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.
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.
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.
[1]: A position that, as far as I know, is neither controversial nor contentious in academia.
For example: “I've spent 34 years working w/"High IQ" quants. I've rarely seen them survive, not blow up on tail events.”
How many “low IQ” quants did he work with? With all due respect to Taleb I’m not sure that anyone who’s even simply above average would make it as a quant or even be attracted to mathematics to this degree.
From my experience with quants not only that they are exceptionally intelligent even if only in a narrow field they also see data and numbers very differently than how “normal” people see them even if these normal people score pretty high on which ever arbitrary scale of intelligence you pick.
I would bet good money on the fact that Taleb likely haven’t worked with any Quant with an IQ lower than say 135 which already makes them exceptional, in fact I’m not sure how much experience a person in his position has with average not to mention low IQ people to begin with considering the social circles he hangs out in.
Another one: “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".“
I’m not entirely sure if we would have deferential mathematics and Newton’s law of motions, yet alone something like GR if everyone followed this attitude, while this might be a reasonable attitude to have to some extent in say business I’m not sure about applying it to our advancement as a species.
IQ might be a poor indicator for intelligence it might be a good one, but his rant offered no arguments or alternatives.
Yes plenty of people can be “obnoxious losers” and have high IQ plenty of them might even be that because of it, however it would be interested to see how much better these people have it than people who chosen to waste their life in just the same manner but who are average or below average and I have a feeling that the basement dwelling Twitter troll unicorn who is indeed correct about their 150 self proclaimed IQ still manages to come on top simply due to the rare occasions when push comes to shove and they have to apply themselves.
http://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1997whygmatte...
Why g Matters: The Complexity of Everyday Life
LINDA S. GOTTFREDSON University of Delaware Personnel selection research provides much evidence that intelligence (g) is an important predictor of performance in training and on the job, especially in higher level work. This article provides evidence that g has pervasive utility in work settings because it is essen- tially the ability to deal with cognitive complexity, in particular, with complex information processing. The more complex a work task, the greater the advantages that higher g confers in performing it well. Everyday tasks, like job duties, also differ in their level of complexity. The importance of intelligence therefore differs systematically across differ- ent arenas of social life as well as economic endeavor. Data from the National Adult Literacy Survey are used to show how higher levels of cognitive ability systematically improve individuals’ odds of dealing successfully with the ordinary demands of modem life (such as banking, using maps and transportation schedules, reading and understanding forms, interpreting news articles). These and other data are summarized to illustrate how the advantages of higher g, even when they are small, cumulate to affect the overall life chances of individuals at different ranges of the IQ bell curve. The article concludes by suggesting ways to reduce the risks for low-IQ individuals of being left behind by an increasingly complex postindustrial economy.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.0963-7214.200...
Intelligence Predicts Health and Longevity, but Why?
Large epidemiological studies of almost an entire population in Scotland have found that intelligence (as measured by an IQ-type test) in childhood predicts substantial differences in adult morbidity and mortality, including deaths from cancers and cardiovascular diseases. These relations remain significant after controlling for socioeconomic variables. One possible, partial explanation of these results is that intelligence enhances individuals' care of their own health because it represents learning, reasoning, and problem-solving skills useful in preventing chronic disease and accidental injury and in adhering to complex treatment regimens.
In any case, he comes off as childish and bitter. It’s all filtered through the idea that success means being a multimillionaire, and everyone else is a failure. His perspective seems limited to finance and academics in that sphere.
> ... when they say "IQ works well between 70 and 130" it means: "IQ works well between 0 and ~85, maybe"
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.
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.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattell–Horn–Carroll_theory
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...
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?
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.
I'm not saying I agree with burning Galileo at the stake, but reading Taleb and knowing how Galileo conducted himself. . . I understand.
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?
