(FB 1545943056 Timestamp)

RE: Nassim Nicholas Taleb ON HIS IQ RANT

I will still take this debate, but not interwoven with twitter-spam. (a) g measures what we attempt to measure (b) chance of success corresponds to a distribution of traits, plus the utility of those traits, in service of the population under the bell curve within 1 SD.

Those of us with exceptional abilities favor working with our region of the bell curve – puzzles – that are of INDIRECT value rather than DIRECT value. WE HAVE KNOWN THIS FOR DECADES.

Lastly, we go to university etc to avoid the marketplace (‘work’). This is the value of higher education: to provide a non-market means of identifying selection. In this sense your criticism is correct. In the sense that you’re criticizing IQ measurements, you’re WRONG …PERIOD.

All of this is OLD NEWS. If you want to encourage people to prosper by pairing their skills to those necessary to serve the market that they understand, then yes. If you mean very bright people are fooled by sophism, innumeracy, pseudoscience – then yes.

But likewise, just as it has taken you many years to migrate from the positivist search for mathematical discovery of units of informational prediction, to the demand for warranty of due diligence (falsification), you too are vulnerable to innumeracy, pseudoscience, ‘literature’.