Wednesday, January 16, 2019

NNT revised draft

Posted by Arun at 6:27 AM
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Guest · 323 weeks ago

Shorter NNT - if you're so smart, why aren't you rich? Taleb is highly disdainful of such other measures of success as educational attainment. IQ tests were devised to predict educability, but he is uninterested in the kinds of intellectual accomplishments that produce those he contemptuously dismisses as academics and functionaries.

Even in defending his chosen territory, he is guilty of highly dubious tactics: (1) He shows that adding noise to a clear signal makes it hard for the human eye to see it. Duh! That's why statistics was invented. (2)His primary data on IQ vs income and wealth consists of two noisy charts from Zagorski which don't show all the data. (3)He ignores the numerical data in the same paper which show correlations of IQ with both wealth and income. (4)The wealth correlation is smaller than the income correlation and both are smaller than educational attainment. (5)The largest correlate of income is wealth (duh! again) and no other correlate is comparable to IQ. (6)All the tested individuals were young enough to be early in their careers. More comprehensive studies show that the correlation of income and IQ grows with age.

My verdict: More bogus science from the great American Denial Industry.
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macgupta 81p · 323 weeks ago

No, more accurately it is - if you're rich, why aren't you smart?
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macgupta 81p · 323 weeks ago

And do explain this (about kindergarten intervention):

"The economist Raj Chetty and colleagues looked at the life trajectories of nearly 12,000 children who were part of a large-scale education program in the 1980s based in Tennessee called Project Star. Although they found that the effect of good teaching, as measured by test scores, almost completely disappeared by junior high, a different story emerged when they checked in on the study participants as adults (age 30).

Those adults who did better in preschool were more likely to go to college and to attend a higher ranked college, were less likely to be single parents, and were more likely to save for retirement than those with similar backgrounds who did not do as well in preschool. Some people would say that these outcomes are more important than test scores. Teaching quality turne dout to be a particularly important factor in preschool performance: students who had more-experienced teachers had high earnings as adults. Factors such as class size and the socioeconomic status of peers had an effect on preschool performance, but neither of these factors explained differences in preschool performance as much as good teaching. One of the authors of the study, Emmanuel Saez, estimated that a terrific kindergarten teacher is worth about $320,000 a year, if you considered the additional monetary value a full class of students with a good preschool teacher can expect to earn throughout their careers. This figure doesn't even take into account social gains, such as better health and less crime".
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Guest · 323 weeks ago

I have always thought good teachers were a priceless resource. Unfortunately, we don't have a 30 minute test to evaluate them. There are several other factors, equally hard to evaluate, that might be more important than one IQ test. For example, the details of the family life and culture seem to affect not only school and other accomplishment but also IQ test results. Because of the plasticity of the human mind and because we really don't know what IQ is measuring, we have only a vague idea of what shapes even results on IQ tests, much less other life outcomes.

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