I’ve occasionally made reference to intellectual accomplishment as being the combination of three factors, and equated it to the effective use of artillery. The metaphor is as follows:
- Gun Caliber: Intelligence, as best approximated by IQ
- Gun Laying: Wisdom, which allows one to effectively aim and focus one’s intelligence on a meaningful target with precision.
- Ammunition: Knowledge and experience. It doesn’t matter how smart you are if you are operating on the basis of false, incomplete, or outdated information.
Now, NN Taleb is a very smart guy. But like all very smart men, he is subject to the temptation to substitute his ability to think quickly on his feet and utilize logic to fill in the blanks of his actual knowledge. I used to be as prone as anyone else to occasionally bluff my way past my own ignorance, until one night in college, after one of my very smart friends was so inadvertently blown out of the water this way in public, that I vowed to never, ever do it again.
In fact, regular readers here will probably have noticed that I do the opposite; while I don’t play dumb, I quite often know a bit more about the topic being discussed than I usually advertise. Back when the evolutionists weren’t terrified of engaging with me, they used to warn each other that I was better read in the basics than they tended to assume.
Unfortunately, Taleb apparently never learned that lesson, which has thereby led to the comprehensive demolition of his hapless argument against IQ. Although I was asked numerous times to address that argument in detail, out of respect for an author that I admire as well as the obvious nature of its flaws, I contented myself with simply pointing out that his argument was false on its face, on the basis of its core assumptions. However, Heretical Insights showed no similar restraint in his point-by-point rebuttal.
Taleb starts off his attack on IQ on the grounds that it supposedly has a ‘low variance explained’ with various performances (which ones specifically he’s referring to, he doesn’t specify):
Psychometrics peddlers looking for suckers (military, large corporations) buying the “this is the best measure in psychology” argument when it is not even technically a measure — it explains at best between 2 and 13% of the performance in some tasks (those tasks that are similar to the test itself)
Taleb doesn’t provide any sources for where the 2-13% claim comes from, which is odd for someone who is so seemingly confident about his stance on IQ. Besides that, he makes a very basic mistake of misinterpreting anything that has a ‘low variance explained’ as being meaningless. The problem is that r2 is a flawed interpretation of effect size because it doesn’t tell us anything about the real world effect that one variable is expected to have on another variable. As an example, let’s assume that IQ explains ‘only’ 9% of the variance in income, so does it matter whether or not a one-point increase in IQ predicts a $10 increase in income or a $10,000 increase in income? Of course it does, and this is obvious to anyone who’s honest, but here lies the problem: r2 does not tell us how large the real-world effect is, because it expresses the effect size in a statistical sense, which is neat and all, but not in a real-world sense, so it’s not very meaningful. An r2 of 0.09 for IQ and income in the real-world means an r of 0.3, or that a 1 SD shift in IQ predicts a 0.3 SD shift in income, which is certainly not trivial.
So, in the real world, even things that only explain a small percentage of the variance can have large effects. Thus, a low variance explained is not valid grounds for dismissing the utility of IQ. But the truth is, we don’t even need to think that hard to find instances where a small variance explained has a large effect. Ryan Faulk gave more intuitive examples in one of his response videos which I will list here:
- Mayonnaise only explains 5% of the variation in the tastiness of sandwiches. Therefore, hugely increasing mayonnaise levels will have no effect.
- Salt explains little variation in steak tastes. Therefore, triple the salt!
- In America, the proportion of people starving to death doesn’t explain much variation in health. Therefore, people don’t have to eat!
- Stabbings explain little variation in physical health. Therefore, increased stabbings will be fine.
- Oil production only explains around 5% of the variance in GDP per capita. Therefore, having 100 times more oil per capita won’t matter.
- Ethnic diversity only explains 5% of the variance in GDP. Therefore, replacing Norwegians with Ethiopians won’t have any effect!
Sounds stupid, right? That’s because it is…
Overall, Taleb’s article was bad, really bad. For a guy who is so confident about his stance on IQ, it’s truly incredible that he made all the mistakes that he did. Taleb seems completely ideologically driven when it comes to the topic of IQ and is completely unwilling to even acknowledge all the compelling evidence in its favor. One of the things Taleb does is constantly insult advocates of IQ or call them names, quite childish for a man who’s supposed to be regarded highly and also quite telling of his attitude towards people who disagree with him. When all is said and done, it’s pretty clear that Taleb’s personal biases against IQ prevents him from seeing the overwhelming evidence that IQ is valid and useful. He thinks that the people who promote IQ are either racists/eugenicists or psychometric peddlers looking to get rich, it never even crosses his mind once that maybe the reason why people promote it is because it’s a good tool for making sense of the world around us. The words ‘racist’ and ‘eugenicist’ are nothing more than empty moral pejoratives used to instill fear against those who are able to think independently enough to not blindly obey our current institutional authorities or our modern sensibilities. Lots of things are eugenic Taleb, and if you’re so committed to fighting it, then the only thing that awaits Western civilization is ruin. It’s time to put this delusion to rest and acknowledge reality for what it is.
I don’t know what Taleb’s motivations might be for metaphorically sticking his hand into such an obvious woodchipper, nor am inclined to guess what they might be. But the important thing to remember is that no matter how smart you are, no matter how successful you might be, and no matter how astonishing your intellectual accomplishments, achievements, and original insights might be, nothing that you did in the past means that you are going to be right in the future.
Every appeal to human authority eventually fails in the face of objective reality, because reality is the ultimate authority short of the Creator God. And the more intelligent one is, the more intellectually accomplished one is, the more important it is to never lose sight of that.