Nassim Nicholas Taleb tweets about IQ

The twitter thread is here.  Please refer to the thread on twitter for full detail.

FYI: IYI = The IYI class: Intellectual-Yet-Idiot
One of the key take aways: "the only robust measure of "rationality" & "intelligence" is survival, avoidance of ruin/left tail/absorbing barrier, (ergodicity). Nothing that does not account for ability to survive counts as a measure of "intelligence".

Sorry for the poor formatting.  Will try to fix.

PS: Also found this:

“I suspect the I.Q., SAT, and school grades are tests designed by nerds so they can get high scores in order to call each other intelligent...Smart and wise people who score low on IQ tests, or patently intellectually defective ones, like the former U.S. president George
W. Bush, who score high on them (130), are testing the test and not the reverse.”

― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

"IQ" THREAD

"IQ" measures an inferior form of intelligence, stripped of 2nd order effects, meant to select paper shufflers, obedient IYIs.

1. 
   "IQ" THREAD "IQ" measures an inferior form of intelligence, stripped of 2nd order effects, meant to select paper shufflers, obedient IYIs. 1- When someone asks you a question in REAL LIFE, you focus first on "WHY is he asking me that?", which slows down. (Fat Tony vs Dr John)
   
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   2- It takes a certain type of person to waste intelligent concentration on classroom/academic problems. These are lifeless bureaucrats who can muster sterile motivation. Some people can only focus on problems that are REAL, not fictional textbook ones.
   
   
   
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   3- Look at the hordes with "high IQ" (from measurement) who are failures in real world rather than the ~50% correlation between IQ and success in
   
   1) salaried employment,
   
   2) jobs that select for edjukashion.
   
   Yuuge survivorship bias. 37 out of 38 PhDs in finance blew up in 1998!
   
4. 
   If many millionaires have IQs around100, & 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.
   
   

   medicaldoc @gorucker interesting point and observation in this thread. You can find billionaires with iq of 100 but I bet you cant find physics profs or grand chess masters . So what is the standard test truly testing?? I love the iyi concept!!

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   5- If you renamed IQ , from "Intelligent Quotient" to FQ "Functionary Quotient" or SQ "Salaryperson Quotient", then some of the stuff will be true. It measures best the ability to be a good slave. IYIs want to build a top-down world where IYIs have the edge.
   
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   6- If you take a Popperian-Hayekian view on intelligence, then you would realize that to measure it you would need to know the SKILLS needed in the ecology, which is again a fallacy of intellectual hubris.
   
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   7- Perhaps the worst problem with IQ is that it seem to selects for people who don't like to say "there is no answer, don't waste time, find something else". Remember the 1998 blowups.
   

8- IQ is an academic-contrived notion. And the problem is that in academia there is no difference between academia and the real world; in the real world there is. Which explains why @primalpoly (while an honest resesrcher) can't see where we are coming from.

 

9- It is PRECISELY as a quant that I doubt "IQ". I've spent 34 years working w/"High IQ" quants. I've rarely seen them survive, not blow up on tail events. Those high IQ who have survived like @financequant /Renaissance happen to be yuuugely street smart

10- #SkininTheGame shows that the only robust measure of "rationality" & "intelligence" is survival, avoidance of ruin/left tail/absorbing barrier, (ergodicity). Nothing that does not account for ability to survive counts as a measure of "intelligence"-- just philosophaster BS.

11- A robust use of "IQ" is for low scores for special needs pple. But then practically ANY measure would work to detect problem & improvement. Or no measure: just a conversation #Lindy. But then psycholophasters are using it like cholesterol, transferring from tails to body.

12- If someone came up w/a NUMERICAL "Well Being Quotient" WBQ or "Sleep Quotient", SQ, trying to mimic temperature or oth physical qty, you 'd find it absurd. But put enough academics w/physics envy on it & it will become an official measure. That's what happened to "IQ".

13- For a measure to be a measure it needs to be: + UNIQUE + MONOTONIC or, at least + TRANSITIVE Hence IQ is not a measure, but something for psycholophasters to BS about.

14- Any measure of "intelligence" w/o convexity is sterile. https://www.edge.org/conversation/nassim_nicholas_taleb-understanding-is-a-poor-substitute-for-convexity-antifragility …

 

15-" IQ" is most predictive of performance in military training, w/correlation~.5, (which is circular since hiring isn't random). QUIZ: translate the correlation into percentage of the time IQ provides a correct answer there.

(hint).

 

16- So Far: "IQ" isn't a measure of "intelligence" but "unintelligence"; it loses its precision as you move away from 70 (left tail). Where it's most hyped (*some* jobs) it predicts ~15- 63% of the time, ~10% if you demassage data. It it were a physical test, wd be rejected.

 

17- A graph that shows the synthesis of my opinion on IQ and the "reseasrch" results about it.

 Nassim Nicholas Taleb‏Verified account @nntaleb Dec 24

18- (continuing graph). So far none of the IQ-psycholophasters seem to grasp that local correlation is never correlation is the commonly understood sense. So when they say "IQ works well between 70 and 130" it means: "IQ works well between 0 and ~85, maybe".

19- A general problem w/social "scientists" & IQ idiots: they can intuit the very terms they are using. Verbalism; they have a skin-deep statistical education & can't translate something as trivial as "correlation" or "explained variance" into meaning, esp. under nonlinearities.

20- This Tweet storm has NO psychological references: simply, the field is bust. So far ~ 50% of the research DOES NOT replicate, & papers that do have weaker effect. Not counting poor transfer to reality. How P values often fraudulent:https://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.07532.pdf … Same for g factor

If you look at my p-haking above all the numbers by the fellow are upper bound -add category selection & the story is grim. Discount the story by > ½. "If IQ isn't a valid concept, no concept in psychology is valid." Sorry but psychology is largely bust.

Steve Stewart-Williams @SteveStuWill

7. More generally, IQ tests are among the most reliable, predictive measures in psychology – one of the field's crowning achievements. https://aeon.co/ideas/how-clever-is-it-to-dismiss-iq-tests ……

22- This tweet storm irritated many: 1) Charlatans with something to sell: without IQ & other *testing* psychologists have little to sell society; there is a vested interest in hacking/massaging the stats & defending the products. 2) Pple who want some races to be inferior.

 

23- Note 1: Why is Intelligence = (long term) survival? Because convexity, missed by IQ tests. You want to make those mistakes with small consequences NOT those with large ones. Academics ~ always focus on frequency of error not magnitude. Too Gaussianized. See #antifragile

 

24- Note 2: "IQ selects for pattern recognition, essential for functioning in modern society". Unfiltered pattern recognition makes you #FooledbyRandomness, to overnarrate, see false positives. Economics PhDs blow up in business. "IQ" good for @davidgraeber's "BS jobs"

25- For IQ idiots too slow: -If a 70 IQ is certain to fail but a 150 IQ has a significant probability of NOT succeeding, the ASYMMETRY has SEVERE statistical conseq.  & "correlation" is BS term. -If variance is lower at some states & higher at others,"Bell Curve" is an illusion.

 

26- I mute/block all pple comparing IQ to a physical measure s.a. height of basketball players. IQ as presented is NOT a measure. Reminiscent of risk charlatans insisting on selling "value at risk" & RiskMetrics saying "it's the best measure". Metrics need to have properties.

 

27- Technical note I omitted: If IQ is Gaussian *by construction* & if performance is fat tailed, then either correlation betw IQ & performance doesn't exist or is uninformational. It will show a finite number *in sample* but doesn't exist statistically. The Statistical Consequences of Fat Tails

 

 

28-CURSE OF DIMENSIONALITY A flaw in the attempts to identify "intelligence" genes. You can get monogenic traits, not polygenic (note: additive monogenic used in animal breeding is NOT polygenic). The problem to some extent affect the "g" in IQ studies as it is multifactorial.

 

29- Note Charles Murray, @charlesmurray, is responding to these with series of ad hominem attacks (I mean really ad hominem). I will retaliate by sticking to the science.

29- A counter by a proponent of IQ w/what "g" offers best: explains ~½ the variance w.r. to academics. No "science" shd boast a measure that fails ~50%! Worse: counting circularity, hacking, the measure shd be wrong ~ 80% of the time! This is ... fraud! https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022440518301031?via%3Dihub … 30- Traders get it right away: hypothetical P/L from "simulated" strategies don't count. Performance=actual. "IQ": What goes in people's head or reaction to a screen image doesn't exist (except via negativa). And correlations in psych papers don't count. There is an asymmetry that indicates most people who believe in IQ as a measure have a low IQ' (some "real" intelligence metric). And an important comment: John Newman‏ @Doxosophoi Dec 26

You're hovering over the target. Intelligence is a measure of efficiency towards one or more purposes. In a free society, purpose is open ended. Therefore, intelligence is open ended and can only be evaluated against a snapshot of purposes in a time and place. Games change.

In a non-free society, where people purposes are dictated to them, IQ (as it has been characterized) becomes a much more important measurement.