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greyenlightenment  investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...  1yr ago (greyenlightenment.com)   Edited 1yr ago   3045 thread views

Nassim Taleb is likely wrong about IQ and talent

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I am going to link to this post as well because it's related and expounds on the above [Refuting common arguments against IQ and talent

](https://greyenlightenment.com/2022/07/13/refuting-common-arguments-against-iq-and-talent/)

Arguments alleging the unimportance of IQ or low correlations between innate factors and outcomes, have two flaws, those being such arguments ignore individual preferences and conditional probabilities. If you want to be good at something, you are going to be competing against other people who also aspire to be good at that very thing, not just people plucked at random. "Goodness" also means relative ability, not only absolute ability/improvement. If you go to gym and lift weights, it's reasonable to assume you will get stronger or stronger compared to someone who has never lifted, but eventually you'll want to know how good you are relative to others, too. If you want to be better relative to other people, this means having to compete against people who may have more aptitude for that very thing you are trying to get better at. In the case of weightlifting, this means people with a more favorable bone structure, favorable muscle insertions, or more fast-twitch muscles. Running? That would be lactic acid threshold, VO2 max, etc.

Correlations do not mean as much as people think they do and are misleading. When you analyze large groups of people, you tend to get low correlations. Short people can succeed at basketball, even in the NBA, but they face much more insurmountable odds compared to tall people. Most tall people do not play in the NBA (the correlation between being over 6 ft 6 and playing professional basketball is indeed small) but if one aspires to play in the NBA, being tall is pretty much a prerequisite despite this low correlation. Same for the correlation between wealth/income vs. IQ, which is low, but it's not like all high-IQ people aspire to high-paying professions. Some are writers, performance artists, painters, or don't want to move up the corporate ladder.

Of course there are benefits of doing things even if one does not aspire to being competitive. The health benefits of exercise may make it worthwhile in and of itself, even if you never get that good at it.

Successful, high-status people are not just good at things: they are good relative to other people too, which matters more. It's like great, I can do math at a 6th grade level; yes, this a major improvement over a 1st grade level, but this is not good enough to get hired at NASA. A 160 on the LSAT is an improvement over 140. Will that get you into a top law school ? likely not (unless everyone else also scores as poorly or worse). Just getting better at something is not good enough. If I sold a course promising a 20-point improvement on the LSAT, a lot of people would be interested, only to feel let down when they learn that this 20 point improvement is compared to guessing.

Second, the alleged low correlation between job performance and IQ is conditional on getting the job. Being hired typically involves two screening stages: sending the resume/inquiring about the job, and if successful, an interview. For good-paying jobs, the screening process means that people with low or average IQs are often weeded out. Likely there is a major cliff in competence between someone with an IQ of 95-100 vs 115-120. So employers want to ensure they are choosing from a pool of applicants who have credentials that correlate with at least + 1-sigma of IQ. But the 130-140 IQ guy may not be much better than the 120 guy, but the 120 guy is waaay better than the 95 guy.

My contra-argument to this would be that more strength has no value in the modern society. You need some strength to do most activities but as we have different power-tools, average worker is as much productive as the Olympic level athlete. And even if it would matter, the strongest man is only marginally better than an average male (in good physical health and training status). The group work is more important than individual strength since immemorial times. Even in stone age hunting mammoths required teamwork more than brute force.

Intelligence however is very different from physical strength. Maybe it has more value in the modern society. Again, some geniuses may make important discoveries that can benefit us all. But that may be very unpredictable and hard to measure anyway.

Taleb doesn't say that IQ doesn't matter at all. Definitely some people are smarter and therefore more successful. But the correlation of IQ with success probably maxes at certain limit.

But the correlation of IQ with success probably maxes at certain limit

Doesn't the graph /u/greyenlightenment embeds in his post suggest otherwise? Unless the limit is above 99.9%?

I agree with that. I should have replied to the OP. It had no text and it made me confused where to put an answer and I pressed the wrong reply. Sorry for that.

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