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Ugh ok, another 'IQ is worthless but I have no alternative' article. What's the point?
Do you need an alternative to criticise a measure? The alternative is to place less emphasis on IQ tests and focus on other qualities.
I have no way to navigate this, I've heard psychologists claim that IQ is the most well proven concept in the social sciences. Now this guy comes along saying the complete opposite. Anyone have any advice on how to weight this up and figure out what the truth is?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The smartest people I've known almost never come across as smart when interacting with them. Perhaps the most easily observed indicator of smarts is humility. The learned learn.
Could you expand with examples?
When your humble you are curious to learn from others, because you know you don’t know everything and separately you know that almost anyone can teach you something important if you just listen. I think one indicator of humility is empathy in a sense trying to put yourself in their shoes emotionally. A big part of humility when it comes to casual debate is understanding the argument of who your conversing with and finding common ground so that you can relate. In my religion humility is often related in different terminology as “an open heart and mind” where the opposite pride is described as being of “a closed heart and mind”. So, that shows you that it has both a feeling and thinking aspect as described above. Honestly I feel if people were truly and fully humble then we wouldn’t have as much toxicity in online debate like there is spread all across my Facebook feed and in other chat streams all across the internet heck we might even learn a lot more from it too.
By the way one thing humility is not is thinking less of yourself as too often people might think. You can be confident and humble.
In conclusion, humility is a catalyst for learning whereas pride (in this context) just helps you stay where you’re at and stop progressing to further knowledge which may even lead to degradation of knowledge. Of course it’s not binary there is a continuum.
See "G factor"[1]. There's a strong correlation between various metrics of "types of intelligence".
An IQ score itself is an average of subtest scores that measure various abilities related to intelligence. So you could have some really high scores for certain abilities (e.g. executive functioning - ability to plan ahead) and some really low scores (e.g. spatial reasoning - understanding three dimensional space) and come out as average. Or you could have a really low score in a certain ability while having average scores in others and come out as below average.
Additionally, some test scores can change based on whether they're timed or not. So you could have certain abilities that are above average, but when timed, come out as average or below.
Notably, IQ tests DO NOT test for creativity nor emotional intelligence.
The problem with judging others by their IQ score is that you throw away their strengths by looking at a single score. Some of my abilities are above average and that could be useful to society. I certainly think creativity, emotional intelligence and other abilities IQ tests neglect are relevant to society as well.
For me, my IQ has ranged anywhere from 87 to 117 and this may be due to ADHD. The instability of the score doesn't give me much faith in its usefulness, nor has my intelligence seemed to affect my career as a software engineer (I've had plenty of success in my decade long career). It has however reliably demonstrated I have ADHD for schools and health insurance purposes, and that's really its primary usefulness.
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,…
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.
On his analysis, he has a nice argument but he's outright wrong about some of it. They're discovering more everyday about how advanced 'tribal Europe' really was. From the Vikings having more advanced societies than initially thought, back to the Celts when the Romans actually started to fear the Gauls and decided to stop their advances before they became so organized they also had centralized government. The planning ahead required for survival in northern Europe alone greatly increases the chance of evolving a higher minimum IQ vs more congenial conditions where little to no planning is required.
Sometimes truth is inconvenient. I would defend IQ. It's real, and it does matter. What I would say is that in my years, I've learned that it is definitely not the most important attribute. It may not even be the second most important attribute.
A cooperative nature is more important than IQ. What use is a highly intelligent person who won't cooperate with others or interact? Einstein without the willingness to collaborate with society overall is useless. Maybe even a nightmare if he's beyond uncooperative and a malevolent genius. A very uncooperative stupid person could potentially be a big problem too.
If I'm ever picking people to be on my team for a zombie apocalypse, or even just managing a modern society today, I'll take someone with a cooperative nature and little regard for their IQ.
In sum, I would agree with Taleb that IQ can potentially be a swindle, but wouldn't agree with the basis of his argument. IQ is an objective measurement of intelligence, but you don't really need to reach so hard as he did to disqualify the importance of IQ. It's obvious as to why it's secondary to other factors.
reading the Wikipedia article, it says that scientific consensus among surveyed psychologists and educational researchers is that IQ is a valid and accurate mesaure of the important components of intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Reliabil... If you're going to challenge that scientific consensus you better have something better to bring to the table than "it's being used by racists" and…
Consensus is a fundamentally social mechanism, and while scientific consensus ought to be as close to factual as possible, the people forming the consensus are potentially prone to exploitation via outside social forces.
The title doesn't seem to match up with the article. The point seems to be that IQ is good at predicting intellectual deficits at the low end but bad at predicting 'success' above that; further it indicates that IQ is mis-used in this range. This doesn't seem to indicate that IQ is 'pseudoscience', just that it's a misused statistic. Not a real shocker there, almost every statistic is misused by some group.
Taleb is saying that if IQs above 100 have no predictive power, then what’s the point in measuring them? It would be like taking a BuzzFeed quiz that tells me my Hogwarts house: a real measurement yielding a reproducible result, sure, but a pointless one and any use of it beyond “Huh, that’s interesting” would be pseudoscience.
The whole point of IQ tests is not to identify or rank people who score above 100. The whole point is to identify those who fall well below 100,because that's actually a disability.
Look at it this way: some amusement parks feature amusement rides that are only safe to ride if riders can be kept safe by the safety equipment. One way to ensure safety requirements are met is to admit only people taller than a predefined height. That means that a specific metric (height) is used to pick who is able from those who are not. However, that does not mean taller people are better at riding that specific ride, let alone any attraction.
The IQ concept serves the same purpose. Those with a low IQ simply struggle to perform some tasks, but above a fuzzy threshold IQ is a meaningless metric to evaluate or predict success.