Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nassim Taleb on why IQ is baloney

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 52 posts

Re: Nassim Taleb on why IQ is baloney

#31

Post by tyingq »

wmil wrote: post #22
tyingq wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in the US military, and they used something called an ASVAB test to check your suitability for various jobs. It's one of the few skills tests I've encountered that seemed both reasonably accurate and useful. I'd much rather see the results of that for a potential job hire than I would want to see their SAT scores, IQ, etc.

The ASVAB effectively is an IQ test. There's more of a breakdown than other tests, but you can calculate IQ from it. The SAT isn't considered a proper IQ test.

The breakdown is what was useful. Mechanical aptitude separate from other concepts, for example.

Re: Nassim Taleb on why IQ is baloney

#32

Post by PavlovsCat »

late2part wrote: post #24
PavlovsCat wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took an IQ test once, when I was 17. It was a sunny day in February, I was well rested, had nice breakfast and even managed to get a sneaky toke while my mother was in the shower. I prepared by singing to the radio in the car. It took a few hours and I got the results on another day, so it was a "real IQ test", though I'd have to look up the exact type. But it doesn't matter anyway. I scored 142 that day, and there…

most sources suggest that Schumacher said this quote, not Einstein. http://nanoscale.blogspot.com/2007/03/quote-verification.htm...

https://books.google.de/books?id=oA0IAQAAIAAJ&q="more+violen...

Thanks, and from that snippet I can tell he probably also said many other things that are true and still unheeded.

We will perish sooner than those things will stop being true.

Re: Nassim Taleb on why IQ is baloney

#33

Post by traderjane »

whoisnnamdi wrote: post #29

Think it should be kept in mind that what Taleb is arguing here is the limited usefulness of IQ in predicting success above a certain IQ level, let’s say the mean. He 100% acknowledges its usefulness for predicting success of lower IQ persons. He mainly just wants to point out that any other measure that was as bad at predicting higher levels of performance as IQ is would not be held in nearly as high regard. IQ ther…

In my view the interesting part of IQ is not merely in its ability to predict human performance in areas where we expect intelligence to matter, but also in its underlying claim that there is even such a thing as a general intelligence (g), as opposed to bundles of domain-specific abilities.

Re: Nassim Taleb on why IQ is baloney

#34

Post by iguy »

wmil wrote: post #20
Knufen wrote: post #5

Disclaimer: Former Mensa member From personal experience it appears that high IQ is a horrible measure of success. On the other hand when you combine high IQ with discipline you can come very far. With all that being said I wish Nassim would provide some actual data instead of anecdotes.

The problem with discussing IQ is that people like to focus on the performance of very high IQ individuals where it's predictive power is weakest. But it's very strong in other areas. For instance say you have two groups of woodworkers, one group has an average IQ of 90 and another group has an average IQ of 100. It's a smart bet that the 100 group has more (total) fingers. "What can we do to help people with 90 IQs…

It's true that some tests give little information about the top end of the range -- if your goal is to see whether Joe is smart enough to be a GI or not, then you're wasting everyone's time if you try to separate the top 0.1% from the top 1%, so you don't.

But it's not true that measurable difference stop mattering. I'm lazy to find exact links but the big study to look up here is SMPY, https://my.vanderbilt.edu/smpy/ .

Part of the reason people are wrong about this is that, in many circumstances, they are used to observing a group which has already been selected on some finer measure. The sporting analogy is height in basketball, which is enormously beneficial... some large fraction of the world's 7-ft-plus population is in the NBA. But among NBA players, height does not predict performance very well... because to get hired, they were judged on a much finer metric of actually playing basketball. And the shorter players are selected from a vastly larger pool, and are extreme outliers in whatever other, non-height, talents are helpful.

Re: Nassim Taleb on why IQ is baloney

#35

Post by heptathorp »

wmil wrote: post #20
Knufen wrote: post #5

Disclaimer: Former Mensa member From personal experience it appears that high IQ is a horrible measure of success. On the other hand when you combine high IQ with discipline you can come very far. With all that being said I wish Nassim would provide some actual data instead of anecdotes.

The problem with discussing IQ is that people like to focus on the performance of very high IQ individuals where it's predictive power is weakest. But it's very strong in other areas. For instance say you have two groups of woodworkers, one group has an average IQ of 90 and another group has an average IQ of 100. It's a smart bet that the 100 group has more (total) fingers. "What can we do to help people with 90 IQs…

> For instance say you have two groups of woodworkers, one group has an average IQ of 90 and another group has an average IQ of 100.

> It's a smart bet that the 100 group has more (total) fingers.

Not without knowing the size of each group.

More fingers per capita, sure.

Re: Nassim Taleb on why IQ is baloney

#36

Post by pulisse »

traderjane wrote: post #33
whoisnnamdi wrote: post #29

Think it should be kept in mind that what Taleb is arguing here is the limited usefulness of IQ in predicting success above a certain IQ level, let’s say the mean. He 100% acknowledges its usefulness for predicting success of lower IQ persons. He mainly just wants to point out that any other measure that was as bad at predicting higher levels of performance as IQ is would not be held in nearly as high regard. IQ ther…

In my view the interesting part of IQ is not merely in its ability to predict human performance in areas where we expect intelligence to matter, but also in its underlying claim that there is even such a thing as a general intelligence ( g ), as opposed to bundles of domain-specific abilities.

Proponents of g don't claim that it's an alternative to domain-specific abilities. They claim that it exists in addition to domain-specific abilities, and is what explains the correlation between performance across domains. That is, people who do well on mathematical tests also tend do well on tests of verbal ability. The factor analytic model that yields g attempts to explain this by viewing mathematical ability as the combination of two factors: a domain-specific mathematical intelligence and a domain-agnostic general intelligence. A subject's performance on verbal tests would similarly be modeled as the product of their g and of a cognitive ability specific to verbal tasks. That a subject's performance on one type of test is partially predictive of their performance on the other type is then (according to this model) explained by the two cases sharing a single partial cause, g.

Re: Nassim Taleb on why IQ is baloney

#37

Post by yawaworhtttt »

microcolonel wrote: post #26
yawaworhtttt wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how what you're saying contradicts my point (apart from vague accusations of 'wishful thinking'). What Taleb is arguing, what I'm arguing, what the original designer of IQ was arguing and what seems to be common knowledge among everyone I know in neuroscience or medicine is that IQ is a very good predictor of life outcomes if you are mentally impaired to begin with. When you venture into the realm of >10…

> When you venture into the realm of >100 IQ, it loses a lot of its predictive power, which is why (where I live at least) it is mostly administered to people, mostly children, suspected of needing 'special requirements'. In that sense, it is a very good 'unintelligence quotient' but not much beyond that. According to whom exactly? There is a very large body of work predicting chess outcomes, productivity in maths, e…

You know, your arguments wouldn't sound so much in bad faith if you stopped implying IQ detractors were insecure or guilty of wishful thinking, as opposed to simply skeptical of the science behind it, especially in a field that's not exactly well known for the solidity, reproducibility and falsifiability of most of its findings.

All that said, what you said still doesn't contradict Taleb. Being able to (badly) predict a narrow range of outcomes like chess makes IQ a lousy indicator with respect to the ambition of psychometricians to elevate it as the best representative of general intelligence. Or to put it into other terms, if the best you can come up with is that, better drop the whole thing and move on to what actual hard sciences can show us (see the GGGP paper).

Re: Nassim Taleb on why IQ is baloney

#38

Post by iguy »

yawaworhtttt wrote: post #15
aplummer wrote: post #13

Man there are some nasty replies in this thread. Not that I don’t agree with the high level premise, but I hate when people dismiss a hundred years of peer reviewed research generally without doing the peer reviewed legwork to back themselves up.

Examples of fields with hundreds of years of 'peer-reviewed research': -Alchemy -Phrenology -Humor theory -Spontaneous generation theory -Astronomical geocentrism -Ether theory -Graphology -Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalysis -Astrology all of them were once respected fields, complete with papers, journals, professorships, exams, etc. By the way, speaking as someone in academia, you'd be surprised at how little 'peer-re…

I agree that "peer-reviewed" is a pretty low bar, although a better example would be more modern fields like those recently dubbed "Grievance Studies" -- formal peer review was not common even in hard sciences until maybe 50 years ago, quite a bit later than geocentrism.

But GP is correct that this is not junk science. The basic ideas of psychometrics were pretty clear 100 years ago. They've been widely attacked since then, both casual mud-slinging (Alchemy, Astrology...) and also people who drilled into the details and tried to prove things wrong. Arguably the former strategy has had more effect than the latter.

Re: Nassim Taleb on why IQ is baloney

#39

Post by whoisnnamdi »

traderjane wrote: post #33
whoisnnamdi wrote: post #29

Think it should be kept in mind that what Taleb is arguing here is the limited usefulness of IQ in predicting success above a certain IQ level, let’s say the mean. He 100% acknowledges its usefulness for predicting success of lower IQ persons. He mainly just wants to point out that any other measure that was as bad at predicting higher levels of performance as IQ is would not be held in nearly as high regard. IQ ther…

In my view the interesting part of IQ is not merely in its ability to predict human performance in areas where we expect intelligence to matter, but also in its underlying claim that there is even such a thing as a general intelligence ( g ), as opposed to bundles of domain-specific abilities.

As another poster mentioned, don’t think that g is necessarily in opposition to bundles of domain-specific abilities.

I see g as an attempt at dimensionalality reduction - can the essence of what is admittedly a complex phenomenon be boiled down to a single metric which, while clearly not complete, is at least directionally correct / helpful.

g in some sense could simply be a low dimensional projection of these more complex bundles.

Just theorizing here, not an expert

Re: Nassim Taleb on why IQ is baloney

#40

Post by hackeraccount »

I've always thought the right analogy for intelligence is beauty. Could you come up with a test to measure beauty? Sure. Is beauty heritable? Sure. Is it a product of environment? Sure.

But the real deal with beauty is that you can look at any measurement of it and poke holes in it. There's never going to be some objective measurement of beauty. If you find someone saying person A. is 112 on my beauty scale and person B. is a 94 then the best response is a good laugh.

And this despite the fact that we would all agree that George Cloony is more beautiful that I am but quantifying that?

Post reply on HN