Geoffrey MillerVerified account

This is stupid. The blog post at the top shows plenty of examples where higher IQ matters after 100 IQ. There's even one that shows increased chances of various outcomes at the top 1% of ability. I can't believe people ate up Taleb's made-up graphs.

Just because having higher IQ 'increases your chances' of certain outcomes does not mean that you can actually predict outcomes from IQ. If I tell you that a particular person has tested at 160 IQ, but no other info, can you tell me how successful they are?

If there are a lot of high IQ high performers, but also a lot of High IQ low performers, and a LOT of high IQ mediocre performers, then IQ is NOT actually telling you much about an individual person's performance. As in it isn't actually *explaining* their success in full.

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.)

So what percent of success does IQ explain? And if it doesn't explain much, what precisely is it useful for? Why use a measure that doesn't capture all the relevant factors? Talebs argues that a true 'intelligence' test should correlate highly with 'success' in real world.

Actually he argues such a test is most likely impossible. Give me a definition of success, and maybe I can find a paper investigating it. For academic performance, for example, IQ+conscientiousness "explains" half of it I think.

Taleb seems to think it is impossible with a fake model, but that the 'real world' is going to separate out who wins and loses. He also indicates the factors that go into success will change with time. So if factors of 'success' are so chaotic, it may be fallacy to rely on ONE.

Who relies on one?