Category: Uncategorized

Whatever happened to Trust & Safety?

Federal regulators should keep this news in mind when they’re considering the way in which the big tech platforms speech police and deplatform while they are funding criminal filth.

Google  has scrambled to remove third-party apps that led users to child porn sharing groups on WhatsApp in the wake of TechCrunch’s report about the problem last week. We contacted Google with the name of one of these apps and evidence that it and others offered links to WhatsApp groups for sharing child exploitation imagery. Following publication of our article, Google removed from the Google Play store that app and at least five like it. Several of these apps had more than 100,000 downloads, and they’re still functional on devices that already downloaded them.

WhatsApp failed to adequately police its platform, confirming to TechCrunch that it’s only moderated by its own 300 employees and not Facebook’s  20,000 dedicated security and moderation staffers. It’s clear that scalable and efficient artificial intelligence systems are not up to the task of protecting the 1.5 billion-user WhatsApp community, and companies like Facebook must invest more in unscalable human investigators.

But now, new research provided exclusively to TechCrunch by anti-harassment algorithm startup AntiToxin shows that these removed apps that hosted links to child porn sharing rings on WhatsApp were supported with ads run by Google and Facebook’s ad networks. AntiToxin found six of these apps ran Google AdMob, one ran Google Firebase, two ran Facebook Audience Network and one ran StartApp. These ad networks earned a cut of brands’ marketing spend while allowing the apps to monetize and sustain their operations by hosting ads for Amazon, Microsoft, Motorola, Sprint, Sprite, Western Union, Dyson, DJI, Gett, Yandex Music, Q Link Wireless, Tik Tok and more.

The situation reveals that tech giants aren’t just failing to spot offensive content in their own apps, but also in third-party apps that host their ads and that earn them money. While these apps like “Group Links For Whats” by Lisa Studio let people discover benign links to WhatsApp groups for sharing legal content and discussing topics like business or sports, TechCrunch found they also hosted links with titles such as “child porn only no adv” and “child porn xvideos” that led to WhatsApp groups with names like “Children ???” or “videos cp” — a known abbreviation for “child pornography.”

They “scrambled” to remove them. But only after they were caught. How is that not a crime? After all, are we not reliably informed that the big tech platforms carefully monitor and patrol their content?

Those faces….

Faith Goldy notes: TFW the Trump family and TPUSA realize: “We’ve brought a senile narcissistic gamma male in to lecture a paying crowd. We’re screwed.”

I’m not sure which is funnier, the expression on Jack Posobiec’s face or the one on Donald Trump Jr.’s face. They both clearly recognize word-salad when they hear it.

UPDATE: Upon further review, it’s definitely the melange of disgust and contempt on Kimberly Guilfoyle’s face.

“Is that… is that the stink of GAMMA that I smell? Get away from me, you creep!”

“They simply failed to recognize the full horror”

The near-total inability of the American people, and the U.S. government, to recognize the full horror of their situation is not exactly new. For Christmas, Spacebunny hunted down a complete first edition set of A History of the Peninsular War by Charles Oman, which she somehow managed to obtain for less than five percent of the going rate. When it comes to things used and garage sales, she is without question an Apex Predator; she is the party primarily responsible for my beautiful collection of books.

Naturally, I immediately awarded the seven-volume set pride of place in my library. In addition to being one of the most thorough and well-sourced accounts of a war in recorded human history, Oman’s history of the Peninsular War is remarkable for its keen observations of human nature. Prior to encountering Martin van Creveld, Oman was my favorite military historian, and A History of the Peninsular War is indubitably his magnum opus.

The attitude of the people of Northwest Spain during the French invasion can’t help but strike the observer of the current US situation as one that is all-too-familiar:

Leon and Old Castile had, as we have already had occasion to remark, been far less energetic than other parts of the Peninsula in raising new troops and coming forward with contributions to the national exchequer. They had done no more than furnish the 10,000 men of Cuesta’s disorderly ‘Army of Castile,’ a contingent utterly out of proportion with their population and resources. Nor did they seem to realize the scandal of their own sloth and procrastination. Moore had expected to see every town full of new levies undergoing drill before marching to the Ebro, to discover magazines accumulated in important places like Ciudad Rodrigo and Salamanca, to find the military and civil officials working busily for the armies at the front. Instead he found an unaccountable apathy. Even after the reports of Espinosa and Gamonal had come to hand, the people and the authorities alike seemed to be living in a sort of fools’ paradise, disbelieving the gloomy news that arrived, or at least refusing to recognize that the war was now at their own doors. Moore feared that this came from want of patriotism or of courage.

As a matter of fact, the people’s hearts were sound enough, but they had still got ‘Baylen on the brain’: they simply failed to recognize the full horror of the situation. That their armies were not merely beaten but dispersed, that the way to Madrid was open to Bonaparte, escaped them. This attitude of mind enraged Moore. ‘In these provinces,’ he wrote, ‘no armed force whatever exists, either for immediate protection or to reinforce the armies. The French cavalry from Burgos, in small detachments, are overrunning the province of Leon, and raising contributions to which the inhabitants submit without the least resistance: the enthusiasm of which we heard so much nowhere appears. Whatever good-will there is (and among the lower orders I believe there is a good deal) is taken no advantage of. I am at this moment in no communication with any of their generals. I am ignorant of their plans, or those of their government.’

At least the Spanish people of the 19th century realized that they had been invaded and they were at war. Today, despite having been invaded by a force 250x larger than the Napoleonic army that invaded Spain, the American people still completely fail to understand that their country, their culture, their government, and their traditions are being fundamentally altered without their will or their consent.

Go away and stay away

In case you’re wondering why Nate Winchester is now banned from commenting here.

Is there any benefit of the doubt or charitable interpretation I can extend to your words, which you have extended to Peterson’s? This isn’t even rhetorical. I haven’t had the time to go over everything you have written in detail so I would not be surprised if there is a passage where you extend him charity. Only on my initial impression does it strike me that by the exacting standard you condemn Peterson, do you also stand condemned. Note also that this is my principle issue with Vox Day as by the standards he applies to Peterson, Vox then is every bit the liar, narcissist, and cultist that Peterson is – more so even.

What an utterly ridiculous statement. There is absolutely no charitable reading of Jordan Peterson that allows one to consider him anything but what he is, a liar, a globalist, and a practicing occultist. Nor does one require an “exacting standard” to condemn his vast panoply of lies, bait-and-switches, redefinitions, false postures, and deceptions. As for the idea that I am even more of a liar than Jordan Peterson, Fake Nate might as reasonably have claimed that I have been prescribed even more SSRI’s than Peterson or dreamed more regularly about cannibalizing my extended family.

I neither need nor want shameless snakes like this around here. And I neither request or require any charity in reading what I have written. If any of you genuinely believe that I am a habitual liar, then by all means, just go away and stay away. Why would you ever want to read someone who lies to you on a regular basis in the first place?

Darkstream: NN Taleb and the importance of intelligence

From the transcript of the Darkstream: now 1 million views strong:

So, Taleb says IQ measures “an inferior form of intelligence stripped of second-order effects meant to select paper shufflers obedient intellectual yet idiots. This is a true statement followed by a falsehood, well, actually, it’s all false. IQ doesn’t actually measure intelligence at all, it is a proxy for intelligence, okay? Intelligence is not something that we know well enough to quantify how many one has. We know exactly what an inch is, so we can measure exactly how tall you are but we don’t know exactly what an IQ point is, and so to say it measures an inferior form of intelligence, no, I don’t think that’s correct.

Q- What do you think is the average and max IQ of your fan base is?
A- Well, I know that there are several dozen people with IQs in excess of 150, so if you simply do the math, I’ll have to work it out, but I would say that the average is probably around 110, which is actually extremely high if you work out the math. Maybe a little bit more.

Adventures in Jordanetics

Fencing Bear is discovering that the only people more inclined to turn on badthinkers and thought criminals than academics are Jordan Peterson cultists:

It is difficult to describe the crisis I have been living through these past several weeks.

Short version: Don’t call out the Devil if you aren’t ready to bout. 

Alternate short version: “Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this world? Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” —1 Corinthians 1:20

There has been much bitterness. There have been feelings of betrayal. There have been feelings of being lied to while watching people whom I thought were my supporters fall away.

Friends warn me about overreacting. At which I overreact.

“Academic freedom means nothing if the faculty do not stand up for it.”

I believed that. Someone whom I have trusted my entire academic career told me that. I still believe it—but do my colleagues?

“Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from insanity.”

I heard someone say that recently on his livestream. Someone whom my friends tell me I should be wary of associating myself with because he has been called the same names I have over the past several years.

Three weeks ago I found this note tucked behind a drawing that I had posted up by my office door.

You are a white nationalist and a detriment to all forms of knowledge. Please resign, as your institution has and will continue to fail to condemn your actions.

You are a violent and malicious threat to academia and to the future. Not only do you profess racist ideologies, you collude with all sorts of monstrous people who transform your otherwise out-dated and foolish forms of racism into something much worse.

I posted the letter on my social media and my friends got a good laugh out of it. I told my dean and chair about the letter, and the campus police sent an officer round that evening to take a statement from me. Colleagues from around the world wrote to me, expressing dismay that I should be receiving such missives.

And nothing happened.

Sadly, she’s come under attack for her lack of faith in St. Jordan Peterson as well. On a not-entirely unrelated note, Nick Krauser reviews Jordanetics in his inimitable, hard-hitting style:

How is it that Vox can achieve such a steady hit-rate and always be at the leading edge of the curve? His Cuckservative book came out before Trump won the Republican nomination. His take-down of Jordan Peterson came at the peak of his popularity when pretty much every right-winger I knew was riding the Canadian globalist’s nut-sack. Vox isn’t just outside the mainstream Overton Window, he’s perpetually outside the Alt-Right’s own Overton Window. So, how does he manage it?

Simple. He’s read history and philosophy. Modern retards raised on YouTube, Twitter and hyper-ventilating click-bait conservative bloggers have no sense of perspective. They think Animal Farm is a porno, Big Brother a TV show, and Franz Ferdinand an indie band. Those of you fortunate enough to get a real education are better able to spot the same old patterns reemerge.

There’s nothing new under the sun. It’s just old wine in new bottles.

The problem when first approaching Jordan Peterson is that he’s a muddled thinker, bullshitting speaker, and incompetent writer. That means to make sense of him you have to straighten out all the knots he himself has created. Reading Jordanetics reminded me of a philosophy lecture I took as a fresh-faced 18yr old scamp in a course called Rousseau and Marx. I asked the lecturer why he’d assigned the Past Masters summary books on those two black-hearted rogues rather than their original writings.

“Oh, they are terrible writers. It’ll take you forever to figure out what they are trying to say. Don’t bother. Just go to the summary books. Those are cleaned-up Rousseau and cleaned-up Marx.”

Cleaned-up? That’s how it feels reading Jordanetics. Vox has done JBP the favour of organising his muddled thoughts for him in order to get at the heart of his true meaning. Actually, it’s not doing JBP a favour at all because to explain what he says in clear terms is to expose him for the evil Satanic globalist fraud that he is. You see, JBP is a wannabe L. Ron Hubbard. He’s a mentally-ill, moral and physical coward, with a messiah complex. His role is to mislead you. There’s a fair chance that JBP was sexually molested by his own grandmother but that can’t be anything compared to the brutal rape Vox gives him in Jordanetics.

Vox’s parsing of JBP’s philosophy, as expressed in Maps Of Meaning and 12 Rules For Life, is that JBP is preaching a post-Christian religion of Balance. JBP uses the terms Order and Chaos as proxies for Good and Evil, and his advice all leads towards a Jedi-like goal of achieving Balance between the two. The goal is not to fight and defeat Evil, but to assimilate it. Obviously that’s ridiculous.

Having read much of the Western canon, Vox is able to trace the intellectual inspiration of JBP to his roots which will surprise the average Peterson fanboy. Vox makes a strong case that JBP is knowingly drawing ideas from Carl Jung and…… Aleister Crowley. Yes, the bald-headed Satanist. He doesn’t just throw those names out as insults but rather draws the connection through exegesis of Peterson’s own written words and a comparison to the gnostics, pagans and Satanists who originated the ideas. Vox firmly believes JBP is knowingly evil, and I agree with him.

There is more. Read the whole thing there.

RIP Whatever

John Scalzi’s decline into irrelevance continues apace:

Every year I post stats on traffic for Whatever, and every year it gets harder to see how it accurately reflects my actual readership, because of the way people read things I post here. Bluntly, relatively few people visit the site directly at this point in time — As of this moment, for 2018, Whatever has had 2.82 million direct visits in 2018, down from last year’s 4.1 million, and substantially down from the 2012 high of 8.16 million.

Strange, because I simply haven’t seen the same sort of decline here at Vox Popoli. As of this moment, for 2018, VP has had 31.85 million PAGEVIEWS, up slightly from last year’s 31.2 million, and substantially up from the 2012 figure of 6.10 million. And Whatever’s reported traffic of 2.82 million is about 25 percent worse than I expected; I had anticipated a decline to 3.75 million in 2018.

Note that Scalzi actually means “pageviews” when he writes “direct visits”. This is the sort of definitional bait-and-switch he has attempted to play in the past, but we know from his past reports that he’s actually talking about pageviews rather than hits or unique visits. Of course, he’s referring to WordPress pageviews, which tend to be a little more generous than Google pageviews, so an apples-to-apples comparison would be 31.85 to 2.69.

But wait, there’s more!

As an aside, there’s a fellow out there who loves when I post these pieces because he like to then say that his own (self-reported, as these are) blog numbers are higher, and this is evidence that he is truly more popular than I am, I am not all that popular, etc. It’s entirely possible at this point he has a larger number of direct visitors to his site than I do. I suspect I may have a larger overall social media footprint than he does, however. For example, I have 158K Twitter followers, and he has none whatsoever, as he was booted off the site for being a terrible person some time ago. I’m not sure he ever talks about the fact that his being a terrible person means his own site is one of the few remaining social media outlets where he is tolerated at all, so if you want his brand of petty shittiness, that’s where you have to go.

Zero. Fucks. Given. So brave. Thank you for this. Actually, Scalzi being willing to post his numbers even when they no longer flatter his self-inflating pretensions is one of the very few things I respect about him. As for my “self-reported” numbers, they are straight out of Blogger and I am reporting them with scrupulous accuracy, as even my worst enemies will usually admit is my wont.

I track my blog stats on an annual basis, so the final figure for VP will be north of 32 million. Thanks to all of you for making this possible, and thanks as well to the Scalzi fan-trolls, who encouraged me to start paying attention to my blog statistics, and from whom we never, ever hear lecturing us about the vital importance of such things anymore.

Do click on the link. Give the poor guy a little traffic for the sake of the good old days.

UPDATE: If you find it hard to grasp the concept of gamma, this should suffice to get it across to you.

lol, it didn’t take the sad little person in question very long to take that particular bait, did it. He’s awfully predictable, and easily manipulatable.

Secret King wins again! Anyhow, as far as relevance goes, the objective metrics are in line with the blog statistics. What is amusing is that if you look at the Google Trend statistics going back to 2004, you can see that he’s really made a meal of that brief period in 2012 when one viral post made him look somewhat more significant than he has ever actually been.

John Scalzi is actually a tragic figure. He could have been considerably more than he turned out to be, had he simply been willing to accept his limitations and work within them rather than focusing all of his energy on convincing the world that he was something he was not and could never be.

Economics vs biology

Free trade theory is about to be put to a large-scale empirical test:

South Africa’s and Togo’s parliaments this month ratified the agreement establishing the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). The total number of countries committing to the deal has thus grown to 49.

Once the agreement comes into effect, it will create a tariff-free continent, covering a single market of 1.2 billion people in 55 nations with a combined gross domestic product of about $3 trillion. It will constitute the largest free trade area globally, according to South African Trade and Industry Minister Rob Davies.

The agreement is expected to reduce export tariffs which currently average 6.1 percent, and boost intra-African trade by more than 52 percent after import duties are eliminated. It is focused on diversifying trade exports away from just extractives and enhancing the chances of small and medium enterprises to tap into more regional destinations.

Economists say that tariff-free access to a huge and unified market will encourage manufacturers and service providers to leverage economies of scale.

If the free traders are right, the African economy is about to explode with trade, economic growth, and rising per capita incomes. If the biologists are right, none of this will make a damn bit of difference, as the biological limits of the populations will outweigh any structural improvements.

Of course, all of this is probably irrelevant, as the conspiracy theorists who believe China is going to colonize Africa and put blacks on reservations in imitation of the European treatment of the North American continent are the most likely to be correct.

Mailvox: Taleb errs on IQ

JC has a Christmas request:

You mentioned Taleb is one of the few people that would make you question things you previously held. Taleb’s math is out of my league but it’s the same way I feel about your blog posts, i.e. they make me really think about my previously held beliefs. Could you maybe address his IQ thread in your blog or on the Darkstream one of these days?

Knowing my respect for the acumen of NN Taleb, a number of people have emailed me concerning his recent thread criticizing the idea of IQ and its utility in providing a reasonable proxy for comparing intelligence between individuals. I love Taleb’s books, I admire his pugnacious spirit, and I do not dismiss anything he says out of hand. However, no matter how much I respect anyone, I do not accept anyone as an authority who cannot be questioned. I have questioned and critiqued most of my intellectual heroes, from Umberto Eco to Thomas Aquinas and Marcus Aurelius, so I won’t hesitate to point out the various errors in fact and logic that Taleb makes in his “IQ” Thread.

“IQ” THREAD

“IQ” measures an inferior form of intelligence, stripped of 2nd order effects, meant to select paper shufflers, obedient IYIs.

1- When someone asks you a question in REAL LIFE, you focus first on “WHY is he asking me that?”, which slows down. (Fat Tony vs Dr John)

2- It takes a certain type of person to waste intelligent concentration on classroom/academic problems. These are lifeless bureaucrats who can muster sterile motivation.

Some people can only focus on problems that are REAL, not fictional textbook ones.

3- Look at the hordes with “high IQ” (from measurement) who are failures in real world rather than the ~50{d8b4b03f7cd10021bc48a627e8e1f7f3430c71153efff7ea4a5b1b0e3fb64988} correlation between IQ and success in 1) salaried employment, 2) jobs that select for edjukashion.

Yuuge survivorship bias.

37 out of 38 PhDs in finance blew up in 1998!

4- If many millionaires have IQs around100, & 58 y.o. back office clercs at Goldman Sachs or elsewhere an IQ of 155 (true example), clearly the measurement is less informative than claimed.

5- If you renamed IQ , from “Intelligent Quotient” to FQ “Functionary Quotient” or SQ “Salaryperson Quotient”, then some of the stuff will be true.

It measures best the ability to be a good slave.

IYIs want to build a top-down world where IYIs have the edge.

6- If you take a Popperian-Hayekian view on intelligence, then you would realize that to measure it you would need to know the SKILLS needed in the ecology, which is again a fallacy of intellectual hubris.

7- Perhaps the worst problem with IQ is that it seem to selects for people who don’t like to say “there is no answer, don’t waste time, find something else”.

Remember the 1998 blowups.

8- IQ is an academic-contrived notion.

And the problem is that in academia there is no difference between academia and the real world; in the real world there is.

Which explains why @primalpoly (while an honest resesrcher) can’t see where we are coming from.

9- It is PRECISELY as a quant that I doubt “IQ”.
I’ve spent 34 years working w/”High IQ” quants. I’ve rarely seen them survive, not blow up on tail events.

Those high IQ who have survived like @financequant /Renaissance happen to be yuuugely street smart

10- #SkininTheGame shows that the only robust measure of “rationality” & “intelligence” is survival, avoidance of ruin/left tail/absorbing barrier, (ergodicity). Nothing that does not account for ability to survive counts as a measure of “intelligence”– just philosophaster BS.

11- A robust use of “IQ” is for low scores for special needs pple. But then practically ANY measure would work to detect problem & improvement.

Or no measure: just a conversation #Lindy. But then psycholophasters are using it like cholesterol, transferring from tails to body.

12- If someone came up w/a NUMERICAL “Well Being Quotient” WBQ or “Sleep Quotient”, SQ, trying to mimic temperature or oth physical qty,  you ‘d find it absurd.
But put enough academics w/physics envy on it & it will become an official measure.

That’s what happened to “IQ”.

13- For a measure to be a measure it needs to be:

+ UNIQUE
+ MONOTONIC
or, at least
+ TRANSITIVE

Hence IQ is not a measure, but something for psycholophasters to BS about.

14- Any measure of “intelligence” w/o convexity is sterile.

https://www.edge.org/conversation/nassim_nicholas_taleb-understanding-is-a-poor-substitute-for-convexity-antifragility …

15-” IQ” is most predictive of performance in military training, w/correlation~.5, (which is circular since hiring isn’t random).

QUIZ: translate the correlation into percentage of the time IQ provides a correct answer there.

16- So Far: “IQ” isn’t a measure of “intelligence” but “unintelligence”; it loses its precision as you move away from 70 (left tail).

Where it’s most hyped (*some* jobs) it predicts ~15- 63{d8b4b03f7cd10021bc48a627e8e1f7f3430c71153efff7ea4a5b1b0e3fb64988} of the time, ~10{d8b4b03f7cd10021bc48a627e8e1f7f3430c71153efff7ea4a5b1b0e3fb64988} if you demassage data.

It it were a physical test, wd be rejected.

17- A graph that shows the synthesis of my opinion on IQ and the “reseasrch” results about it.

18- (continuing graph). So far none of the IQ-psycholophasters seem to grasp that local correlation is never correlation is the commonly understood sense. So when they say  “IQ works well between 70 and 130” it means: “IQ works well between 0 and ~85, maybe”.

19- A general problem w/social “scientists” & IQ idiots: they can intuit the very terms they are using.
Verbalism; they have a skin-deep statistical education & can’t translate something as trivial as “correlation” or “explained variance” into meaning, esp. under nonlinearities.

20- This Tweet storm has NO psychological references: simply, the field is bust. So far ~ 50{d8b4b03f7cd10021bc48a627e8e1f7f3430c71153efff7ea4a5b1b0e3fb64988} of the research DOES NOT replicate, & papers that do have weaker effect. Not counting poor transfer to reality.

How P values often fraudulent:https://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.07532.pdf …
Same for g factor

21-If you look at my p-haking above all the numbers by the fellow are upper bound -add category selection & the story is grim. Discount the story by >½.

“If IQ isn’t a valid concept, no concept in psychology is valid.” Sorry but psychology is largely bust.

22- This tweet storm irritated many:

1) Charlatans with something to sell: without IQ & other *testing* psychologists have little to sell society; there is a vested interest in hacking/massaging the stats & defending the products.

2) Pple who want some races to be inferior.

23- Note 1: Why is Intelligence = (long term) survival? Because convexity, missed by IQ tests. You want to make those mistakes with small consequences  NOT those with large ones. Academics ~ always focus on frequency of error not magnitude. Too Gaussianized. See #antifragile

First, while IQ may measure an inferior form of intelligence, Taleb’s apparent unfamiliarity with the statistically observed exclusion of the high-IQ cognitive elite means that he finds himself in error from the very start. Whether it was designed to do so or not, IQ observably does not select for “paper shufflers, obedient IYIs” as those who can best be described in that manner tend to be in 1SD to 2SD range. In fact, those in the 150+ range are 97 percent EXCLUDED from the elite professions, including academia, often due to their inveterate intellectual disobedience.

One study even found that the highest IQ among the academics measured at an elite English university was only 139! The fact that IQ proxy tests have not been utilized in the US college admissions process for nearly 30 years now only further obscures the severing of the link between academia and high intelligence.

Second, while it does take “a certain type of person to waste intelligent concentration on classroom/academic problems” those don’t tend to be the 3SD+ set. They tend to focus on ABSTRACT problems, because they are the only people capable of, and interested in, doing so. It is the midwits from the 105 to 115 level who prefer spitting out correct answers to questions already answered.

Third, Taleb fails to understand the reason for the correlation between high IQ and failure in the real world, which stems from the communications gap. The correlation between IQ and academic success is only 50 percent for IQs below 140; the rate of real world success for 150+ IQs is higher in the real world than in the academic world. Taleb is looking at too broad a range of “high IQ” rather than at a reasonable gradient of high IQ ranges.

Fourth, Taleb conflates intelligence with survival. But this is just flat-out wrong. Intelligence is simply a measure of intellectual ability, just as size, strength, and speed are measures of physical ability. And while intellectual ability is not necessarily as easily quantified, and while IQ is assuredly not a perfect measure, it is no more correct to redefine it simply because some people with lower IQs have higher incomes than other people with higher IQs than it would be correct to redefine size because some short people have higher incomes than taller people.

The fact that a track sprinter’s speed does not always translate to success on the football field, where speed is at a premium, does not mean that the sprinter is not fast. It merely means that there are other, more important factors involved that are less immediately apparent to the casual observer. And given the way in which the most intelligent women are disinclined to reproduce, it should be obvious that intelligence is no more intrinsically advantageous to survival than size.

In this failed critique of IQ, Taleb demonstrates the limitations of the technical mind, which I suspect in this case stems from Taleb’s understandable irritation with the shortcomings of the quantifiers used to determine IQ. A better measure would take into account more objectively quantifiable measures such the as speed of accurate reading, and place more importance on the ability to correctly perform logical and mathematical tasks quickly. But Taleb’s critique primarily fails due to his false assumptions concerning the correlation of academic success with IQ, which is surprising considering that Taleb probably knows more 1SD to 3SD academics than anyone reading this.