Nassim Taleb on IQ

44 points by ptbello 7 years ago | 35 comments

ellius 7 years ago |

I like Taleb's work. It's always good food for thought and frequently insightful. That said, his posture towards academia of late seems a bit juvenile and not a little annoying. Which isn't to say that he doesn't have a point, but it gets pretty frustrating when I pay good money for a book (Antifragile) and every other page is taking potshots at "fragilistas" and talking about how those dumb intellectuals don't actually know anything. In my book you win arguments by winning arguments, not by reframing the discussion so as to portray all of your opponents as hopelessly deluded cowards and fools.

rfrey 7 years ago | |

The most salient anecdote Taleb tells about himself is the one where he's going onstage to debate an opponent. He asks his publisher if punching the other guy in the face would be against his contract, and his publisher notes that it would be very good for book sales.

All Taleb does is punch people in the face nowadays. It's probably very good for book sales. He notes elsewhere, rightly I think, that the goal of anybody seeking PR should be to get the attention of somebody more famous then them: since it's much easier to pick fights than make friendships, and either will do, he picks fights with anybody he thinks has prominence. I believe it's a persona, and he's a very good method actor.

It's also really annoying if you think some of his ideas are very good, as I do.

sytelus 7 years ago | | |

These days if you get in to NYT or Amazon top list, you are talking about windfall in range of $10M. For books like Fifty Shades of Grey this was at $100M for the author. So writing books these days is not poor author trying to getting by but a very very serious business. It's as serious as Series C startup with actual office, roadmap, business plan, marketing plan and even full time employees who would do research, citation collection, word smithing, editing etc for you. People like Tim Ferris and Malcolm Gladwell have made this to an art form and are some of the most successful founders for this type of business. The way they work is by taking couple of known data points in academia and expand it on to 400 page book dishing it out as fundamental insights that everyone is missing out on. Such books are rife with repetitions, personal stories, cherry picked anecdotes, raising underdogs and putting down others that evoke emotions but at the same time tuck away the other side of the story that would have made them more balanced and boring.

I wouldn't be surprised if Taleb has made more money from his books then his hedge fund career and accordingly he might be more aggressive to protect his image as dispenser of great counter-intuitive insights. His assertions in these sets of tweets are obviously overblown. IQ testing is known to be very faulty measure for intelligence but at the same time lot of rebellious personalities including Einstein, Bill Gates, Lady Gaga etc have had high (> 150) IQ. No one would call them people yearning to be obedient salaried drones.

ellius 7 years ago | | |

The problem with that strategy is that this isn't boxing. There isn't a sideshow first followed by an objective measure of skill. Arguments are directly judged by their presentation. So I guess you can argue that it's a tradeoff—get your ideas in front of more people by diluting their potency with juvenile antics—but frankly I think that's a short-term strategy and doesn't produce works with staying power. If his goal is just to make money it's probably smart. If his goal is just to carve out a space for other people to carry forward the debate then that's debatably also smart. But if he's really trying to present and defend his ideas in a credible way I think it's counterproductive.

KMag 7 years ago | |

Also known as "attack ideas, not people".

At work, I find it much easier to get support for my ideas if I frame my arguments in a way that leaves those arguing against me a face-saving way to agree with me. If you come out and call them stupid, they have no choice but to argue against you tooth and nail, because to agree with you is to agree that they're stupid. Sometimes it's really tempting to leave a trap in an argument, leading them down a path where they're forced to start making contradictory or ridiculous claims. It feels good, but is counter-productive.

woodruffw 7 years ago |

Is there a coherent train of thought in these tweets, other than Taleb's disdain for IQ[1]? I'm struggling to understand why a measurement that appears to have no value "measures best the ability to be a good slave," or why any of this entails the belief that "the only robust measure of "rationality" & "intelligence" is survival."

[1]: A position that, as far as I know, is neither controversial nor contentious in academia.

DecayingOrganic 7 years ago |

If many millionaires have IQs around 100, & 58 y.o. back office clercs at Goldman Sachs or elsewhere an IQ of 155 (true example), clearly the measurement is less informative than claimed.

it is important to distinguish the macro from the micro point of view.

From the micro point of view, a talented individual has a greater a priori probability to reach a high level of success than a moderately gifted one.

On the other hand, from the macro point of view of the entire society, the probability to find moderately gifted individuals at the top levels of success is greater than that of finding there very talented ones, because moderately gifted people are much more numerous and, with the help of luck, have - globally - a statistical advantage to reach a great success, in spite of their lower individual a priori probability.

saagarjha 7 years ago |

Stripping the article of the author (whom I don’t actually know much about other than he seems to have showed up next to Nate Silver at some point), I found this “thread” to be a bunch of personal anecdotes and “intelligent looking formulas and stuff” taken out of context to support the general conclusion that IQ is a bad metric for intelligence, as Taleb would know because he clearly has a very high IQ (note: this is something that he actually brings up as someone else saying about him, to give him credibility?). While I am not opposed to the position he takes, I did not understand the argument he is making the slightest. Could someone explain to me why this is actually legit, rather than what to me looks dangerously close to pseudoscientific rambling?

TEJOOS 7 years ago | |

It's not pseudoscientific buddy completely legitimate

TEJOOS 7 years ago | | |

BTW r u a grad student at Cornell ?

thinkingkong 7 years ago |

Part of the challenge with measuring stuff is we usually stop when we have a single measurement. IQ is a repeatable thing but the problem - to my naive self - is that its called intelligence quotient and the idea of giving it a single measurement is ridiculous as there are more factors than one.

Intelligence is probably going to be a maximum within the system youre measuring against. Maybe high IQ is great for researchers and professors, but not for investors, or business folks.

closed 7 years ago | |

This is a classic discussion in the intelligence literature. For example, the cattell-horn-carroll theory[1]. Usually meauring general intelligence involves measures along a bunch of different problem domains.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattell–Horn–Carroll_theory

thinkingkong 7 years ago | | |

Oh neat! Id never heard of that before.

simonebrunozzi 7 years ago |

Taleb. Love him, hate him. Always a lot of controversy.

I like him quite a lot somehow, and there's clearly a good amount of genius in him, although sometimes there are certain positions and affirmations that feel less so (to me at least).

For example, his critique of the growing inequality in the world [0] [1] amounts to pointing at dynamic inequality, not static one. This one never convinced me so far.

To be clear: I fully understand his point; I simply disagree, especially while living in San Francisco and witnessing homeless people every day, walking next to VC multimillionaires.

Anyone able to convince me?

[0]: https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/892351059615789057?lang=e...

[1]: https://medium.com/incerto/inequality-and-skin-in-the-game-d...

petermcneeley 7 years ago | |

Piketty argues for a wealth tax. Taking skin in the game seriously we see that for Taleb, a %1 er and his circle, such a tax would threaten a great deal of skin indeed. Such essays by Taleb are just an auto defense mechanism driven by self interest.

clairity 7 years ago | |

how do you fully understand his point?

i find taleb to be frustratingly incomplete. he likes to play with words but doesn’t string enough material ones together to complete an idea.

yes, i can buy that dynamic and static inequality can be different (e.g., dynamic and static stability in mechanics is different) but he doesn’t really say what he means by that.

or maybe he’s so enamoured with words snd erudition that i get bored long before he finishes the explanation?

the_other_guy 7 years ago |

I like Taleb's philosophy that he unlike most successful people, downplays the role of hard work and rationality for success and attributes most things to what we call luck and chance. Being a wall street trader, short seller, etc... may require this kind of mentality since all rules and conventions are broken every day and having a 160-IQ in this arena will be even more harmful than useful if you use logic and science for every decision. However, I don't really understand his disdain for academia and theoretical knowledge, his philosophy won't get him anywhere where strict and disciplined logic is needed, the kind of logic that actually advanced the civilization not the one he used to make money off his bets from pointless stock charts

ronilan 7 years ago |

When someone asks me a question in real life I don’t focus on “Why”. I focus on “How” (can I help them).

Most arguments down the thread seem just as moot to me, but then again, I’m probably not smart enough for a Twitter IQ thread.

bachmeier 7 years ago | |

Nobody's smart enough for a Taleb thread on any topic.

naravara 7 years ago | | |

It's weird. Even though I agree with probably 80% of what Taleb is trying to say, he's just such a condescending prick about it that I STILL want to throw rocks at him to make him shut up.

I'm not saying I agree with burning Galileo at the stake, but reading Taleb and knowing how Galileo conducted himself. . . I understand.

gmuslera 7 years ago |

I got two ideas from that writing: - Is not a good idea to take a single dimensional indicator for a multidimensional capability. I suppose that know about IQs can discuss about that. - That having a high IQ is not a so great predictor on how well you will solve a real world problem. If we define "real world problems" the ones with feedback loops, plenty of noise, and known and unknown unknowns (his field of work) then he may have a point. But that is a subset of the real world problems, and anyway you may have to solve ideal world problems too.

techbio 7 years ago |

The fact that some people can’t survive in the market, and other people don’t [even participate], meshes well with his “simple verbal test”: it only works if your subject is playing along. Street smarts are earned, granted. But IQ is not a measure of how many toys you die with. If the test is market survival, anyone who retires is a genius.

cheez 7 years ago |

I enjoyed reading this thread this morning. Makes some salient points, that IQ is correlated with success in a specific area (physics/academia).

fromthestart 7 years ago |

This reads like a desperate rant by someone who scored poorly on an IQ test and took it personally.

microcolonel 7 years ago |

Of course, if you submit a piece supporting any other take on these matters, it may not make it on HN.

fredch 7 years ago |

FOR THE RECORD,

Financial crashes are not "black swan" events. I've never seen a black swan in my life, but I've seen two or three financial crashes. As far as I can tell, Taleb is just a memer.

His degeneration of late is hopefully cluing people in, though the compulsion to substitute memes for thought will continue. Hey, maybe that's what IQ is, a person's likeliness to think instead of resorting to memes? Maybe that's why Taleb hates it?