[Starbuck]

I'm posting a lot of his stuff lately, but Nassim Taleb is a brilliant man.
This fits in quite well with this thread, Intelligence vs Wit:

Quote:

I've always wondered why males with boring professions, even when wealthy, do not attract females as much as artists do: rock stars, painters, & (in Europe) novelists & poets are more "interesting" than mathematicians, engineers, computer scientists, or physicists. Likewise men with flamboyant objects like red Ferraris or colorful clothes attract like a magnet, compared to the more conservative, but stable, plodding accountant. Same with wit compared to intelligence. Is it about the Zahavian showoff with language & artistic prowess? We have been playing with linguistic prowess and cave paintings for tens of thousand of years. Anyway, this metric can be used as a guideline to define true intelligence & relevant subjects: whatever subject is boring & unattractive in a Zahavian way will not be ancestrally fit & will be not natural to society. Painting, wit, music are more NATURAL than abstract mathematics or abstract, not exhibited wealth.

What I take is that intelligence in the sense of IQ tests and SAT scores is not as natural & ancestrally fit as wit, l'ésprit fin.

By not natural I mean not Black-Swan robust, skills we call intelligence because of a certain construction, but that are not needed ecologically. Mate selection has the right heuristics & intuitions --though in the right domain, & in the right domain only (the modern world we've constructed is quite different). So, Is "intelligence" without wit & verbal briliance really intelligence?

(From http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/notebook.htm )

And no, I have no idea what "Zahavian" means here ...but from a quick search it seems to be the scientific name for
peacocking. Amotz Zahavi apparently is an evolutionary scientist Israel.