Think it should be kept in mind that what Taleb is arguing here is the limited usefulness of IQ in predicting success above a certain IQ level, let’s say the mean. He 100% acknowledges its usefulness for predicting success of lower IQ persons.
He mainly just wants to point out that any other measure that was as bad at predicting higher levels of performance as IQ is would not be held in nearly as high regard. IQ therefore is in a vulnerable position as a hallowed metric, which he detects and proceeds to attack, hence the Twitter thread.
Think he could have done it with less bluster and fluster, but that’s all he’s saying at the end of the day. Not nearly as controversial as some are making it out to be
Have you ever read any of his books? Bluster and Fluster is his thing. I wanted to put down "The Anti-fragile" until I figured out that his persona is kind of like his advice on prediction. A kind of caustic sorting hat. Now it's sort of his brand and it works fantastically for clickbait.
In my view the interesting part of IQ is not merely in its ability to predict human performance in areas where we expect intelligence to matter, but also in its underlying claim that there is even such a thing as a general intelligence (g), as opposed to bundles of domain-specific abilities.
Proponents of g don't claim that it's an alternative to domain-specific abilities. They claim that it exists in addition to domain-specific abilities, and is what explains the correlation between performance across domains. That is, people who do well on mathematical tests also tend do well on tests of verbal ability. The factor analytic model that yields g attempts to explain this by viewing mathematical ability as the combination of two factors: a domain-specific mathematical intelligence and a domain-agnostic general intelligence. A subject's performance on verbal tests would similarly be modeled as the product of their g and of a cognitive ability specific to verbal tasks. That a subject's performance on one type of test is partially predictive of their performance on the other type is then (according to this model) explained by the two cases sharing a single partial cause, g.
As another poster mentioned, don’t think that g is necessarily in opposition to bundles of domain-specific abilities.
I see g as an attempt at dimensionalality reduction - can the essence of what is admittedly a complex phenomenon be boiled down to a single metric which, while clearly not complete, is at least directionally correct / helpful.
g in some sense could simply be a low dimensional projection of these more complex bundles.
It is exactly that: think of it as the first principal component, of some group of tests.
Obviously this always exists. The argument is really about how big the 2nd component is -- if it were comparable, then talking about the 1st alone would be very misleading. And for a typical bundle of school-like topics (like math/english/biology exams) it's quite a long way down: IIRC a factor of 3 or 4?
If the bundle of subjects is different, then the size and meaning of the components will vary. In the tests the army does to slot recruits into all sorts of roles, I think manual dexterity is one of the things they care about which is almost uncorrelated with g. Eyesight is I think one of the only things negatively correlated with g (and it's thought to be nurture: bookish kids spend too little time outdoors).
Was IQ ever meant to be a measure of financial success? Or rather, did anybody, at any time, ever think that the “smarter” people were the more financially successful? I know I never thought that or observed that anybody else appeared to think that. Being “smart” meant that you were (under the just-world hypothesis) guaranteed a certain level of comfort: you’d end up with an office job where you say all day in an air conditioned office rather than breaking your back under the hot sun, but the super-successful types were either (depending on your biases) the ruthlessly selfish or the risk-takers.
He mainly just wants to point out that any other measure that was as bad at predicting higher levels of performance as IQ is would not be held in nearly as high regard. IQ therefore is in a vulnerable position as a hallowed metric, which he detects and proceeds to attack, hence the Twitter thread.
Think he could have done it with less bluster and fluster, but that’s all he’s saying at the end of the day. Not nearly as controversial as some are making it out to be