Geoffrey MillerVerified account

Good thing nobody believes IQ explains success in full, that's a dumb strawman from Taleb. The consensus in intelligence research is that it's only part of the story, and that there are other factors ("specialized" intelligence, personality, environment, luck, etc.)

Also: the point is that at higher IQ levels the *average* success goes up significantly, which means it cannot be the effect of variance. It might be true that it decorrelates slightly, but it is far from Taleb's dumb model that has 0 correlation after 100 IQ.

So you can use it to make vague predictions about *groups,* but it will never tell you about an individual within, and the individuals will have an outsize effect on the outcomes. The average can be explained by a few EXTREME high performers, while the rest are mediocre at best.

No, it can not, try to read the SMPY study. What increases is the *proportion* of successful people. You are asserting stuff without data (and so does Taleb). And yes, it's not the best idea to use it on an individual basis. Researchers agree with this. Everyone knows.

The crux of Taleb's method of thought is that the outliers throw off the measure irretrievably I'm willing to believe there's a MUCH higher proportion of high IQ people who are billionaires. But what about people with net worth of ~$10 mil, what IQs do they tend to have?

And he is concerned about risk and ruin. Does having high IQ significantly decrease your chances of 'blowing up' (i.e. either dying or going completely broke) over that of an IQ 100 person? So assuming that high IQ improves odds of success, does it also reduce odds of blowup?

So I think full refutation of Taleb requires showing that there aren't a lot of high-IQ losers who are broke or die early (and thus aren't picked up by our measure! Survivorship bias,) who are overshadowed by the billionaires. This is, admittedly, a hard task.

I need to go so Ill respond later but yes, you are right, survivorship bias and outliers are a problem. A way to go around them is longitudinal cohort studies, where you track outcomes over the years, taking losers into account.