IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle

This was kind of my point, if it's not science, criticising it as unscientific doesn't seem to be a particularly meaningful activity.

One has to consider how MBTI is used by people in the real world, I've come across two scenarios in my own life:

1) A business does it during some form of team day or off-site. The main purpose is to highlight that people think/operate in different ways and have different value, and an effective team is sensitive to this and works within it rather than trying to fight it. My comment is that the _specifics_ are kind of irrelevant, as long as the message that people are different is communicated effectively.

2) People use it in their personal lives as a form of reassurance, they've found something that they feel describes themselves and perhaps is useful in explaining themselves to others. This won't happen for the people who are close to the centre of the various axis, because they'll feel that more than one of the "types" could apply to them. But for the people who are closer to the extremes (like myself) find them to be rather accurate. And we're the people who'll find value in it. So my comment here is simply that if someone thinks their MBTI type is meaningful, it probably is -- because for the purposes they care about (how do I explain myself to others, or similar), it actually is pretty helpful.

I don't mean to be hostile, but I don't know how else to say it: I don't know why or how posts like this, and most of what Taleb posts, get this much attention, because they're so ironically unscientific and poorly written. Taleb doesn't know what he's talking about, he selectively cites research, and makes assertions as if they are citations. The citation you provide is one example; there are scientists (e.g., Lubinski) who have successfully demonstrated over the course of years of research the validity of scores on the upper end of the intelligence distribution. Taleb comes across as an uninformed idiot.

Taleb falls into these common fallacy traps regarding intelligence and individual differences research:

1. Some improper use of intelligence theory historically (e.g., racist, overapplication) doesn't mean the idea of intelligence is invalid or not useful. 2. A trait such as intelligence can be highly but not perfectly stable; environment can contribute to stability and genetic factors can contribute to changes. 3. Measures can be imperfect but still useful and valid, throughout the range. 4. The contribution of other factors to outcomes other than intelligence doesn't mean general intelligence isn't contributing as well. 5. The phenomenon of general intelligence doesn't preclude the existence of more specific ways of describing cognitive abilities (e.g., verbal memory, processing speed, visual mental simulation).

Someone else posted something about how political IQ and individual differences research is. I feel about these topics how I imagine ecologists must feel about global warming research: lots of gish gallop by people who have a political or narcissistic axe to grind.

Another problem is that people want to believe that problems in behavioral sciences can be reduced to really simple black or white positions, or apply analogies from other fields directly without any modification. Yes, you can measure behavioral attributes, but no it's not quite ordinal and not quite ratio, and that's fine. Yes things can be somewhat stable and somewhat not. The list goes on and on.

Finally, there's this narcissistic status-asserting behavior that drives a lot of this. It's like the pecking order in science that goes something like physics > chemistry > biology > behavioral science is driven in part by people feeling the need to assert that they're smarter than people lower in the hierarchy. The problem is that this hierarchy is basically wrong, and driven in part by the system complexity of the fields, but it doesn't stop people like Taleb because he needs someone to bully to make himself look smarter.

Notably, under the left's view, believing a system is just would require proving a negative.

Is basically 'guilty until proven innocent'; a recipe for eternal identitarian strife; totally different from how we approach structurally similar questions on other topics.

It's particularly interesting in this case because the youtube link is Thomas Sowell speaking about the negative effects of Affirmative Action and he is a black American, would you say that he is dog whistling for racists?

Now onto the law itself, Affirmative Action is a racist policy as it advantages certain races over others, full stop. Recently asian students have brought a suit against Harvard (https://www.npr.org/2018/11/02/660734399/harvard-discriminat...), for their policies negatively effecting asian Americans. As a society we need to decide if we want to advantage some races over others. In my opinion it makes more sense to advantage people from poor backgrounds then it does based on race, as the black son or daughter of rich parents will have had more opportunities than the poor asian American. If you disagree with that I would love to understand why.

In addition, I fully agree that legacy admissions should be removed.