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greyenlightenment  investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...  1yr ago (greyenlightenment.com)   Edited 1yr ago   3040 thread views

Nassim Taleb is likely wrong about IQ and talent

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One cause of the IQ-denier (and extending beyond that, denial of racial differences in IQ distribution) fallacy / fantasy is assortative socializing.

Lots of top-tier VCs don't subjectively think IQ is a strong selector because -- by the time a founder gets to Series B, they've been pre-selected for high IQ (1).

Lots of CEOs don't subjectively think IQ is a strong selector because -- by the time they interview someone for an executive position, that person has already been successful and thus has been pre-selected for high IQ.

You don't even have to be that high up. If you're an engineer at Google, your friend group and work group are probably all people who are fairly high performing individuals. So you might notice that there are fewer black people in that group, but the black people that you do interact with probably feel about as smart as everyone else (2)

Conversely, in my experience, if one talks to ER doctors, cops, public school teachers, or other people who are exposed to relatively large and relatively random slice of society, and one is really careful not to use the words IQ and wait until they've had a couple drinks, each of them will readily attest that some people are just plain smart and some people are just plain dumb.

1 - Or at least high enough to come off as quite smart in a superficial conversation not in one's domain.

2 - Not really true when I talk to non-woke people, but for the woke, at least smart enough that it's easy for them to dismiss any differences as those of education or environment, etc.

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