Errare humanum est, perseverare diabolicum ..

Quote:[url=https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1107632294544576512][/url]

Scott Adams blocked Taleb. I mentioned this in the JBP thread, but I'm fully expecting Taleb to go into melt-down mode in the next few years and alienate 99.999% of people.

At some point, it'll be just him and his sycophants.

Meh. Taleb's advantage over other people is that he's really fucking smart and his ideas are really good.

Lots of people made serious money in crypto using Taleb-style strategies.
Fragility, resilience, and anti-fragility are great concepts.

He would probably block me in an instant if I ever tweeted at him, but I'll keep reading him regardless because his ideas put money in my pocket. I don't really care what an asshole he is.

That's my view as well. I don't like listening to him speak. He seems to have the annoying genius trait of being in love with his own intelligence, but I do like that he made anti-fragility a mainstream concept. I can forgive some narcissism in someone who is saying something I need to hear.

I haven't had time to fully grind through a book of his, but I've had a lot of fun taking notes from his articles

Samb,

Would you mind fleshing out how you used his tactics to make money? Any best practices you adhere to?

I'm not looking for a play-by-play but that sounds interesting.

Quote:[url=https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1110187589573767169][/url]

Quote: (03-26-2019 12:01 AM)Fortis Wrote:  

Samb,

Would you mind fleshing out how you used his tactics to make money? Any best practices you adhere to?

Well, that's a huge topic, and part of it gets into more identifying information than I'm comfortable with, so how about I just give you something that was pretty useful to me during the crypto bullrun: The "Green Lumber Fallacy".

It comes from an earlier book but Taleb was the first person to really talk about it. Here's how it was described in the earlier book.




The green lumber fallacy is the idea that knowing ABOUT a thing is the same as knowing HOW TO MAKE MONEY off of a thing.

I had a similar joke I told back in the bullrun. "How do you tell if a trader loses money?" "Ask him if he's read the Bitcoin whitepaper."

This was a trap that a lot of traders fell into. They thought that knowing about a coin was the same as knowing whether its value would go up or down. So you had people who could quote the bitcoin whitepaper (The technical document that described how bitcoin worked) chapter and verse. They knew how fees were calculated. They knew the history of Bitcoin, and had all kinds of ideas about who Satoshi might be. They knew what hashing algorithm BTC used for its private/public key pairings. Etc. etc. And they spent ENORMOUS effort learning all this.


None of that shit makes you any money.

When I started, I was one of these people. I would spend hours reading altcoin whitepapers. I watched hours of indepth interviews with shitcoin developers, trying to get a good sense of the company's internal workings, whether their partnerships they claimed were legitimate, what the eventual demand would be for the product and what competitors they might face, etc.

I lost a ton of money. During the period from like June to August of 2017, I followed that strategy and did embarrassingly poorly.

Then, I switched strategies, and realized that the question to ask isn't "What is this thing?" but "Will other people want to pay me for this thing?" In other words, I stopped caring whether the green lumber was actually painted green.

I started studying the flow of money between different crypto exchanges. Figuring out what made certain coins appealing to buyers. I learned to just completely ignore a whitepaper and reduce a coin down to a single sentence like "Exchange token with ties to China" or "Does something involving DNA" and instead memorize things like its marketcap and what exchanges it was listed on. Those were the metrics that determined how much money you could make, and making money was what I wanted to do. At my height I could analyze something like 30-40 coins in a day.

And THAT was when I started making money.


EDIT: Just to make clear what I'm talking about, this is Sam when he's very concerned about whether or not the lumber is painted green. This Sam is not making any money.

Quote:Quote:

Why I'm down on Iota:

Crazy-high valuation (1 billion +) means that huge amounts of money would have to come in for you to see a 2x or 3x. If the TA supports it you can, of course, still buy, but there's no obvious reason to buy and HODL it over any number of better coins.
From an FA perspective, feeless transactions mean there's no incentive to run nodes: From what I've read there's no good reason to run a an iota node, beyond "You'll get faster transactions" "Maybe you can sell the node data to somebody" "You'll feel like a good person!". Cryptocurrency nodes are computationally and network resource intensive, and will only grow so in the future. http://www.tangleblog.com/2017/06/27/inc...node-iota/ If you want to see the kind of thing I'm talking about.
Doubt in the team: Per above.
Doubt in the underlying technology: Spend some time reading AMAs with the team on reddit and you'll see that people have any number of good, fundamental questions about the technology that the team is avoiding answering.

And this is Sam when he's stopped giving a shit what color the lumber is. This Sam is making money.

Quote:Quote:

People want IOTA? Let 'em by IOTA. Buy it before they do and then sell it to them for more than you paid for it.
It's centralized? Who cares? They want it anyway.
It has severe security flaws? Who cares? I won't be holding it long enough for that to matter, and if I do, my position sizing rules will protect me.
IOTA's written by idiots and liars? Who cares? You're not investing in a company that'll be around in 5 years, with your investment dependent on them being upright people who make good decisions. You're buying a silly, imaginary coin and then selling it a little later.

Quote: (03-26-2019 12:34 AM)Wutang Wrote:  

Quote:[url=https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1110187589573767169][/url]

I'm still smarting from being banned from a mainstream internet forum almost two years ago when they were circle jerking about the Russia probe. I made my counterpoints as politely and mildly as I could, and then the discussion reached a point of "OK both sides will check in after the Mueller probe finishes". I signed off with a slightly dismissive "OK guys keep on drinking the NYT Kool-Ade until then, see ya". Banhammer...so the circle jerk continued, and they are on suicide watch at that forum today.

samB,

Your breakdown there alone definitely bumped those books up a few notches on my reading list.

Thanks for that.

Anyone refuted Taleb's article about IQ and the statistics he presented?

If in fact its true that low IQ is a reliable indicator of failure but high IQ not a reliable indicator of success then thats a pretty important distinction to make.

My own personal experience agrees more with Taleb's view so interested to see if facts back it up.

As for his abrasive style, he's Lebanese. Thats how we argue.

Taleb's argument, which I agree with, is that IQ does correlate with success up until somewhere between 100 and 115, after which the correlation breaks down.

Quote: (03-26-2019 01:09 PM)Beirut Wrote:  

Anyone refuted Taleb's article about IQ and the statistics he presented?

If in fact its true that low IQ is a reliable indicator of failure but high IQ not a reliable indicator of success then thats a pretty important distinction to make.

My own personal experience agrees more with Taleb's view so interested to see if facts back it up.

This sorta thing doesn't really surprise me. In my own life, I've noticed that the legit smartest guys I know are all middling now. They tend to see the dark side of a proposition and will often not even try.


The guys who got farthest are the dudes who just bit down on the guard and swung for the fences for as long as it took.

Of course, if you want to be a billionaire tech-elite you'd need the requisite high IQ, but I do think that a lot of the alt-right masturbates a bit too much to IQ as an indicator of success.

For every super smart Jordan Peterson slaving away hoping to crack into the big leagues through glib and gile, there's a legion of faceless guys quietly amassing small fortunes off of unassuming shit: plumbing, roofing, laundromat, and other cash-in-hand businesses.

There are way too mediocrities, like Joe Rogan, pulling down nice millions a year for me to think that being high IQ matters that much.

^ i agree because i am one of them.

I scored relatively high on an IQ test in my youth but more importantly, i used to ace every standardized test i ever took.

I had a 99 percentile score on the MCAT and didnt open a book for it (had decided not to pursue med at that point)
I scored 780 GMAT while having no idea what the test is about.
I have an engineering degree while barely attending a class.
I had As in business electives while never attending a class just reverse engineering multiple choice questions.

I can basically pass any test or class without internalizing any long term knowledge from it.

But, once i entered the real world of business i was like a deer staring in headlights. Procrastinating, being generally uncreative, lacking initiative, hate small talk so very bad at networking, overthinking everything a million times over etc...

If it wasnt for poker and some lucky investments in my youth id be in a very shitty place mentally and in life right now. Im successful relatively but i often feel i massively underachieved (i also feel the school success can put a lot of heavy expectation on someone internally)

I have been forcing myself to change and undertake some projects now and a lot of it is actually things i considered "dumbing myself down". Making small talk, socializing with people i have nothing in common with, pursuing ideas that i think are silly, forcing my brain to shut down when it overanalyzes, etc...

Everything you said reminds me of 3 guys I knew growing up. I'm related to at least one of them.

An IQ of 120-125 is probably the sweet spot. You are smart enough to learn from the really high IQ people while at the same time able to communicate meaningfully with the average man. From what I've seen that creates a lot of opportunities for leadership and success. If you have a very high IQ you are just not around enough people like yourself growing up, and your chance of being a little weird as an adult is correspondingly high. High IQ is a mixed blessing.

I agree with Taleb about IQ tests. I think they are way to simplistic. They capture some of the ability of the mind to make various mechanical inferences and associations that were useful at the turn of the Industrial Revolution. That's about it.

In my career, I got an opportunity to interact with and observe some very accomplished people, including inventors, engineers, and scientists. For example, in one of my jobs, my boss was a close friend of Richard Feynman, and my office mate was a former professor of mathematics at Caltech. I noticed that really smart people have two characteristics. The first is an intense curiosity about how things work. The second is an extreme open mindedness. When you present them with a new idea, they will never put you down, but will say "Ok lets assume that and see where it leads". They have the ability to create something new, i.e. create order out of chaos. They can work with uncertainty and create an ordered way of looking at it. They can apply old skills to new problems. They experiment and try things out. None of that shows up in a paper and pencil IQ test.

Another thing that comes to mind is Jazz musicians. As you may know, music is closely connected to math. Some of the patterns that Jazz musicians can create and perform are extremely mathematical and complex. Thus, I am very skeptical that a black musician has a lower IQ than Europeans because he can't express his ideas on pencil and paper, even though he operates at genius level on a musical instrument. What if the musician gave the psychologist an intelligence test on a clarinet? Why does the paper and pencil have a preferred status over a musical instrument or some other mode of expression? Does this artificiality really accurately measure all forms of success in the real world?

These IQ tests have some validity in predicting whether a person can learn skills that have already been well defined. So, it means one will be successful in a well-ordered pre-robotics economy.

Quote: (03-26-2019 01:05 PM)Fortis Wrote:  

samB,

Your breakdown there alone definitely bumped those books up a few notches on my reading list.

Thanks for that.

There's a ton of amazing ideas in his books. Honestly, I feel that antifragility is overrated, in that many people give it more importance than it deserves. Very, very few systems are antifragile, and it's hard to actually apply the concept in every day life.
Taleb's real key insight was distinguishing "fragility" and "resilience" and realizing that these things aren't what they appear.
A wealthy banker making 150k a year might seem to be better off than a poor taxi driver making 30k, but all it takes is one layoff and that banker is FUCKED, whereas nobody can take the taxi driver's living away from him. The driver is resiliant and the banker is fragile.

This isn't a super new insight, but the way he presents it really makes you analyze whether your own situation is fragile or resiliant.

Quote: (03-26-2019 01:22 PM)Abelard Lindsey Wrote:  

Taleb's argument, which I agree with, is that IQ does correlate with success up until somewhere between 100 and 115, after which the correlation breaks down.

You're talking about monetary success.
And samB just showed how making money is a parasite job and works better if you have no clue what you're doing.
What can you deduce from that ?

Did I show that? I don't think I showed that.

Quote: (03-25-2019 11:34 PM)SamuelBRoberts Wrote:  

Meh. Taleb's advantage over other people is that he's really fucking smart and his ideas are really good.

Lots of people made serious money in crypto using Taleb-style strategies.

Lots of us also made serious money in crypto not using Taleb-style strategies.

Quote:Quote:

The green lumber fallacy is the idea that knowing ABOUT a thing is the same as knowing HOW TO MAKE MONEY off of a thing.

I had a similar joke I told back in the bullrun. "How do you tell if a trader loses money?" "Ask him if he's read the Bitcoin whitepaper."

This was a trap that a lot of traders fell into. They thought that knowing about a coin was the same as knowing whether its value would go up or down. So you had people who could quote the bitcoin whitepaper (The technical document that described how bitcoin worked) chapter and verse. They knew how fees were calculated. They knew the history of Bitcoin, and had all kinds of ideas about who Satoshi might be. They knew what hashing algorithm BTC used for its private/public key pairings. Etc. etc. And they spent ENORMOUS effort learning all this.


None of that shit makes you any money.

When I started, I was one of these people. I would spend hours reading altcoin whitepapers. I watched hours of indepth interviews with shitcoin developers, trying to get a good sense of the company's internal workings, whether their partnerships they claimed were legitimate, what the eventual demand would be for the product and what competitors they might face, etc.

I lost a ton of money. During the period from like June to August of 2017, I followed that strategy and did embarrassingly poorly.

You're partly right and partly wrong.

I also followed the same strategy you did, reading white papers etc. Only difference is I did it way before the entire bull market exploded. I got into crypto in late 2016, banked hard on Ethereum based on the whitepaper and made helluva lot more money than traders who came in mid-2017. Even today, in this crypto bear market, I'm making a boatload of money from solid projects that are offering staking rewards. Staking rewards is something that I imagine will catch people by surprise next bull-run (assuming another bull-run happens of course)

The green lumber fallacy is mostly applicable to day traders, not value investors. The book Taleb got the idea from ("What I learned losing a million dollars") is written by a commodity trader, not a long-term investor. It's actually a fantastic book and one I recommend over Taleb's books. The author, Jim Paul, talks in detail about the psychology of making money - which I found infinitely more useful than the "green lumber fallacy", which was merely a paragraph in Paul's book.

If you play a game similar to value investors like Warren Buffet, the green lumber fallacy is not a fallacy at all but an absolute necessity to know what the thing is to make money off it. You weren't wrong about IOTA - it's a joke project and doomed to fail in the long-term. But you tried making money being reasonable in the most unreasonable era, namely during the crypto bubble.

My guess is that had you come in 6 months earlier in the crypto world, you would've had a different story to tell. And it really depends on what game you want to play. If you're a trader who wants to quickly come and get out, by all means green lumber fallacy is what you need. If on the other hand, you're like me and you already made 50x on ETH by June 2017 and you're currently banking on other projects which have a very good shot of 20-50x before the next bullrun, focusing on fundamentals is key.

And more broadly speaking, I do like Taleb's ideas, but like the green lumber fallacy, they often seem to be very limited in practical scope and derived heavily from his experience as a trader.

In regards to limitations:

Quote:Quote:

There's a ton of amazing ideas in his books. Honestly, I feel that antifragility is overrated, in that many people give it more importance than it deserves. Very, very few systems are antifragile, and it's hard to actually apply the concept in every day life.
Taleb's real key insight was distinguishing "fragility" and "resilience" and realizing that these things aren't what they appear.
A wealthy banker making 150k a year might seem to be better off than a poor taxi driver making 30k, but all it takes is one layoff and that banker is FUCKED, whereas nobody can take the taxi driver's living away from him. The driver is resiliant and the banker is fragile.

This isn't a super new insight, but the way he presents it really makes you analyze whether your own situation is fragile or resiliant.

I know you got that banker/cabbie idea directly from his books, but I think you can agree it's not a good example in light of Uber and self-driving cars. Taxi drivers seem extremely fragile to me in 2019.

https://www.wired.com/story/why-are-new-...g-suicide/

Quote:Quote:

On March 16, Nicanor Ochisor, a 65-year-old yellow cab driver, took his own life in his Queens home. According to his family and friends, he had been drowning financially as his prized taxi medallion, on which he had hoped to retire, plummeted in value.

If that's supposed to be resilience, sign me up for the fragile wealthy banker job. At least if I'm a banker, there's a chance the government will bail my ass out. Or shit, I might even be able to pivot and join a startup or some other high status job.

And not like Uber drivers themselves are resilient seeing how Uber is hell-bent on self-driving cars.

And here's the thing. It's fine that his ideas are actually limited in scope. There are very, very few ideas that are so great, they apply in a majority of cases.

The problem is that Taleb doesn't see the limits of his own ideas, as partly evidenced by blocking/calling an idiot everyone who disagrees with him.

I would recommend everyone to read his books, just to get a different way of thinking about stuff. But as I've gotten older...for every idea Taleb has, I can think of a pretty important situation where his idea would fail catastrophically.

He comes in with the life experience of a trader and a real hard-on for Mediterrean culture. It's a bit amusing to see someone who is so deeply influenced by his background espouse his ideas as almost universal generalities.

I remember he wrote in his book how the difference between stoicism and buddhism is that stoicism has attitude. Lol, no. The real difference is that stoicism comes from the same part of the world he does and that's really why he likes it more.

Quote: (03-26-2019 01:09 PM)Beirut Wrote:  

Anyone refuted Taleb's article about IQ and the statistics he presented?

If in fact its true that low IQ is a reliable indicator of failure but high IQ not a reliable indicator of success then thats a pretty important distinction to make.

My own personal experience agrees more with Taleb's view so interested to see if facts back it up.

As for his abrasive style, he's Lebanese. Thats how we argue.

We need to take a step back and think about why Taleb went about attacking IQ.

He's very sensitive about IQ, or more specifically, national IQ since it's a common argument used by people on the right against third world immigration. Taleb - being an immigrant himself from Lebanon, which apparently has an average IQ of 82 - would understandably not like this point.

Taleb really dislikes race realism and discussions about race vs. IQ.

So keep that in mind. He makes some valid arguments, i.e. IQ isn't the end all be all. But he throws the baby out with the bathwater.

The most epic argument I've ever seen in favor of IQ is by Lagriffe du Lion:

http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/

Read it from bottom to top.

Even if you only read the bottom 5-6 articles, you'll quickly grasp where IQ's actual strength lies - i.e. in predicting differences between large groups (this is where bell curves work wonderfully).

The real crux of IQ isn't in the Taleb gotchas by showing minimal income differences between an IQ of 110 and 140. It's in the differences in IQ between racial groups and how that percolates through in the statistical distribution of groups in categories such as violent crime statistics (lower end of IQ) and percentage of Nobel prizes won (higher end of IQ).

Taleb is pulling a real slick one by focusing on individual differences at the upper end of the IQ spectrum. By doing so, he's challenging the entire science of intelligence testing and thereby trying to negate how racial differences actually play out.

So you can bet your ass now that if someone now tries to bring up racial IQ differences, they'll point to Taleb's criticisms of IQ. In that sense, he's accomplished his mission.

But that said, I have yet to see a convincing argument refuting what Lagriffe has written. I've seen some prominent people like Steve Sailer tweet about Lagriffe. I do find it interesting that I haven't seen Taleb address Lagriffe directly. I doubt he ever will.

Quote:Quote:

I agree with Taleb about IQ tests. I think they are way to simplistic

Sherman, I highly recommend the 30+ articles Lagriffe has written if you think they're way too simplistic.

Quote: (03-26-2019 03:31 PM)Akwesi Wrote:  

An IQ of 120-125 is probably the sweet spot. You are smart enough to learn from the really high IQ people while at the same time able to communicate meaningfully with the average man. From what I've seen that creates a lot of opportunities for leadership and success. If you have a very high IQ you are just not around enough people like yourself growing up, and your chance of being a little weird as an adult is correspondingly high. High IQ is a mixed blessing.

You're 100% right.

I like using height as an analogy for IQ (something I mentioned in that 200 IQ+ guy's thread).

Being 6ft tall is great.

Being 8ft tall is just weird as fuck and your best bet is that you end up in a very niche career like professional basketball player.

There are trade-offs to everything, IQ being no different.

I think even Buffett quipped he would have to lose about 20 IQ points before he could successfully manage any of the companies Berkshire Hathaway owns.

Quote: (03-27-2019 04:13 PM)SamuelBRoberts Wrote:  

Did I show that? I don't think I showed that.

Sorry, I'm having an internet overdose these days so I might have stretched it.

Short story time :
At some point in my life I was given the possibility to live very well (but illegally).
I would have had few money (at least officially ..), but all the basics covered and by now I would have 12 kids by 3 different women.

I don't want to give too many details for obvious reasons, but in any case I turned the opportunity down.
Of course, who would have accepted right ?
So I pursued a career instead and I can't complain, I make five figures monthly for less than 150 hours of work and have 2 beautiful kids.

I recently realized I made the wrong choice.
I would have been better off having taken the first option.
Money is just an illusion, it is absolutely useless.
You usually only understand it when you finally have enough.
You have been running after a red herring, the whole time.
And now it's too late, the system won.

I don't know, maybe Taleb is right after all.
I'm high IQ yet had much less success from an evolutionary point of view than I could have had had I been stupider and just focus on some real goal.
Of course I know that's not what he meant, he was talking about money since he's even stupider than me.
Fuck this shit, I'll log off for tonight.

I get what you mean oberrheiner, but I think Sam actually showed he knows more about human nature than most of the population.

Is it useful knowing the ins and outs of an investment if that is not what motivates a purchase?

Also, if you're only working 150 hours a month, make good money, have a good relationship with your wife and children and aren't unhealthy, then you're pretty blessed my bro. Take a nap or something.

Quote: (03-27-2019 03:53 PM)Oberrheiner Wrote:  

Quote: (03-26-2019 01:22 PM)Abelard Lindsey Wrote:  

Taleb's argument, which I agree with, is that IQ does correlate with success up until somewhere between 100 and 115, after which the correlation breaks down.

You're talking about monetary success.
And samB just showed how making money is a parasite job and works better if you have no clue what you're doing.
What can you deduce from that ?

I am sorry, but monetary success through speculation is a kind of accidental, unless you make the market yourself, of course.

Cryptocurrencies value is still tied to the output of economy, or actually, the FIAT currencies output, NOT to their intrinsic values aka white papers. The only intrinsic values which count are anonimyty and scalability, and which currency truly has that?

Currently, cryptocurrencies are like local (city, county) money in Europe (Notgeld) in the Great Depression Era. Which points to the fact that we are already in the Great Depression-like times.
By the way, no better way to remove inflated volume of FIAT than creating myriad of 'currencies', and then, puff!, by destroying exchanges/electric blackouts to remove the inflated QE.
Well, if you think otherwise, tell me, how many real assets were bought with cryptocurrencies? The role of cryptocurrencies is to absorb FIAT, not to move into the real economy of Main Street.


But it is still not the Green Lumber fallacy, since white papers are not the essence of cryptocurrencies. You do not know what they are by reading white papers. As with every money, you should start with the market, the economy side, the history side, not the technical side. When was the last time when many new currencies were simultaneously on the market? During the Great Depression.
Only in our technology-obsessed times people could believe cryptocurrencies are something truly 'new'.

I don't get this entire argument except him wanting to push his viewpoints.

IQ is the best correlation to life success even if that correlation isn't 100%, but it's still a good tool.

Besides - the upper tier echelons past 130 have a lower chance of corporate and monetary success than the ones in the 110-128 range. Vox Day mentioned that if you are 140+ in IQ then your chances of becoming CEO or reaching vice president level go down instead of up. The reason may be manifold and it's everyone's guess - maybe lack of communication skill between the 140 guys and the 100-110 foot soldiers, maybe it's an innate tendency to become bored with the drudgery of the corporate world.

Nobel price laureates when tested clocked around 125 in one test and it's not that impressive - but obviously they were sufficiently smart to bugger through countless studies, write papers, become famous and break through certain barriers.

I personally found that I saw more higher IQ individuals in math clubs, IT programmers, writing geeks or entrepreneurs. Some successful entrepreneurs absolutely loathed being in corporate as they considered it being in slow quicksand while they found success in their own endeavors since they could offload the boring tasks to the people they hired.

However going on that front and rejecting the entire wealth of knowledge is ridiculous.

It correlates especially well in the lower and average demographic strata as well as in life successes of those people. We don't have to go into the demographics to see it replicated both in the core countries Asia, Europe, Africa and their respective diasporas - and we are talking WORLDWIDE. The Chinese or Japanese diaspora does well EVERYWHERE!

On top of that we have some funny numbers on top of the Nobel price winners:

They tested various groups in the US:

Homeless - avg IQ 80 (white homeless tested)
Millionaires - self-made - 112
Millionaires 10+ mio. $ - also 112 to 118 - they go up to the highest level in some studies, but it does not get higher than that.

I also know that the military tests their staff quite strongly and they have huge sets of data that absolutely back up all the mainstream IQ studies. 83 IQ is their limit and not for lack of reason. I also know that the highest IQ guys get pushed into the military intelligence divisions. Generals - even genius generals - may not even score as high, but they have a certain knack, leadership abilities and are often above 120, but on average probably don't reach the highest grounds. And that is fine. The nerdy 150 IQ guy can go decipher a code or pore over some minute battleplan while the former Storming Norman inspires both the troops as well as High command.

Thus even the military conforms to this graph - the IQ success curve goes up to somewhere around 128 and then begins to gradually go down. Still - woe the nation state that falls below 100 or even 90 or 80. No amount of investment in education will push your country forward without massive support from outside - only positive eugenics.

High IQ correlates with lower agreeableness. However, low agreeableness correlates with low IQ, too.
Since agreeableness is social grease, the relative lack of it also effectively limits social influence of both low and high IQ.
Human society is essentially a society of mediocrity. Nowadays maybe more than ever. IQ is declining in the West, which means the the acceptable mediocrity treshold declines too, but with that, also the scope of influence (roughly, acceptability) of remaining high IQs goes down as well.
So much for Plato's dreams.

Contrary to its own myth of omnipotence (aka 'Star Trek'), humanity seems to be a self-limiting species, after all.