going to risk their reputation by releasing a test that doesn’t predict GPA, and it’s very hard to predict GPA without also predicting IQ. Of course changes to the scale mean that a new formula is required to convert current SAT scores to IQ.
By decent, what would you guess the correlation to be? Is it possible for you to construct a new formula for SAT scores to IQ?
Also, if one takes a PSAT test earlier than is needed (i.e. taking the PSAT in ninth grade when the test is meant for eleventh graders), is there still a regression when moving to official IQ tests, especially since the students here aren’t being selected for their SAT scores by universities?
Responding, answering…
It’s weird not to see an IQ estimation of Mark Zuckerberg, given that we know many interesting data about him (1600 SAT score post-1995, Harvard undergraduate student, Jewish, youngest billionaire in his time, etc.)
It would be a delight to see a post about him.
You need a very high IQ to swindle a project away from its rightful owners, simply because you customized the code and added a few things.
Yes, not to mention he did it without long-term sacrifices to his public reputation.
Billy,
Did you ever receive your RAIT results? Just curious as you provided a lot of interesting information about the test in an older post
Do you have a source for the 1600 SAT?
I’ll try to find it, I don’t remember where I read about that.
Nevermind, I saw it in the movie “Social Network” which is unreliable. Though people on the internet consistently say that he scored 1590/1600 or 1600/ without citing sources.
I’ve never seen a source for it other than that movie.
Tattttttttttthhhhhhhhhhhhh rattthhhhhhhhhhhitttttttttthhhhhhhh
So where’s part 2?
I have tried twitter but when I post a comment, I get instantly blocked by the people I like Richard Brody, Nicholas Taleb and 3 others.
Generally, I just point to a technical or logical problem. I am not in the business of trolling or senseless polemia so either my comments look dumbs or threatening or irritating ….
i have pulled out of Twitter because it’s a bit sad for me to see I lack the social skills. I may be in a worse category than our beloved Kitty in that respect.
They blocked you because you are seen as being a very arrogant and bossy person wit your comments.
It’s difficult to be more arrogant and bossy than Taleb ? And I didn’t express a personal opinion. It’s more a technical thing. But maybe you are right. Splendor veritatis 😂
Some highly smart people are too much evolved, when evolution happen step by step. All people have sort of individual variation in their intelligence sectors, highly smart people too, but their variation tend to be even higher exactly because they have more stuff to reach. And because higher intelligence is a novel trait so it’s more on variability and chances to ”error’, some more reative, others more absolute, than a lower level because novel traits are in more variability to be selected ”by nature”.
An interesting question about « g » that Taleb may have started – I have been talking about here a while ago – would be to know if it’s perfect measure would be normal, log-normal or exponential function.
(1) For example stature or weight are normal. Almost every adult male stands between 80cm and 240cm and between 30kg and 300kh.
(2) But for the vision, the number of colours one is able to see, or the distance, differences are more log-normal, because you have to express it in terms of thousands
(3) Wealth, if you consider all type of countries, would have to consider differences expressed by millions.
We now are able to evaluate vocabulary size and differences are quite small. It’s extremely rare to get less than 5k words in mother language and even rarer to get more than 150k. So it’s really something more like height and stature than like vision.
As vocabulary test correlate quite well with « g » , I don’t think it’s possible that « g » would belong to (3) category. So the hypothesis of doubling mental capacity every 5 IQ points, wich would make a 1M difference between a 60IQ person and 160 seems a bit extreme. My guess it’s that it is in the (2) category where the differences go by multiple of 10-10k among most people. Then forcing the test into a log-normal distribution to expand the tails would make probably more sense.
But psychométrician should work on the measurement question more.
Santo I was reading in the Economist how the new Brazil president is popular for bashing gays. He seems like an even more traditionally rightwing person than Trump. More like the Philippennes president Duterte.
I always thought Brazil was sexually more ‘liberal’ than even the West so this is a cause of concern to me.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-27/gays-for-bolsonaro-why-many-will-overlook-his-homophobic-rants
This article says Bolsinaro said he would ‘rather have a dead son than a gay son’.
My experience is that it’s a very hypocritical society.
In practice, they are very sexual and luxurious. In theory, they are very prejudiced against all forms of sex outside wedlock. During Vatican II council, the Brazilian bishops were by far the most conservatives and even counter-revolutionary. Before this new pope election, they used to have their parishioners kneel and kiss their bishop ring (both in private and in public).
Brazil embody the very hypocritical nature of christianism. I don’t know about irish and polish people but mediterranean catholics and in Murrica latrina people tend to be both quite sensual and also conservative, with a lot of genuine conservative [boring] people.
Did you vote for him?
I am French philo. I spend some holidays in Ipanema. I don’t vote there 😂
Never, i believed Ciro [the Bernie Sanders here] would win the election but majority of brazilian leftists choose Haddad [the Hillary Pinton here] and yes, he loose.
Bozonaro is a zionist, a parasitic sociopath of (((alt right))).
Yup, Brazil is very heteregeneous on personality and civilization levels, just like a combination of Spain, and in some subgroups, Belgium, with places which resemble Central Africa or any other fake african nation-state. But, because this there are places where this virulent criminality, not just against homos, is higher, of course. Surprinsingly southern states, the whitest, are those with highest levels of domestic violence, namely against women. Maybe, they have better data than northern states, but it’s surprinsing that southern states already have higher rates than in the southeastern states.
Bozonaro is basically the avg brazilian man in the presidency.
https://brasil.elpais.com/brasil/2019/01/02/opinion/1546450311_448043.html
Translate this if you want, very good article.
Are you controlling for race? Southern states have more blacks
Southern states of Brazil!!
Saw the UN sec general say that countries need to increase immigration to match ‘demographic realities’.
Was thinking he should personally be forced to pay for the extra policing, healthcare, pension, welfare, and education costs of immigrants right from his bank account.
Made a comment on chateau heartiste who seems to be really hyped about bezos texts to his illicit lover leaking onto the internet. Anyway, the observation was that in order to be really really rich in the West you either have to be an inheritance case, a psychopath, marry into it (rare for men) or be a slightily or fully aspy computer/math nerd.
If you went through the forbes list of publicly known billionaires, most would fall under those 4 categories I bet.
Just goes to show how being rich is a type of poisoned chalice.
You ungrateful ape. The entire modern world was built by what you would call “aspies”.
Phil wants aspires to be indentured servants to toll the land so that he can play assassins creed and read useless novels. He also likes Indians becuase he’s into more round phenotypes as opposed to the very gracile East Asians and Sami. He really just wants the british empires Victorian era back becuase he thinks that creativity + material resources is the ultimate good. Even though he cant deinfe them sufficiently to be sustainable within an norms of reaction perpective lol. The reason he likes those things is becuase its an ad-hoc way of hating on non-whites and becuase its something that reflects comtemporary affairs, ignoring or obfuscating East Asian history. Empathy is just an means to reach the afformentioned things especially as it correlates by coincidence amongst nordics. He likes leftism becuase its better economically and becuase hes an bad worker.
Your sentences dont always make sense mouse. You should probably type them into google translate from your own native language.
I like leftism when or if this works because i dislike to be exploited by son of bitches parasites.
TM,
I. doubt philosopher likes Indians . He lampooned them.
Pill hate aspies builders of civilization but love sociopaths, those who destroy or distort possible human existential wellbeing maximization…
hearshite is sociopath too.
There are ”two” broader types of thinkers: specific and holistic. And ”two” broader types of cognitivists/perceptuals: specialists and generalists.
On avg, majority of ”high IQ” people is:
specific on thinker
And generalist on cognitivist.
The so-called ”intellectual yet idiot” would be those with this profile.
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