“Q: CURT; WHY IS NASSIM TALEB TRYING TO ARGUE AGAINST IQ TESTING?”
Simple:
(a) He’s claiming wealth is a proxy for demonstrated intelligence. (false)
(b) He’s claiming IQ has limited effect on income and wealth (true)
(c) Where it does have effect it’s in those who lack enough of it. (false)
(d) That there are other individual factors that matter as much or more – especially trait conscientiousness. But also manners, ethics, morals, and class signals of trust.
(e) That there are other group factors that matter as much or more – the average intelligence of the group (meaning the ratio of the size of the underclass to the ‘smart fraction’ being a resistance)
(f) That as intelligence increases marginal differences in demand for intelligence decrease, if for no other reason that at some point, you don’t have a large enough constituency for your ability and what you WANT to do with that ability to create surplus income and wealth. If for no other reason than your IQ *IS* your wealth, your entertainment, and your risk reduction.
AND;
(a) He has a chip on his shoulder that’s partly class and partly race.
(b) He’s trying to defend a race and culture difference by claiming it doesn’t exist.
(c) He’s trying to preserve the falsehood that his ‘fat tony’ character archetype is smart rather than IMMORAL.
(d) He’s evading the fact that this particular IMMORALITY is what the west institutionally selects against.
(e) And that morality is what companies are hiring for: productivity, morality, trustworthiness, and error detection. (Not gambling in financial markets that profits from others failures.) Because those are the traits that allow western civ organizations and institutions to scale, and prevent his culture’s organizations and institutions from scaling.
(f) And this is why he’s ‘failed’ in his project – He tried to discover a measure of informational change that won’t be possible until we have a standard weight and measure from AGI. AND because the way we defend against immorality is sovereignty, reciprocity, truth before face, duty before self, embodied in the rule of law, of that natural law, that prevents the West turning into the low-trust middle east. (Which is what he’s saying is ‘smart’: the ethics of the bazaar.)
(g) In other words, at the end of his rainbow he can’t face the fact that he’s discovered his ethics, his sense of being ‘smart’, his entire self-image, is just ‘immorality that is the reason for the failure of his culture’.
(h) And so he’s using ‘mathiness’ and pseudoscience to attack IQ by claiming individual income is a proxy for intelligence, rather than all that matters for income by YOUR demonstrated intelligence in markets is everyone ELSE’s intelligence, and personality and norms, traditions, morals and institutions, which will cause a strong distribution to the left (inability) and a narrower distribution to the right (ability). If for no other reason than it’s increasingly difficult to gain marginal improvement in income when you’re competing with increasingly competent people (duh).
IQ tests are correct. We could claim that prediction is more important than recall and recitation and test for that – but it’s very difficult. We could claim that we require personality and morality tests in addition to intelligence testing. And I’ve argued for that. And we could claim that a test of manners and agreeableness would help aslo. But the present IQ tests are just a measure of rates of learning demonstrated by performance against many types of problems- because that’s all IQ is: rate and breadth of neurological conductivity and associativity. It’s the same formula as transmission by undersea cables (all cables).
Now I’ve stated this before, and I’ve written about Taleb’s ‘game’ extensively and I’ve made a video about it. He’s blocked me for stating it. And I think he’s intellectually dishonest to promote it. And given his disagreeableness systematizing and ego’s dominance expression (and yes, I’m one to talk, right? Because I’m almost as bad), it’s blatantly obvious what he’s trying to accomplish by defending his ethic, his work, and his culture from due criticism.
I started out about the same time as Nassim doing about the same thing, except with primitive AI’s for military and simulation purposes. In that case ‘innovation’ (tail events, tail effects, meaning “innovations’) that are desired require far more information than we’d assume when it’s almost impossible for the behavior of such AI’s to become deterministic (and militarily useless). Nassim was taking the opposite view, of trying to predict rather than create tail events.
I came to the same conclusion. But I didn’t try to ‘math’ my way out of it because as a computationalist rather than a mathematician (and there is a big difference). I was keenly aware of the limits of mathematics (and given Taleb’s fascination with Mandelbrot) he should have been also.
Instead, as Hayek discovered, you can’t use math or positive legislation or positive economics to via-positiva produce a direct good. You can only use natural law in legislation, measured by economic innovation, to suppress all ‘bad things’ leaving the greatest window of opportunity for good things “innovation’.
As in everything, when Babbage failed to convert his insights into a general theory, we lost a century to sophistry in math, logic, and philosophy, until we crashed and burned set and verbal logic, and it’s discipline in philosophy in the mid-last century. At least Wolfram is somewhat fitfully demonstrating it in his ‘math of state machines’, and we now know enough about the human brain, as demonstrated by the backward training of neural networks using language instead of evolving them from embodiment. (Didn’t see that one coming myself.)
I hope this helps.
Cheers
Curt Doolittle
The Natural Law Institute.
Reply addressees: @Lord__Sousa @aldafa_ir @nntaleb