[joost]

He blocked me on Twitter when I asked a simple question


Anyways...

I finished Antifragile and I am finishing Fooled by Randomness. [I've read Black Swan but it was when it came out. Have to read it again]

I'm grasping the concept of not "collecting coins in front of the steam roller". People tend to invest in small-margin biz, risking losing a considerable amount of their portfolio value. People underestimate risk.


Examples:

Buying "blue-chip" stocks. Even the ones who pay a healthy dividend. During a Black Swan event, the stock price can be hammered and plummet (go half in value, sometimes even less). Same can be said for real estate. It can go down in value.

A friend of mine is flipping houses in Florida. Uses $1mil to buy 3 houses to renew and sell. He makes 12% in a year. But what if another hard-to-predict event like 2007 happens? He'll blow up.


My previous investment advice was to buy 90% Dividend Aristocrats stocks, 5% in gold coins and another 5% in speculative stuff (i.e Bitcoin). You can even use Covered Calls to get extra cash/income from your stocks. It's all fine in theory but if a Black Swan appears, might get hammered and take many years to recover. Imagine your portfolio losing half its value?

Taleb's Barbell Strategy would be like 90% on the safest as possible (cash, T-notes, gold, etc). Robinhood brokerage is going to pay 3% for cash accounts, 3-month Treasuries pay 2.5%...
So in case shit hits the fan, you know you're going to have 90% of your portfolio intact.
Then you use 10% on highly speculative assets, hoping to get lucky. In his case, he uses options. He's hoping for the Black Swan to appear. A debt crisis is coming. We don't know when nor how the markets will react but it can go worse than 2007/08.

Taleb's options method is buying options on the cheap, expecting a meltdown and profiting. It might take years but it will eventually. But even if the markets don't get crushed, having liquidity is important for when a good opportunity arrives. Of course it has to be something "safe". Let's say you see a great piece of real estate? In 2001 you could buy luxury apartments in Puerto Madero (Buenos Aires) for $20k. In 2007 you could buy real estate cheaply in US. In 2014 when the Russian currency plummeted a friend of mine who was there bought Tag Heuer watches for half price in the stores and took it to UK to sell them. Recently the Turkish Lira plummeted and many UK residents went there to enjoy "cheap Hollidays" or who-knows what else...

I can go on and on but I bet you can remember a time (or many) in your life when you wish you had cash available to close a good deal. So every few years there's a chance for you to enter a nice position.

He blocked me on Twitter but I appreciate the perspective he showed me with his books. Do not underestimate risk. And be Antifragile (embrace uncertainty).

[edlefou]

(01-02-2019 01:13 AM)Wutang Wrote:  

Taleb now has written a full essay on IQ:

https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely...31c101ba39

(12-31-2018 12:34 AM)Wutang Wrote:  

Taleb tweet storm on IQ; lots of statistical reasoning and concepts being thrown around and lots of it I can't understand (IQ too low? ) but others might find it interesting

He's basically saying IQ tests measure how good you are at taking tests, not real life intelligence, which depends on street smarts or situational intelligence ("It measures best the ability to be a good slave").

He also reiterates that the field of psychology is bullshit because the research doesn't replicate and doesn't transfer well to reality.

So when you use a bullshit metric to imply racial inferiority, you're incorrect from a statistical standpoint.

HCE gets it:

(01-02-2019 07:29 AM)Handsome Creepy Eel Wrote:  

The ugly truth about IQ is that the ability to juggle triangles on a piece of paper is an amazing predictor... of the ability to juggle triangles on a piece of paper. Of cunning, common sense, wisdom, willpower, determination and numerous other factors involved in real life? Not so much.

[Ocelot]

(01-02-2019 11:12 AM)edlefou Wrote:  

HCE gets it:

(01-02-2019 07:29 AM)Handsome Creepy Eel Wrote:  

The ugly truth about IQ is that the ability to juggle triangles on a piece of paper is an amazing predictor... of the ability to juggle triangles on a piece of paper. Of cunning, common sense, wisdom, willpower, determination and numerous other factors involved in real life? Not so much.

The ugly truth about IQ is that it's the most powerfully predictive measure of human intelligence we've come up with, which is why it has the mystical power to make otherwise intelligent people get so butthurt and indulge in self-delusional bullshit like this.

Go teach a bunch of 80 IQ children how to code and then tell me they're just bad at juggling triangles, or that it's pure coincidence they all take four times as long to reach the same level of proficiency you reached after two months.

When some gameless 5'6 guy laments that the only reason he can't get laid is because he wasn't lucky enough to be born with tall genetics, we set him straight and tell him to stop making excuses, hit the gym and approach. But nobody is seriously going to pretend being tall isn't an advantage, or that it's just a coincidence that tall men tend to be viewed as more attractive by women. IQ is no different: it's not an excuse for all your failures. But it does matter. And it's heritable. Deal with it.

[Proto Ubermensch]

(01-02-2019 09:13 AM)Oberrheiner Wrote:  

Ok so in his tweets he says in 19 those morons have no clear definitions and/or understanding of some terms, then in 23 he says intelligence is survival.
So not only does he contradicts himself, but also this whole conversation is pointless since we are talking about different things.

Yeah you see, in serious papers the definitions are given in the beginning so that people can agree on them and know at all what we're talking about.
Fuck this guy seriously, he's wasting my time.
I'm the stupid one here though, he had wasted my time already with his black swan book, so much so that I never got around to starting antifragile.

I don't know why I always give people a second chance.
In this case probably because he does makes a couple good points, the problem is that he presents them as something revolutionary while they're not, and they're lost in a sea of useless drama.

Or more probably because so much of my time was wasted by IQ-deniers when I was young.
All of them having this one thing in common : they were not high-IQ themselves, meaning they were talking about something they had no idea about - and that's a cardinal sin, always and regardless of your IQ.

In any case I'm done with Nassim, the signal/noise ratio is just too low.

Curious to know why you thought black swan was a waste of time? It's had a profound effect on the world (black swan is now common vernacular among investors and intellectuals)

[Oberrheiner]

Well it didn't teach me anything I didn't know before, and could have been written to be a 3 or 4 times shorter book.
I still don't understand why it's supposedly a landmark book, but I read a lot and honestly I don't even remember anything from this book.
Ah yes, I learned the english word contraption, when he talks about a friend of his who has a headset for his mobile phone if I remember correctly ?

Anyway, outliers are not a new concept.
I worked for almost two decades on safety-critical projects, and risk assessment is a thing, you know.
Now some people multiply impact by probability, some ignore probability altogether.
It's always been like that, it's nothing revolutionary - and if you ignore probability you don't have to care about black swans at all.

Why it had a profound effect on the world I don't know - but did it really ?
In my business this is basic stuff, for intellectuals well let's be honest here most of them are not very intellectual at all, and why it's new for investors I'm not sure .. although it would explain a couple of things about the finance world
Also when I see some reactions in the morocco beheading thread I don't exactly see strategies for immunity against black swans either, so I don't know.

[ilostabet]

@Oberrheiner

I agree with you that Black Swan doesn't really have 'new concepts', after all, there is nothing new under the sun and Taleb himself recognizes and uses the wisdom of the ancients to analyze the modern world. His analysis is not accurate because it is new, but because it is anything but.

Is it not true that, for example, a big part of Neomasculinity if not all of it is rediscovering age-old truths and concepts that have been forgotten and abandoned, and repackaging them for a new era? I would say so, and I would say the same for Black Swan.

For me it was an eye opening book. I think the fact it was 'groundbreaking' says more about the world we live in than it says about the book itself, the fact we have forgotten basic truths and simple perspectives that the ancients took for granted.

[Oberrheiner]

Well I said it wasted my time, it does not automatically mean that it had to waste everybody's
The what was not new to me but yes, it may have helped others in which case it's good.
The how I found not always clear and often redundant, that's harder to see as a positive but if others found it adequate it's good too.

I won't be able to make a much stronger point on this I'm afraid, I read it 10 years ago and don't remember much if at all, but I certainly understand your point.

[TigerMandingo]

Lately the manosphere has been absolutely consumed by the IQ debate. There are a number of guys on this very forum who feel the need to mention in every single post. The worst part is how dull it all is. High IQ people tend to be nauseating blowhards who use it as a crutch to make themselves feel better.

A good example of a high IQ blowhard is Garry Kasparov, the famous chess player. Bobby Fischer called him an idiot savant I believe, lol. Excellent at chess, but an insufferable asshole in all other aspects.

[edlefou]

The ugly truth is that IQ has some predictive power, but Taleb gives statistical proof that its predictive power is embarrassingly low and what it predicts is not meaningful.

Anecdotal evidence about 80 IQ children and gameless 5'6 guys doesn't disprove his statistical analysis.

Imagine this:

There's an amazing "measure" for predicting the area of a rectangle by taking the length and the width and multiplying the two together.

Many build lucrative consultancies for the military and large corporations selling this measurement methodology.

Racists/Eugenists show that certain groups of rectangles are inferior because the multiples of their widths by lengths have values that aren't as good as the multiples of the widths by lengths of certain other groups of rectangles.

However, Taleb comes along and proves that multiplying the length by the width only gives you the correct area of a rectangle only 13% to 50% of the time, and the rest of the time it gives you garbage.

Taleb's point would be that your rectangle measuring formula is not scientific and is poorly thought out.

Taleb would call you a psychometrics peddler looking for suckers and that your rectangular formula matters far less than you think, as he's shown in his analysis.

How would you prove he's wrong? Are his graphs wrong? Has he made a mathematical mistake?

[Kid Twist]

Guys like Peterson and Molyneux, hardly "-ists" of any kind, and very intelligent, say it's the only social science metric that actually is scientific and reproducible. Beyond that, it fits precisely what we see in the world.

Now, is there a difference in 110-130 IQ that isn't made better by other qualities? I don't think so. My feeling is that personal and group IQ are important as thresholds. Then other qualities can rule the day in a given environment.

[Oberrheiner]

(01-03-2019 10:17 PM)edlefou Wrote:  

The ugly truth is that IQ has some predictive power, but Taleb gives statistical proof that its predictive power is embarrassingly low and what it predicts is not meaningful.

Anecdotal evidence about 80 IQ children and gameless 5'6 guys doesn't disprove his statistical analysis.

Imagine this:

There's an amazing "measure" for predicting the area of a rectangle by taking the length and the width and multiplying the two together.

Many build lucrative consultancies for the military and large corporations selling this measurement methodology.

Racists/Eugenists show that certain groups of rectangles are inferior because the multiples of their widths by lengths have values that aren't as good as the multiples of the widths by lengths of certain other groups of rectangles.

However, Taleb comes along and proves that multiplying the length by the width only gives you the correct area of a rectangle only 13% to 50% of the time, and the rest of the time it gives you garbage.

Taleb's point would be that your rectangle measuring formula is not scientific and is poorly thought out.

Taleb would call you a psychometrics peddler looking for suckers and that your rectangular formula matters far less than you think, as he's shown in his analysis.

How would you prove he's wrong? Are his graphs wrong? Has he made a mathematical mistake?

He's not wrong, he's talking about a different thing as I said above.

As for racists/eugenists, that's your problem :
You are the one letting extremists depriving you of a useful concept because of their twisted world view.
You need to reject their bad framing of the discussion - can you ?

[Fortis]

He's slowly winning me over. Sometimes his writing style is overly complex and pedantic but I do like the sentiments within. Seems like a no-bullshit, old school thinker. I really like his emphasis on trusting people who will be affected by the things they advocate. I've long felt that politicians and our intellectual class suffer 0 consequences while acting like they know everything. It reeks of femininity and weakness.

Beautiful article on what an IYI is for those who don't know: https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellect....6ot3305bl

[Handsome Creepy Eel]

(01-02-2019 08:37 AM)Oberrheiner Wrote:  

(01-02-2019 07:29 AM)Handsome Creepy Eel Wrote:  

Some of the countries with highest IQ in the world:

highest mean IQ

(01-02-2019 07:29 AM)Handsome Creepy Eel Wrote:  

In those countries, you're apt to hear and witness stupid shit of such magnitude that it rivals anything that cannibal witch doctors in rural Swaziland could come up with

You usually won't hear this from high-IQ people (unless they're propagandists).

Although it's of course possible to brainwash smart people, you just need to invest more resources to do it (and less to undo it).

That's actually my point - we frequently mention how an IQ 150 person just can't relate to and get along with an IQ 115 "midwit" because let's face it - the IQ 150 person is a genius in comparison and their brain works in a radically different way. As soon as there is a large enough gap, communication between them becomes impossible.

In the same way, we compare the mean 100 IQ Brit and a mean 70 IQ Rwandese and declare: yes, the typical Rwandese is a drooling idiot compared to the Brit. Just look at that 30 IQ gap! The poor Rwandese just can't compare.

Yet if both of them are just as capable and of holding and acting on absolutely retarded beliefs as I have illustrated, what difference does it make in the end? If you can be a relative genius yet still relatively retarded, then what's the point of endlessly pontificating about superior IQ? If IQ really extends further than juggling triangles on paper, it should be able to make you smart - but in real life we just don't see it happening.

(01-02-2019 03:11 PM)Ocelot Wrote:  

(01-02-2019 11:12 AM)edlefou Wrote:  

HCE gets it:

(01-02-2019 07:29 AM)Handsome Creepy Eel Wrote:  

The ugly truth about IQ is that the ability to juggle triangles on a piece of paper is an amazing predictor... of the ability to juggle triangles on a piece of paper. Of cunning, common sense, wisdom, willpower, determination and numerous other factors involved in real life? Not so much.

The ugly truth about IQ is that it's the most powerfully predictive measure of human intelligence we've come up with, which is why it has the mystical power to make otherwise intelligent people get so butthurt and indulge in self-delusional bullshit like this.

Go teach a bunch of 80 IQ children how to code and then tell me they're just bad at juggling triangles, or that it's pure coincidence they all take four times as long to reach the same level of proficiency you reached after two months.

That's a strawman. I never disputed that juggling triangles strongly related to a very abstract task such as coding or that the IQ 80 children would be harder to teach coding. Absolutely they will. I just argued that being good at coding doesn't in any way prevent you from being retarded, delusional, violent and generally an utter failure at life.

Consider Eric Clanton, the communist who tried to murder someone with a bike lock. He's a college professor of philosophy. Can you really see yourself saying "yes, but at least this waste of life has an IQ of 110 and is a genius relative to Africans so that makes him superior"? What does it matter? If someone is inferior scum, they're inferior scum regardless of their IQ, and the same is valid on a national or racial level too.

It's not self-delusional to say that there's much more to life than intelligence.

[Oberrheiner]

(01-04-2019 07:16 AM)Handsome Creepy Eel Wrote:  

Yet if both of them are just as capable and of holding and acting on absolutely retarded beliefs as I have illustrated, what difference does it make in the end?

In the end maybe not much.
Both have the possibility to hold retarded beliefs, just as both have the possibility to succeed at life.

However regarding how you get to that end, the differences are enormous.
That's why it matters.

(01-04-2019 07:16 AM)Handsome Creepy Eel Wrote:  

If you can be a relative genius yet still relatively retarded, then what's the point of endlessly pontificating about superior IQ?

I wouldn't know, I don't believe in "superior" IQ - I even said several times that high IQ is often more a curse than a blessing in my experience.

IQ is just a potential, it says nothing about whether you'll ever reach this potential.
And the higher it is the more complicated it is to reach it (because of a difference in kind not in degree), so that's not helping either.

[Oberrheiner]

Also what I should add is that you don't actually see that many high IQ people endlessly pontificating about it.
Those who do are usually social failures trying to compensate that by displaying their number.

But then wouldn't Taleb be guilty of doing the exact opposite of that ?
Namely trying to compensate a not so high IQ* by displaying his social skills** instead ?

* no judgement here, he admits himself in this twitter thread that he was surrounded by people with higher IQ than him during his career.
** "survival street smarts" or however he defined that in the same twitter thread.

[Wutang]

One idea that Taleb has brought up a few times is the idea of FU Money ie. being financially independent so that you can free from people who would constrain your idea and behavior whether it be a meddling HR department, SJWs trying to get you fried, or boycotts that lead you to losing advertisers/customers. He can have the recent spat he is having with IQ and make all the various talking heads explode because he is loaded with FU money. He doesn't have to suffer anyone he doesn't to no matter who they are whether it's a random Twitter guy or someone with more credentials like the various PhDs and professors he's pissing off right now.

Since he can't be intimidated via money the other way to attack him would be to shame or disparage his reputation but it's obvious he doesn't care about that either. He's spent an entire career distancing himself from "respectable" intellectuals so he isn't reliant on their approval. He's in a great spot to be able to do the work he wants to and put out the ideas he wants to spread.

[Sp5]

I agree with Taleb on IQ. I was a clerk in the US Army. Over time, I learned the IQs (GT score) of everyone in my unit of about 200 men.

The IQ had little to do with how I had independently judged a soldier's competence, conversational ability, wittiness, or game. Some sharp guys were well below 100, and some dullards were well above it.

The range of GT scores (in those days tracked IQ exactly) in the unit was 78 to 160.

[Ocelot]

(01-04-2019 07:16 AM)Handsome Creepy Eel Wrote:  

That's actually my point - we frequently mention how an IQ 150 person just can't relate to and get along with an IQ 115 "midwit" because let's face it - the IQ 150 person is a genius in comparison and their brain works in a radically different way. As soon as there is a large enough gap, communication between them becomes impossible.

In the same way, we compare the mean 100 IQ Brit and a mean 70 IQ Rwandese and declare: yes, the typical Rwandese is a drooling idiot compared to the Brit. Just look at that 30 IQ gap! The poor Rwandese just can't compare.

Yet if both of them are just as capable and of holding and acting on absolutely retarded beliefs as I have illustrated, what difference does it make in the end? If you can be a relative genius yet still relatively retarded, then what's the point of endlessly pontificating about superior IQ? If IQ really extends further than juggling triangles on paper, it should be able to make you smart - but in real life we just don't see it happening.

IQ isn't a test of wokeness, or how redpilled someone is, it's an intelligence test. It tests their ability to process new information, acquire knowledge, make deductions from that information, reason their way through problems. I think the biggest problem with these arguments is that the anti-IQ folks usually don't know what an IQ test even entails, and think it just consists of a non-verbal reasoning puzzle page.

As for silly beliefs, well beliefs are rarely a product of intellect to begin with, they're predominantly socialised—that goes for most individuals of all levels of intelligence. The greatest socialisation pressure to adopt ridiculous beliefs today is coming from the institutions most captured by insane ideologues: universities and the media. People who are most plugged into either or both of these will have been indoctrinated more thoroughly. This is largely orthogonal to intelligence.

Note that you could just as easily use your own argument to claim intelligence as a feature doesn't exist at all, because people who have it in abundance still do stupid things sometimes. It's not a metric-dependent argument.

(01-04-2019 07:16 AM)Handsome Creepy Eel Wrote:  

That's a strawman. I never disputed that juggling triangles strongly related to a very abstract task such as coding or that the IQ 80 children would be harder to teach coding. Absolutely they will. I just argued that being good at coding doesn't in any way prevent you from being retarded, delusional, violent and generally an utter failure at life.

It doesn't prevent you, it just strongly correlates. At least until you get to the extraordinarily high 150+ range, when it starts to create alienation problems, which feed into a variety of other negatives. This isn't a fault in IQ tests' ability to correctly measure intelligence: it's simply that there are many problems attendant with high intelligence. Go ask Isaac Newton.

Again, to use height as an analogy, substantial deviation from the median has poorer average results than slight deviation (unless you want to play basketball). Being 7 foot tall has far more disadvantages than advantages. But being 6'1-6'4 is all advantages. That doesn't mean a ruler that clocks 7 foot as 'really fucking tall' is broken: it's working precisely as intended. And certain activities, like basketball, are going to be filled almost exclusively with people from the extreme right tail of the bell curve. Likewise, men like Galileo, Newton, or Mozart don't come from the mid-upper quartile of human intelligence.

(01-04-2019 07:16 AM)Handsome Creepy Eel Wrote:  

Consider Eric Clanton, the communist who tried to murder someone with a bike lock. He's a college professor of philosophy. Can you really see yourself saying "yes, but at least this waste of life has an IQ of 110 and is a genius relative to Africans so that makes him superior"? What does it matter? If someone is inferior scum, they're inferior scum regardless of their IQ, and the same is valid on a national or racial level too.

It's not self-delusional to say that there's much more to life than intelligence.

This is immense goalpost shifting. IQ tests are not "life tests", otherwise it would be called your LQ. They are intelligence tests. I don't know what this "inferior scum" business is about. Retards are retards, that doesn't make them bad people. An IQ test is also not a morality test.

You're damn right intelligence isn't everything, note even close, but the question is whether IQ is a reliable and meaningful way to measure it. The answer is you betcha.

When I was a kid I was helped by a charity that used to operate in the UK that offered aid to gifted children who weren't being catered for by the school system, and I ran some classes for them some years later. All the children had been properly IQ tested by psychs and had to be over 130 to be eligible for support. At the lower end of the spectrum, there were a few kids that I'll grant you were probably just "bright", and from privileged backgrounds with parents who were education-oriented and who put a lot into their kids.

But there was not a single child in the 150+ range who wasn't profoundly gifted—we're talking ready for university at 12 years old. And most of these kids were not privileged in any way. They were from working class families, they weren't all white/asian/jewish, but they were all male (standard deviation, the bane of feminists). And a commonality is that they were usually extremely precocious even as babies. They learned to talk 6 months early. They skipped crawling altogether and were walking several months early. They could read and write fluently as toddlers. Same story every time. Their parents were often uneducated, but without exception highly intelligent too.

There was no one similarly gifted getting scored a mere 130. The test does its job.

(01-04-2019 08:47 AM)Oberrheiner Wrote:  

Also what I should add is that you don't actually see that many high IQ people endlessly pontificating about it.
Those who do are usually social failures trying to compensate that by displaying their number.

But then wouldn't Taleb be guilty of doing the exact opposite of that ?
Namely trying to compensate a not so high IQ* by displaying his social skills** instead ?

* no judgement here, he admits himself in this twitter thread that he was surrounded by people with higher IQ than him during his career.
** "survival street smarts" or however he defined that in the same twitter thread.

Disagree on this one, there is no way Taleb scores below 140, he's likely in the 150+ range, so at the very least I wouldn't dismiss his argument as him having "skin in the game" (i.e. REEE I scored low, the test must be bad).

(01-04-2019 03:19 PM)Sp5 Wrote:  

I agree with Taleb on IQ. I was a clerk in the US Army. Over time, I learned the IQs (GT score) of everyone in my unit of about 200 men.

The IQ had little to do with how I had independently judged a soldier's competence, conversational ability, wittiness, or game. Some sharp guys were well below 100, and some dullards were well above it.

The range of GT scores (in those days tracked IQ exactly) in the unit was 78 to 160.

None of these things except competence are related to IQ, and that one's only by proxy. A low-conscientiousness 120 IQ individual will of course be outperformed by a hard working 90 IQ guy, particularly when the parameters of the work are already familiar.

[Oberrheiner]

And that was a solid post by our friend Ocelot

(01-04-2019 03:23 PM)Ocelot Wrote:  

Disagree on this one

It's just the impression his twitter rant gave me, I don't know the guy so I can't judge really, hence the interrogative form in the two sentences of mine you bolded.

[renotime]

[SamuelBRoberts]

(01-04-2019 03:23 PM)Ocelot Wrote:  

(01-04-2019 03:19 PM)Sp5 Wrote:  

I agree with Taleb on IQ. I was a clerk in the US Army. Over time, I learned the IQs (GT score) of everyone in my unit of about 200 men.

The IQ had little to do with how I had independently judged a soldier's competence, conversational ability, wittiness, or game. Some sharp guys were well below 100, and some dullards were well above it.

The range of GT scores (in those days tracked IQ exactly) in the unit was 78 to 160.

None of these things except competence are related to IQ, and that one's only by proxy. A low-conscientiousness 120 IQ individual will of course be outperformed by a hard working 90 IQ guy, particularly when the parameters of the work are already familiar.

Yeah, this is the first I'm hearing that IQ is supposed to correlate with game. When I think of a 140 IQ guy in a musty library somewhere, pouring over books for his doctoral examination in some obscure field of insect biology, I don't usually think "Man, there's a guy who's getting a lot of pussy."


Taleb's a very similar personality to Vox Day, who's been discussed to death in other threads. He loves to set traps: making bold statements that seem to say more than they actually say, and are easily misinterpreted. Then, when somebody criticizes the misinterpretation, he comes down on them hard and makes them look like an idiot. It's a hobby of his. It doesn't help that he speaks entirely in brief tweets and dense statistical language that's impenetrable to outsiders. I'm honestly reluctant to say anything about his arguments until I'm a little clearer on what his arguments actually ARE.

That said, I think a lot of the issue might have to do with the fact that Taleb is a trader, which is a fairly unique field. Trading has very little to do with IQ, and far more to do with emotional control, humility, boldness, and a number of other traits that really don't have a lot to do with intelligence. I learned this lesson pretty quickly when I started trading, 'cause I went into it thinking something along the lines of "Aha, I am a very smart person, so I'm going to be really good at this. I'll use my superior intellect to determine the course of the markets, and make a fortune!"

Several thousands of dollars of losses later, I got THAT dumb idea bitch-slapped out of me, in much the same way that the high-IQ quants that Taleb talks about blew up and lost all their money when their models failed in the bond crash in the 90s.

But I don't think you can generalize from that one, very unique field, into the wider world. I haven't met a lot of IQ80 oncologists or IQ95 assembly programmers.

[joost]

(01-04-2019 05:55 PM)SamuelBRoberts Wrote:  

I'm honestly reluctant to say anything about his arguments until I'm a little clearer on what his arguments actually ARE.

But I don't think you can generalize from that one, very unique field, into the wider world. I haven't met a lot of IQ80 oncologists or IQ95 assembly programmers.

What's considered smart? Someone successful? How can we define successful? Or smart?

Someone who gets pussy? Who makes loads of money? Who invent something? Who discover something?

As you mentioned a 140 IQ guy might be in a library looking at numbers but maybe he'll prefer to be having sex with a nice girl instead? Couldn't he use his "intelligence" to get girls? Maybe to get rich?

So 80 IQ is certainly a failure but after let's say 110 IQ you get less successful after every increase? What kind of fucked up measurement is that? That's what Taleb is presenting. So according to him, you can't measure intelligence.

[Ocelot]

(01-04-2019 07:45 PM)joost Wrote:  

So 80 IQ is certainly a failure but after let's say 110 IQ you get less successful after every increase? What kind of fucked up measurement is that? That's what Taleb is presenting. So according to him, you can't measure intelligence.

It's not the measure that's fucked up: intelligence and success simply don't correlate beyond the upper-mid quartile. Taleb is choosing to frame it this way deliberately.

It's worth remembering that many of the greatest minds humanity has produced were not "successful", financially, with women, or just in general popularity, but their contribution to the world was irreplaceable. Tesla died an impoverished incel: his intelligence certainly didn't lead to personal success.

[BortimusPrime]

Every time I read about IQ denialism I think of that South Park penis size episode where in the end the only solution was to tell everyone they were above average.

[pitt]

Replying based on the last few posts.

I think if you have a really high IQ (over 140), that will probably affect in how you deal with women, your social skills may not be so sharp. You won’t be the funniest guy in the room unless you are a high IQ guy that can dumb down your intelligence. The best guy I know in the game is not that smart, far from that, but he totally understands game, he knows the dynamics of getting laid, I have seen way smarter dudes that totally don’t get it.

I also don’t think anybody with an IQ under 100 would be a good trader, matter fact these type of work don’t interest people with low IQ, they tend to gravitate towards hands on stuff.