4277 "IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Rebutted!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb swore at me on Twitter - then blocked me - and has also produced an article debunking the value of IQ as a valid metric for measuring intelligence.Watch me as I go through the article and unpack all the errors, assumptions and just plain strangeness of Taleb's analysis.---Background : “IQ” is a stale test meant to measure mental capacity but in fact mostly measures extreme unintelligence (learning difficulties), as well as, to a lesser extent, a form of intelligence, stripped of 2nd order effects. It is via negativa not via positiva. Designed for learning disabilities, it ends up selecting exam-takers, paper shufflers, obedient IYIs (intellectuals yet idiots), ill adapted for “real life”. The concept is poorly thought out mathematically (a severe flaw in correlation under fat tails, fails to properly deal with dimensionality, treats the mind as an instrument not a complex system), and seemed to be promoted byracists/eugenists, people bent on showing that some populations have inferior mental abilities based on IQ test=intelligence; those have been upset with me for suddenly robbing them of a “scientific” tool, as evidenced by the bitter reactions to the initial post on twitter/smear campaigns by such mountebanks as Charles Murray. (Something observed by the great Karl Popper, psychologists have a tendency to pathologize people who bust them by tagging them with some type of disorder, or personality flaw such as “childish” , “narcissist”, “egomaniac”, or something similar).---▶️ Donate Now: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate▶️ Sign Up For Our Newsletter: http://www.fdrurl.com/newsletterYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate▶️ 1. Donate: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate▶️ 2. Newsletter Sign-Up: http://www.fdrurl.com/newsletter▶️ 3. On YouTube: Subscribe, Click Notification Bell▶️ 4. Subscribe to the Freedomain Podcast: http://www.fdrpodcasts.com▶️ 5. Follow Freedomain on Alternative Platforms🔴 Bitchute: http://bitchute.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Minds: http://minds.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Steemit: http://steemit.com/@stefan.molyneux🔴 Gab: http://gab.ai/stefanmolyneux🔴 Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Facebook: http://facebook.com/stefan.molyneux🔴 Instagram: http://instagram.com/stefanmolyneuxSource article: https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39
This is from a guy I got into a bit of a tangle with on Twitter, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and let's have a look at what Nicky has to say about IQ.
So he says, background.
Quote IQ.
Ah!
I hate to say softest, but you see, we've already started with scare quotes.
IQ is a stale test.
You see, it's stale, and that's negative.
Stale tests meant to measure mental capacity, but in fact mostly measures extreme unintelligence or learning difficulties, as well as, to a lesser extent, a form of intelligence stripped of second-order effects.
Does he tell you what second-order effects are?
No, because he's trying to dazzle you with language rather than illuminate you with clarity.
But you see, he then clears it up because then he says, it is via negativa, not via positiva.
Designed for learning disabilities, it ends up selecting exam takers, paper shufflers, obedient I-Y-Is, intellectuals yet idiots, ill-adapted for, quote, real life.
Minor grammatical error.
Okay.
Okay?
So, there's some truth in this, of course, that the IQ test was originally developed to figure out people who had Learning disabilities.
And here's what I'm going to do with this article.
The most powerful way to rebut people is to simply accept that what it is that they have to say is all true and see if you can disprove the argument, right?
So you can end up getting into a whole bunch of background and look at the math and look at the charts and counteract.
But that's not really particularly fun.
What I find a lot more fun is to simply say, OK, let's accept that everything you're saying is absolutely true.
Are you still right?
Because you can't get any better than that when it comes to rebutting people.
So yeah, I mean, that's interesting.
So he's basically saying it gives you a bunch of followers and that the IQ test Only tells you whether you're good at taking IQ tests, right?
Exam tapers.
Exam takers.
Paper shufflers.
Yeah, see, I don't know what that means.
Sometimes papers, and this is what Jordan Peterson said, sometimes papers do need to be shuffled correctly.
Obedient I-Y-Is.
Intellectuals, yet idiots.
And that's kind of true, right?
There's been a study that says that there was some university where the highest IQ in the university professorship was like 139, which is still far short of where it can go, statistically.
So, yeah.
If you're talking about academia, yeah, of course, academia is going to be full of people who are book smart but unwise, for sure.
Okay, so he says, the concept is poorly thought out mathematically.
A severe flaw in correlation under fat tails.
Fails to properly deal with dimensionality.
Treats the mind as an instrument, not a complex system.
And seemed to be promoted by.
Ah!
Seemed to be promoted by.
So now we're talking about guilt by association.
So some people are going to promote IQ and those people are bad.
And therefore IQ is false.
You know, which is basically saying that vegetarianism is Nazism because Hitler was a vegetarian.
I mean, it's not an argument, right?
Okay.
So who promotes IQ?
According to Nikki here, right?
Who promotes IQ?
Racists and eugenicists.
That's pretty bad.
People bent on showing that some populations have inferior mental abilities based on IQ test equals intelligence.
Hmm, some populations have inferior mental abilities based on IQ test equals intelligence.
Okay, first of all, very few people who know anything about the subject say that IQ is exactly the same as intelligence, right?
In fact, psychometricians have an entirely different Metric called G, which stands for general intelligence.
So the IQ test measures particular kinds of reasonings, verbal and spatial and so on.
But nobody says that IQ test is exactly the same as intelligence.
So, I mean, things like creativity and so on are not particularly well measured by the IQ test, right?
So some populations have inferior mental abilities based on IQ test equals intelligence, whether it's a strong man at all, right?
I mean, the IQ test measures IQ.
Now, there is a correlation, a very strong correlation in many ways between your IQ and life success as a whole, professional success, income, marital stability, general health, and so on.
So, it measures something, but nobody says their IQ test is equal to intelligence, says the strongman.
Those have been upset with me for suddenly robbing them of a, quote, scientific tool, as evidenced by the bitter reactions to the initial posts on Twitter slash smear campaigns by such mountebanks as Charles Murray.
A mountebank is somebody who sells you a false cure, like a snake oil salesman, I guess you could call it, right?
So, what has he said here?
This is important, right?
It's a stale test.
It's meant to measure mental capacity, measures extreme unintelligence.
Now, there's something interesting that he talks about with this that I want to get into here.
So it ends up selecting exam paper shufflers, obedient intellectuals, yet idiots, ill-adapted for, quote, real life.
All right, well, okay.
So he hasn't really, he's just made a bunch of assertions so far, and then he goes straight For the ad hominem, right, which is... It's stupid.
Come on, Nassim, this is ridiculous, right?
Ah, it's promoted by racists and eugenicists!
Oh, actually, didn't he type that incorrectly?
Eugenists.
I think it's eugenicists, so... Well, when you're in a hurry and you're emotionally driven, and he is very reactionary, he kind of swore at me on Twitter and blocked me and all kinds of goofy tween stuff, but...
Yeah.
Smear campaigns.
Charles Murray.
Charles Murray, wrong on immigration, but I don't think he's orchestrating a smear campaign.
Now here is a staggering piece of a lack of self-knowledge, right?
So he puts in brackets here.
Something observed by the great Karl Popper.
Psychologists have a tendency to pathologize people who bust them by tagging them with some type of disorder or personality flaw such as childish, narcissist, egomaniac, or something similar.
Huh.
You see?
So, this is very interesting.
Nassim says that demonizing people who disagree with you is really, really terrible.
But people who disagree with me on IQ are racists and eugenists!
I mean, come on, man!
Do you have a mental mirror?
Do you have an observing ego?
Do you have a third eye that is observing what you're doing?
If demonizing people who disagree with you is really bad, Well, people who are good at IQ are just exam takers, paper shufflers, idiots, yet intellectuals, and they're racists and eugenists.
But, you know, can you imagine how terrible it would be to pathologize people who disagree with you?
That would be terrible!
I'm sorry, that's just a joke.
So who else promotes IQ.
Psychometrics peddlers looking for suckers, military large corporations buying the, this is the best measure in psychology argument when it is not even technically a measure.
It explains at best between 13 and 50 percent of the performance in some tasks.
Those tasks that are similar to the test itself.
Minus the data massaging and statistical cherry picking by psychologists.
It doesn't satisfy the monotonicity and transitivity required to have a measure.
At best it is a concave measure.
Just clearing everything up for us.
No measure that fails, 60-95% of the time, should be part of, quote, science, nor should psychology, owing to its sinister track record, be part of science, rather scientism, but that's another discussion.
Yeah, the field, I mean, I'm with you there, Nassim, the field of psychology is a mess, and so much of the tests can't be replicated, and, you know, the peer review process is a joke, and one of the things that's happened to psychology is it's been so heavily hit by accusations of racism and sexism and so on, that the most important stuff that it could be studying, it's not studying anymore, because if you want to study, say, race and IQ, you must be a eugenist and a racist.
All right.
So he says here, some argue that IQ measures intellectual capacity.
Real-world results come from, in addition, wisdom, or patience, or conscientiousness, or decision-making, or something of the sort.
No, it does not even measure intellectual capacity or mental powers.
Well that's interesting.
So here he says, right back up here he says, it measures extreme unintelligence, learning difficulties.
Right?
So he says IQ measures extreme unintelligence.
He doesn't, he has a big problem with high IQ measurement, which we can talk about, but he says here IQ mostly measures extreme unintelligence.
So he accepts that, right?
So then down here he says it does not even measure intellectual capacity or mental powers.
Dude!
Pick a lane.
Does it measure extreme unintelligence or does it not measure intellectual capacity at all?
You gotta kind of get your story straight here, right?
So here you go.
If you want to detect how someone fares at a task, say loan sharking, tennis playing, or random matrix theory, make him or her do that task.
We don't need theoretical exams for a real-world function by probability-challenged psychologists.
Well, you kind of do, right?
See, you really, really kind of do.
So...
If you want to see how someone plays tennis, sure, you can watch them play tennis.
But if you're going to train someone in a complex field, you need to know whether they're going to be able to cross the finish line.
So if you're going to start trading someone in, say, advanced statistical probability all the way through to the PhD level, you're going to need some kind of measure on how intelligent they are as a whole, right?
It's not going to be perfect, but it is something that you're going to need.
To measure so yeah, I mean I'm gonna get I'm gonna assume that everything he says here in these graphs is true.
It's fine.
So traders get it right away.
He says hypothetical PL from simulated paper strategies doesn't count performance equals actual what goes in people's head or reaction to a screen image doesn't exist except via a negative.
Okay, so fat tails.
So a fat tail, like if you have a really vertical bell curve, there's not a lot at the extremes.
If you have a flatter bell curve, there's more at the extremes of sort of higher and lower.
So I just wanted to sort of mention that.
So, if IQ is Gaussian by construction, and if real-world performance were net fat-tailed, it is, then either the covariance between IQ and performance doesn't exist, or it is uninformational.
It will show a finite number in a sample, but it doesn't exist statistically.
Another problem.
When people say, sorry, when they say black people are X standard deviations away, different populations have different variances, even different skewness, and these comparisons require richer models.
These are severe, severe, it's repeated, mathematical flaws.
A billion papers in psychometrics wouldn't count if you had such flaws.
See the formal treatment in my next book.
Okay.
See, the really, the good arguments in his next book.
So shouldn't you wait until that's happening?
Okay.
So I'm going to break down to you what he's saying here.
And we'll get into more of this.
So basically what he's saying is this.
So at the lower end of IQ, right, so we're talking like where mental retardation starts to kick in, where courts no longer assign moral responsibility to criminals, around IQ of 70.
So around IQ of 70, it's informational because it measures intellectual deficiency, right?
But at higher IQs, it becomes less predictive.
The IQ measure becomes less predictive, to which one can only say, Well, of course it does become less predictive.
Why?
Because higher IQ people have more choices.
There's such a thing as free will, so it's tougher to predict the outcome of higher IQ people than it is to predict...
The outcomes of lower IQ people, because lower IQ people have far fewer choices in life, right?
So a higher IQ person can pull a Jack Nicholson in five easy pieces and can end up working on an oil rig.
We all know people who have very high intelligence who end up, quote, underperforming in life.
And so, yes, you see, a guy with an IQ of 150 can choose to be a dishwasher, but a guy with an IQ of 85 can't choose to become A mathematician.
So you see, when people have more choices, Nassim, it is actually very true.
Sorry, I shouldn't laugh, but it's just so obvious this is emotional.
Lack of self-knowledge.
Yes, when people have more choices, those choices become more difficult to predict.
I'll give you another example.
So let's say a guy is five foot tall, right?
I mean, not Tom Cruise territory, but he's short, right?
So let's say a guy is five foot tall.
Is he going to be a pro basketball player?
Well, no.
He's not.
Now if a guy is seven feet tall...
He has the option to be a pro basketball player if a bunch of other stuff lines up, right?
So one guy has no choice to become a pro basketball player, another guy does.
So is it easier to predict whether the 5 foot tall guy is going to be a pro basketball player or is it easier to predict whether the 7 foot tall guy is going to be a pro basketball player?
The answer is 2!
Here's your little intelligence test, right?
The answer is 2.
Of course, it's harder to predict if the 7 foot tall guy is going to become a basketball player because he has the choice.
It's easy to predict whether the five-foot-tall guy is going to become a pro basketball player because he can't, right?
So, yes.
When people have more choices, it's pretty tough to predict all of those choices.
When people have fewer choices, it's easier to predict, right?
Now, this argument from complexity, yes.
So, in America, Largely because... So blacks in America have higher IQs than their originating race, right?
So the originating race in Sub-Saharan Africa has an average IQ in the low 70s, which is like the bottom 2 or 3% of the white population.
The blacks in America have an average IQ of 85 because they are 20% white, right?
This is just the way it kind of cranks up.
So the standard deviation runs like this.
So the average IQ for whites is 100.
And so half of whites are below that, right?
Now, if you look at the standard deviation for blacks, it's one standard deviation or about 59 Q points below that of whites, which means that only 16% of blacks are above IQ 100, right?
I mean, okay, there's more complexity if you go into different black populations and so on.
Absolutely, for sure.
But, you know, this this idea that you've got a slice and dice and exceptions, like we make decisions about generalities all the time in life in the world in professional personal, like we make decisions.
So, you can say, well, in some places in America, if you're a male under 25, you can't rent a car, right?
And you can say, well, I know a guy who's really responsible and he should be able to rent a car.
Or if you look at East Asian young men, they're better drivers.
Or if you look at, you know, this particular redheads from North Jersey, they're so... But the thing is, you can't, you know, you have to make decisions in life as individuals, as a society.
And so this idea that it's more complex, you can't say that every single young man under 25 is a bad driver.
It's like, well, you just have to have a general rule for two reasons.
One is that investigating all the cause and effect becomes too complicated, becomes less worth it, right?
Because if you spend five million dollars trying to figure out which young males would be better or worse drivers, then you have to be able to rent to enough young males in the demographic that are good drivers in order to cover the five million dollar cost.
And then, of course, you're going to have So you're probably not going to be profitable.
And also then, what's going to happen is you're going to end up with a lot of conflict in the rent-a-car lineup, right?
Because some 20-year-old guy is going to rent a car.
Some other 22-year-old guy is going to come up and say, I want to rent a car.
They're going to say no, right?
And he's going to say, well, this 20-year-old guy just rented a car.
How come I can't?
Right?
It's just not worth it.
So you have to make decisions.
Is it generally valuable?
Profitable to rent to males under 25.
I know for some places.
They've said no and the reasons for that who knows I'm not an a Statistician working for an insurance company, but you just kind of have to make general decisions.
So saying with lots of exceptions.
Yes, absolutely Absolutely close to one In five, American blacks are smarter than the average white, which is why you have lots of successful blacks in movies and academia and so on, TV, you name it, right?
So, yeah.
Saying it doesn't slice and dice all the way, right?
Who knows what that even means.
I mean, it's just, it's boring, extra, um...
It's boring extra complexity that doesn't take into account the fact that people need to make decisions.
So as I've said a million times before, I want to repeat here.
If you're looking at, say, I mean, let's just mix it up a little bit.
If you're looking at an East Asian, right?
So Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and so on, right?
So they score very high in spatial reasoning, which is why there's a lot of East Asian engineers, right?
So you would never want to go to each individual East Asian and say, you're a good engineer.
There may be a slightly higher probability on average, but each individual you can't judge.
However, when you start to look at a million engineers, then the averages are going to start to come into being.
So you never judge any individual black, or any individual Hispanic, or any individual white, or East Asian, or Ashkenazi Jew, or anything like that.
You don't judge individuals by group averages.
Of course not.
It's like saying, I know for sure that the next woman who walks through the door is going to be shorter than the male average.
You don't know that.
I mean, if you were to make a bet, you'd have a slight edge if you went with shorter than the male average, but you can't say that about any individual woman with any certainty.
But if you start to look at 10 million men and women, well, you're going to start to get some averages.
And this difference between not judging individuals and judging averages in aggregate is something that continually trips people up.
See, it's racism to say that all blacks are less intelligent than Hispanics, right?
It's racism.
It's racism to say this individual black is less intelligent than this Ashkenazi Jew, right?
That's absolutely racist, because it's not true.
You can't make that statement, you can't make that claim, and it's wrong.
However, when you're going to start to look at 10 million, 50 million, 100 million people, then you can start to say, well, group differences are explainable by various metrics.
So, anyway.
Okay so he says but the quote intelligence and IQ is determined by academic psychologists like the paper trading we mentioned above via statistical contracts as a correlation that I show here that patently don't that they patently don't understand Okay, so IQ does not measure intelligence.
IQ measures IQ.
The IQ test gives you a number called IQ.
It does not measure intelligence.
Is it correlated to intelligence?
It seems to be.
Is there a correlation between IQ and reaction times?
Yes.
Is there a correlation between IQ and general health?
Yes.
Does it seem to indicate a well-functioning human organism?
Yes.
But it does not mean the same as intelligence, which is why there's a separate metric named G.
And Nassim does not talk about you at all in this article.
So when he says, well, IQ doesn't measure intelligence, everybody agrees with you.
Nassim, everyone is a complete straw man.
And it just shows that you haven't read deeply in the field, right?
I mean, I'll link below.
I've got an interview with 18 world-class experts on intelligence.
They don't agree with everything that I say.
Please understand this, but I have read and studied a lot and interviewed a lot of people.
So, you know, something.
Okay, it does correlate to negative performance.
Ah, you see?
Now, right before, he was saying, let's go back here, right?
It's just important, right?
It does not measure intellectual capacity or mental powers.
And now he's down to, it does correlate to negative performance.
Right?
As it was initially designed to detect learning special needs.
But then any measure would work there.
I don't know what that means.
A measure that works in left tail, not right tail, IQ decorrelates as it goes higher, is problematic.
So what he's saying is that IQ accurately predicts life outcomes, or accurately predicts, say, salary, for people who are less intelligent, but it gets less predictive of people as they become more intelligent.
Right?
Because of a little thing called free will, and choice, and options.
And also here's another thing too.
As people get super smart it becomes increasingly difficult to have a conversation with a person of average intelligence.
There is a cap on, say for instance, university around 130 or so, maybe high 130s.
After that you don't see a lot of people in university.
Why?
Because they have a tough time navigating social issues with people who are many standard deviations below them in intelligence.
So it becomes even more difficult at the highest levels of intelligence to predict outcomes.
And so people who are very smart often have a very tough time, a very very tough time having conversations with people who are much less intelligent, so they're not going to be quite as successful in general Say, are they going to be really good at training people?
Well, no.
How patient would Mozart be for instance in teaching a child how to play piano and compose music?
He would be very impatient and he would be a terrible teacher because he's very good at music, not because he's very bad at music, right?
So I have worked very... I mean, I'm aware of the category that I'm putting myself in, so you can tell me.
But I've worked very, very hard to make sure that I can translate abstract philosophical concepts into the language of the people, of the smart average.
And I've worked very, very hard on that.
I was very struck many years ago, as I've said before, when Someone said, uh, Socrates never used the word epistemology.
Love it.
Love it.
So, but it's hard.
And if you doubt this, if you doubt this, you can just do a test, right?
So you can go, if you know somebody who's got low IQ, like let's say you've got an IQ of 110, just go and try and have a conversation with someone who's got an IQ of 80.
And you're going to find that is really, really tough.
So sure, what he's saying here is that if you're a very low intelligence, IQ predicts outcomes very well, but if you have a very high intelligence, then the IQ test does not as accurately predict.
And that's partly because of, as I said before, free will, a variety of choices, variety of outcomes.
And also because the very, very smartest people have a very tough time, very tough time.
Having any kind of productive conversation with less intelligent people.
And I mean, think if you're just like one of the super smartest people in the world, how are you going to have a conversation with the average person when you watch CNN?
I mean, your head explodes when you read the news.
I mean, it's just crazy.
And the other thing too, of course, is that since IQ, even by your late teens, is 80% genetic, then you as a child have had a very great deal of difficulty having conversations with anyone.
Other kids, right?
I remember when I first moved to Canada, I was put in grade A and then I was put back in grade 6 because of a bureaucratic mess up and everything.
I found a boy and, you know, the first day, grade 6 in Toronto, the game was punch the girls in the groin.
And I just wasn't going to do that.
So I found a friend and we would spend the entire, like while the The boys were chasing the girls and punching them in the groin or pushing themselves over or trying to hit each other with ice balls or whatever, right?
He and I would just walk around the playground and have great conversations.
Unfortunately, he died very, very young.
But if you don't find people like that, how are you going to have the social skills necessary for economic success?
It's going to be very, very tough.
So yes, absolutely, it matters, right?
So IQ decorrelates as it goes higher.
Again, that means that the prediction value of IQ gets less as IQ goes up, for sure.
Got it.
All right.
To get that point, consider that if someone has mental needs, there will be a 100% correlation between performance and IQ tests.
Yeah, the performance doesn't correlate as well at higher levels as psychologists will think it does.
All right.
Yeah, got it.
So the statistical spin as a marketing argument is that a person with an IQ of 70 cannot prove theorems, which is obvious for a measure of unintelligence, but they fail to reveal how many IQs of 150 are doing menial jobs.
See, there's also things too, like intelligence requires a meritocracy in order to gain traction, right?
Intelligence requires a meritocracy in order to gain traction.
Many years ago I wrote a novel called Just Poor about a woman who was genius who was born into 18th century England as an orphan in a remote farm, and she was just a complete genius, and she had no scope for her intelligence.
She had no capacity to put it into being.
For a more contemporary and non-fictional example, look at North Korea versus South Korea.
Genetically identical, right?
Same people, just bifurcated by communism a half century or so ago, a little bit more.
So look at North Korea and South Korea, right?
North Korea, the economic output is dozens of times lower than in South Korea.
Genetically, they're the same.
Why?
Because South Korea has a relative free market.
And North Korea is an ex-communist totalitarian hellhole of torture and destruction and horror and trauma and so on, right?
So... Yeah, environment does matter.
There are people who are very smart If you're smart and you're raised by dumb parents, a lot of times the dumb parents will resent you, will be confused by you, will try and put you down, will sense that you're superior to them in intelligence, will get mad.
If you're a smart person raised in a dumb environment, like Malcolm Gladwell has talked about this, that he was born in a pretty remote area, I think he's Canadian, and he's saying, like, a couple of my friends just happen to be brilliant.
I also, again, I get the category problem, but I'm just saying my experience I happened to be around a group of people when I was a teenager in Canada after I got away from the groin-punching mouth-breathers.
I was around a bunch of people.
We debated together.
We read books.
We played Dungeons and Dragons together.
And, you know, one of them's gone... two of them have gone on to be professors.
Another one is a professional writer.
And some of them have not done that well.
One has been an entrepreneur.
Just there was a cluster of really, really smart people.
around that really helped stimulate my intelligence.
I helped, I think, stimulate their intelligence as well.
So yeah, there's some environmental issues, some people who are traumatized.
Traumatized?
If you have an IQ of 150 and you're repeatedly raped by your single mom's boyfriend as a child?
You're gonna have some trouble, right?
So yes, it does get less predictive the smarter you are.
But I don't really know what that matters.
Because the key arguments and fascination and interest and necessity for IQ discussions are around low intelligence, not high intelligence at the moment.
So, all right.
He says, here is a false comparison to claim that IQ measures the hardware rather than the software, right?
So the hardware is your physical brain structure, software is like culture and values and so on, right?
And it's not false.
There is a correlation, not hugely strong, but there is a correlation between IQ and brain size.
Brain volume does differ between the races.
Skull size does differ between the races.
And it is exactly as you would expect, that the higher IQ races have more brain volume and have larger brains and larger skulls and so on.
So, it does have some relationship to the hardware.
So he says, IQ can measure some arbitrarily selected mental abilities in a testing environment believed to be useful.
However, if you take a Popperian, Hayekian view on intelligence, you would realize that to measure it, you would need to know the mental skills needed in a future ecology, which requires predictability of said future ecology.
It also requires the skills to make it to the future, hence the need for mental biases for survival.
Yeah, I think what he's saying is you'd need to know what Intelligence requirements would be in the future in order to figure out whether IQ test is useful.
Oh Don't think so because IQ also measures your capacity for learning and your capacity for adaptation to new Environments and so on assuming a meritocracy All right So Saying that you need to know all of the intelligent environment of the future in order for IQ to be valid.
It doesn't explain why IQ tests that are taken 40 years ago, like you can do an IQ test on a two or three year old using symbols and they're pretty valid.
You can do an IQ test on children.
You can do an IQ test which doesn't revolve around any verbal component and is simply pattern recognition among symbols and signs and so on, like what is the next row in this pattern and so on.
And so this doesn't explain, if you're going to say, well, you need to know all the future environments for IQ tests to be valid, it doesn't explain why IQ tests are very predictive when they're taken 40 years ago about how people are doing right now.
So again, I don't know.
And look, you don't need a high IQ to survive.
If you needed a high IQ to survive, then all races would have the same IQ.
In different environments, you need different levels of IQ in order to flourish, right?
So if you look at the East Asians come from a Siberian background, a brutal winter and so on and and even uh... farming for rice takes a fair amount of intelligence in terms of uh... uh... the irrigation and so on so uh... clearly in sub-saharan africa or let's just take the pygmies right uh... the pygmies uh... have i think the lowest intelligence is in the fifties uh... in terms of IQ so clearly high IQ has not been selected for In that environment.
And it has something to do with not needing winter, not needing to plan for winter.
It has something to do with not having to marshal and harvest your resources.
Because if you don't plan for winter, if you don't have a forward look, right?
An IQ has something to do with the deferral of gratification and being able to look over the horizon to see what the results are going to be of current decisions.
If winter is not killing off people who didn't plan, Then there's not a positive selection for IQ.
And this is one explanation, in general, as to why warmer climates tend to have lower IQ and colder climates tend to have higher IQ, although that does diminish at the very extremes in terms of The Inuit, or what used to be called the Eskimos, don't have particularly high IQs, even though they're in very cold climates, because they have food year-round from hunting, and they can't really farm, because the growing season is far too short.
So when you get to the extremes, then it doesn't really seem to have much issue.
So, I don't know what that means.
High IQ is not always good for survival.
Alright, real life!
In academia, there is no difference between academia and the real world.
In the real world, there is.
Yeah, I don't know.
So, when someone asks you a question in the real world, you focus first on why is he or she asking me that, which shifts you to the environment.
See Fat Tony versus Dr. John in The Black Swan.
It detracts you from the problem at hand.
When someone asks you a question in the real world, you first focus on why is he or she asking me that.
Okay, so let's go with this and look at Nassim and say, why on earth would he have such an issue with IQ?
Well, he is from a high IQ caste, as far as I understand it, in Lebanon, a Christian caste.
And does he have any particular in-group preference for the Middle East, for Arabs, for who knows, right?
Muslims in general, because of inbreeding, because Islam does not ban cousin marriage, and cousin marriage is rife in Islam, and cousin marriage takes 10 plus IQ points off the general population, which is pretty brutal.
So why on earth would he have an issue with IQ?
Well, it could be because he comes statistically from a low IQ population.
I know he's not Muslim and all that, I'm just talking about the general aspect of the Middle East and so on.
And maybe that has something to do with it.
Like, it's really, really important to remember that for... Like, every group wants to see itself as the best.
Every group wants to see itself as the best.
Everybody wants to be on the winning team.
Everybody wants their own race, ethnicity, team, religion to be the best.
Of course, right?
Naturally.
It's a huge and deep shock to the world how incredibly productive and positive and powerful and beneficial white Christian civilization has been to the world.
Right, so from 800 BC to 1950 AD, 98% of scientific advancements came from white people.
Right?
So like North America and Europe, 98%.
The modern world only exists because of white people.
And that's just a basic fact.
So if you're not white, it's a big challenge.
Like, okay, what does this mean?
Well, what you'd want to do is you'd want to look at whites and say, well, what do they do?
And let me try and do that same thing, right?
Like I look at sort of in-group preferences among, say, Japanese and say, well, they are able to maintain their culture and their country, so you try and take the best of what every race has to offer.
I've taken some stuff from black culture, from Hispanic culture, from Jewish culture, from obviously white culture, from East Asian cultures, a lot of great stuff.
So you try and pick and choose from the buffet of human excellence and get the best out of all of that.
But it's really, really tough for non-whites to look at whites and say, wow, that's like a hell of a group, right?
And it is.
It's a hell of a group.
And what are they going to say as to how to explain how whites got so much right and other countries and cultures and races and religions didn't?
And that's really tough.
It's really, really tough for people.
And so what generally the answer tends to be, well, white people just stole everything.
Like white people are wealthy because they stole everything.
And that creates a lot of rage that could culminate in something like a race war, which is one of the reasons why I push back on On the data.
So, all right.
So yeah, this question, why is he or she asking me that?
I don't know.
Can you just answer the question?
Because then you got to start psychologizing, right?
So he says it's really, really bad to psychologize or pathologize people who disagree with you.
But then when someone asks you a question, you say, why is he or she asking me that?
And that's why, you see, he says that the only reason you'd want to focus on these issues is because you're a eugenicist and a racist.
Or maybe and or a racist.
So rather than answering the question you get to imagine that you can mind read people's deep base motivations and so on and it's stupid.
It's stupid stuff.
All right.
Real life never offers crisp questions with crisp answers.
Most questions don't have answers.
Perhaps the worst problem with IQ is that it seems to select for people who don't like to say there is no answer.
Don't waste time.
Find something else.
Real life never offers crisp questions with crisp answers.
I don't know what the word crisp here means.
Is it crunchy?
Does it have nuts on top?
Is it a little dry?
Is it tumbleweed covered?
I don't know what crisp questions with crisp answers.
And it's true for individuals, again, to get right back to it.
It's so dumb.
It's true for individuals.
Yes, you can't look at an individual and judge that individual by group averages.
But you know what?
You really, really can, right?
So why is there no Shakespeare coming out of Sub-Saharan Africa.
Why is there no high-functioning, economically productive, stable, and non-corrupt black country?
It's not because they're lazy, and it's not because they're bad, or it's not because they lack moral qualities or moral excellence or concentration or any of these things.
It's IQ on average, and in particular because the smartest blacks have tried to get us out of black countries and get to white countries where their intelligence is going to gain traction through the meritocracy of the free market, right?
So, anyway.
Yeah.
Individuals, yes, there's no crisp questions with crisp answers, but when you start to zoom out, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
Okay.
Like, if you start looking at prevalence of heart attacks or cancer for people who are over 80, you can't say any individual is going to get heart attack or cancer, but when you start to look at it, you get it.
All right.
Three.
It takes a certain type of person to waste intelligent concentration on classroom slash academic problems.
These are lifeless bureaucrats who can muster sterile motivation.
And this, my friends, is what we call science.
I don't know what that means.
Some people can only focus on problems that are real, not fictional textbook ones.
See the note below where I explain that I can only concentrate with real, not fictional problems.
IQ doesn't detect convexity.
Oh, that sounds terrible.
By an argument similar to bias-variance, you need to make a lot of small inconsequential mistakes in order to avoid large consequential ones.
1.
See anti-fragile and how any measure of intelligence without convexity is sterile.
I don't know what that means.
So yeah, I mean, I'm not gonna read his whole book and try and figure out how it relates to this.
But anyway.
To do well, you must survive.
Survival requires some mental biases directing to some errors.
I don't... I don't know what that means.
No, see, to do well, you must survive.
So...
Intelligence is costly, right?
So the brain is like 3% of our body mass, but it's like a third or something like that of our entire energy is devoted to keeping the brain going.
Like, one of the reasons we were able to develop a brain is we stopped going on all fours, which meant our back wasn't exposed to sunlight, which meant that we didn't need as much water for cooling our bodies, which meant that we could use more water to keep the brain running, because it does need that.
And so nature doesn't build more than you need, right?
So nature says, I want a brain the size of a walnut.
But if that doesn't work, then you want a brain the size of an orange.
And if that doesn't work, you'll take a brain the size of a grapefruit and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
Oh, and by the way, by the way, I want to point this out because you see this a lot.
So people say, If brain size is related to intelligence, then whales and elephants have larger brains than people, so they should be smarter.
And it's like, no, because it's not just the brain.
It's the complexity of the brain and so on.
Particular frontal cortex.
It's like saying, well, you see, giraffes are taller than people, therefore giraffes must be better at basketball.
It's like, no, it's not just height.
It's not just size, right?
So the nature doesn't want your brain to be any bigger than absolutely necessary.
In other words, if having a smaller brain gets you killed, nature will reluctantly give you a bigger brain.
Until such time as your big brain no longer gets you killed and then nature will stop.
Which is why we don't see IQ 300 people because it actually becomes negative because you can't find a woman who's gonna... At the highest levels of IQ there are almost no women whatsoever and so There's a cap, right?
Because if you're really, really super smart, you're not that successful, you can't relate to people, and you can't get along with women, you can't understand women, and therefore, you know, there's a drop-off in terms of very high IQ.
So, fooled by randomness.
Who wants to be fooled?
Not I. Seeing shallow patterns in not a virtue.
I think that's supposed to be is not a virtue, but apparently typos are not an indication of intelligence.
Fooled by randomness.
Sorry, that's a bit of a shallow jab.
Seeing patterns is not a virtue.
Leads to naive interventionism.
Some psychologist wrote back to me, IQ selects for pattern recognition essential for functioning in modern society.
No.
Not seeing patterns except when they are significant is a virtue in real life.
Not seeing patterns except when they are significant is a virtue in real life.
I don't know.
I can't pass that one.
Alright.
Could be my low IQ.
Six.
To do well in life you need depth and ability to select your own problems and to think independently.
Okay.
If you renamed IQ from Intelligent Quotient to FQ Functionary Quotient or SQ Salary Person Quotient, then some of the stuff will be true.
It measures best the ability to be a good slave.
Alright, so here he's got a chart correlation of IQ with different aspects of job performance.
Training success in the military, 0.6.
So 1.0 is a perfect correlation.
0 is no correlation, so 0.6.
Job performance, high complexity with IQ.
Training success, civilian job performance.
So it goes down.
Leader effectiveness is 0.3 and some change, right?
So yeah, there's a correlation.
But what I want to know, of course, is that in higher IQ, I believe that there's a bell curve of success in higher IQs.
So for instance, With university professors, the very smartest people don't end up in academia, right?
So, what I want to know is if you just have a straight... Okay, let me sort of give you an example, right?
What is a sweet spot for height for basketball players?
What is it?
6'10", 6'11", maybe 7' or whatever, right?
Now, if you have some weird
hormonal issue like the tallest guy in the world had some I don't know what something wrong with his hormones or something wrong with his pituitary gland or something like that and you end up like I don't know Andre the Giant or you end up like eight foot tall because of a medical issue then if you don't normalize out that for height for basketball then you'd say well you see when you get taller you're likely to get better at basketball but at the very greatest of heights you're gonna be terrible at basketball because it represents a health problem that's gonna have other negative effects right
So it's the same thing with intelligence.
You may be good at training people as you get smarter, but at the very highest level of intelligence, you're probably terrible at training people.
Because you just can't communicate with them that well, can't follow their concerns, can't understand why something that's so easy for you is so difficult for them, right?
So that's what I want to see when it comes to training.
Are they shaving off the top IQ and getting a more accurate measure?
Leader effectiveness.
Well, to lead people You need to be able to understand their motivations, and if you're too far away in terms of intelligence, you can't really figure out what makes them tick, what they're motivated by.
You're speaking a whole kind of different language.
So yeah, are they cutting off where higher IQ becomes a negative for working with other people?
Right?
Because all of these jobs are working with other people, we assume, right?
Uh, and so, yeah.
Creativity?
Again, I don't know.
As far as I understand it, I've not seen a lot of studies, if any, that I can recall with IQ and creativity, so I won't really speak to that, but... So... Alright.
But, you know, when you're determined to believe something, you're just gonna look at this and say, ah-ha!
You know, there's no com- But there is!
You know, 0.6 correlation's pretty important.
You know, 0.6, 0.5, 0.55, 0.58, these are all pretty good correlations.
Because our resources are very limited in life.
And if you apply resources to training someone who just can't do the job, like if you train someone to be a doctor, it turns out that person doesn't finish the course, can't ever become a doctor.
You're down one doctor, because you could have used that to train other people.
So yes, these kinds of correlations really matter.
Okay, if someone came out with a numerical well-being quotient or sleep quotient, trying to mimic temperature or physical quantity, you'd find it absurd.
But put enough academics with physics envy on it, and it will become an official measure.
See, I don't know, like, when he says it doesn't measure anything, and here he's posting something that says it measures something pretty real.
All right.
So there is a whole bunch of notes down here, but I just really wanted to get this whole point across here.
The army really, really wants smart people, right?
The army wants smart people, and the army wants to win wars.
I mean, it's literally life and death.
And the army won't take people with an IQ of below about 83, because they can't find anything to do with them.
And this was tried in the Vietnam War.
They were called McNamara's morons, and they drafted and put out into the field a whole bunch of very low IQ people, who were incredibly destructive, shot the wrong people.
There was one guy who thought it was hilarious to roll grenades into other people's tents, but they were not live, or they were Not primed and then eventually he blew someone up because he was just giggling at this, right?
So the army wants smart people and they have the highest stakes and they want the most effective fighting force and they simply won't take people because they can't find anything productive for those people to do.
And so, yeah, it kind of matters.
So here's the big issue, though.
The big issue is this.
Right now, IQ is important because of low IQ.
IQ discussion, the IQ discussion is important because of low IQ, not because of high IQ.
is a red herring.
Right?
So the problem is, in the West, millions and millions of people from low IQ population groups are being imported and funded and paid for by a high IQ population.
In general, white males are paying for lots of people coming in from the third world who come from low IQ groups.
Right?
So Muslims have an average IQ in the low 80s.
You've got Somalia with a very low IQ.
Sub-Saharan Africa with a very low IQ.
These are basic facts.
So the issue Even if we accept everything that Nassim is saying is perfectly valid and true, he's saying that at the lowest levels of IQ...
It's incredibly predictive, highly predictive and very valuable.
Well, that's the issue at the moment.
I'm not particularly troubled about the IQ 150 people coming in to the West.
I'm particularly troubled by people with an average IQ of 70 or 75 or 80 or 85 or even in the high 80s in terms of the Hispanic population coming into the West.
The West was designed by a high IQ population for a high IQ population and low IQ populations are not going to do particularly well.
In fact, they're going to do very badly.
And what that means is that at a time when we are increasingly automating things in the world, you have a situation where you're importing lots of low IQ people and you're paying them to have a lot of babies, and IQ is 80% genetic by our late 20s, sorry, our late teens.
And so you have a situation where you're importing people who are going to be dependent on welfare in perpetuity, who are going to have lots of kids, there's going to be massive amounts of crime, in particular for the mid-80s, which is kind of the sweet spot for criminality, and you are taxing the domestic high IQ population to pay for massive numbers of children from low IQ populations, and that is going to be a complete and total disaster.
Like the welfare state requires a high IQ population, because in a high IQ population, the vast majority of people make more money from being in the workforce than they would on welfare, but with a lower IQ population, which is why immigrants are so much more likely to be which is why immigrants are so much more likely to be on welfare than the domestic If you are somebody with an IQ of 85, you're going to make far more money on welfare than you ever would in the workforce, because you're just going to be very, very limited.
So, if you are replacing a high IQ population with a low IQ population, you get massive crime, you get incredible drains upon the treasury, you destroy the welfare state, you have to dumb down education as well, right?
Because, if people don't understand group differences in IQ, as the reason why, for instance, there may be fewer blacks from Sub-Saharan Africa in higher education, then what happens is they say, well, you have to have A proportional representation of the demographics in every single field, which means that if you have 10% Sub-Saharan Africans in your community, you need to have 10% Sub-Saharan Africans in higher education.
And that means that, unfortunately, based upon statistics, you're going to end up with a lower IQ population in your higher IQ, or formerly higher IQ educational system, and you're going to have to change it to make sure that they graduate.
And so you're just going to have to reduce the standards, reduce the standards.
The other thing, too, is that even the IQ, I know that that's the Flynn effect and all of that, which I've talked about before, but there's also strong indications that IQ is declining around the West, not just because of the importation of low IQ populations, but because even among whites, you are paying.
All right, so single mothers tend to be less intelligent than married women.
Single mothers get a lot of money for having babies.
Let's just talk the white population, right?
And so you are paying the least intelligent people to have the most babies and you are taxing the most intelligent people and therefore they're going to have the least babies, right?
And so even among the white population you're going to see a dumbing down of the population over time largely as a result of the welfare state.
And the result of that is that IQ tests have to be calibrated downwards because IQ tests are recalibrated every couple of years to make sure that the white population is at the average of 100 so that you compare apples to apples over time.
And so they've gotten rid of certain portions that I would consider more challenging of the IQ test because the population is getting less intelligent as a whole.
And so as the IQ test gets dumbed down for reasons of political correctness and to hide the decline caused by the welfare state even within, Ethnically homogenous populations, then the IQ test is going to become less predictive because it's getting dumbed down.
And so there's lots of reasons why you would have this.
But the fascinating thing to me is that IQ is the most important thing when it comes to lower IQ populations, and lower IQ populations are the ones flooding by the millions, sometimes by the tens of millions, into Western countries.
And so, even if we take everything that Nassim says is absolutely completely true, IQ remains incredibly valuable for lower IQ populations and predicting the success thereof.
And so, Nassim, when we're talking about immigration, by your own admission, IQ is an absolutely essential topic to discuss, because if we get this wrong, and all the indications are that we're getting it incredibly wrong, Western civilization is going to collapse, and it's going to collapse in the most horrendous possible way that you can imagine.
After 70 years of communism, Russia was still essentially Russia.
After fire bombings and two nuclear weapons being dropped on Japan, Japan was essentially still Japan.
