Episode 102: Is IQ a Bit Scientifically Valid?
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Hello out there. This week on the Theory of Anything podcast, we discuss Nassim Nicholas Taleb's article, IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle. We use this article as a springboard to consider, do the numbers produced by an IQ test say anything meaningful or useful about human minds? Would these tests be better off in the dustbin of history?

And is there overlap between Taleb's take on IQ and the negative view of these tests held by many critical rationalists? Taleb is a polarizing figure, but we do our best to look past his personality and focus on the claims he makes in the essay. And I hope our listeners do too. I got a lot out of this discussion with Bruce, and I hope someone out there does too. ♪

Welcome to the Theory of Anything podcast. Hey, Peter. Hello, Bruce. How are you doing today? Good. This is just after Christmas for us. I'm afraid to even say what I got for Christmas because it's so nerdy. Oh, no. I got a book on probability and the history of probability. Okay. Because I am... That's one of the gifts I got, but we're not like massive gift buyers for Christmas, so we just...

And we even kind of like get our own gifts. Like we just decide what we're going to be receiving for Christmas. Uh-huh. Yeah. That's kind of how it goes. Rather than risk. And we're doing a little bit of a mixed mix up. Like they'll, we'll buy a few gifts that are surprises or something just to keep it fun. Uh-huh. But, uh, the name of the book is the emergence of probability, a philosophical study of early ideas about probability induction and statistical inference by Ian hacking. Okay. And, uh,

I actually bought it in part because of our interview with David Deutsch. We had that little short discussion about what the word originally meant. And I should note that

That was just talking about etymologies. It wasn't a serious attempt to figure out what the word originally meant. So I was really curious, what did the word originally mean? Like in the minds of people back then, not a Popperian like me retroactively using etymologies to recreate it. And he covers that in great detail. And I'm really pleased with that part of the book so far that I've read. So I also...

I also got the complete fiction of HP Lovecraft. That's another gift I got for Christmas. Oh, I think I have that one too, actually. Do you really? I didn't even know you liked Lovecraft.

Well, to be fair, I think I bought it to read to my kids, and the only one we read from it was that call of Cthulhu. Cthulhu. Cthulhu. Yeah, that was the only one I read. Nobody knows how to pronounce Cthulhu. Okay. And we intentionally made it so it was unpronounceable. Yeah. But of course, we've kind of settled into agreed upon Cthulhu.

pronunciations and you'll definitely hear Cthulhu most often. Yeah. Okay. Well, I, yeah, it was, um, it was good. It was good. You know, I'm just trying to read my sense, the classics while I sure still can. And we're reading Dune right now. And, um, are you aware that Conan took place inside of the Cthulhu mythos?

I, I, I've heard you say that and I, I absolutely, I absolutely believe that though. I mean, it's kind of true. Yeah. He, he definitely reduced the connections to it before published. Like he would in the original stories, he would actually use the actual names of the Cthulhu mythos gods.

So that it was clearly in the Cthulhu Mythos. And then he'd remove them just before publication and make it more generic. So it's arguable, but it's generally accepted that Conan took place in the Cthulhu Mythos. Okay. Conan's the guy in the Cthulhu Mythos, the human that actually fights back and wins. Nobody else ever does. Yeah. But Lovecraft just takes place more in...

Modern times, though. But they're some of the same demons or whatever. That's right. Is that okay? I got it. All right. So we are going to talk today. I mentioned this in some past podcast. I wanted to do this. And the title of the podcast, at least in my notes, is IQ is a bit scientifically valid, which is a really dumb name. But I'm going to explain what it means as we go. Okay.

It's really, we're going to talk about Nicholas Taleb's critique of IQ.

And I don't disagree with his critique, by the way. Not that I'm an expert, not that I would know if it was correct or not, but I think he does a marvelous job of taking apart IQ theory, right? Yeah. As far as I can tell, anyhow. So we're going to cover it today. And maybe just a little bit of background. I'm sure most people know who Nicholas Taleb is at this point. He's most famously the author of The Black Swan.

And he's the one who came up with that term black Swan that you hear used everywhere. It came from his book. Yeah. He actually has written like, I came up with four or five different books and it calls him. He's got some name for what, for the series. The first one was fooled by randomness. We're going to talk about that. Wait, can we back up one second? Are you sure that he came up with the term black Swan? I mean, don't you think that was that people talked about that for him? No. Okay. So he,

No, you're not sure. No, I am sure. You are sure. Okay. Okay, so let's back up. Yeah. I would probably be more accurate to say he popularized the term black swan. Fair enough, yeah. Because obviously black swans and the concept of a black swan as a literal black swan existed way before Taleb. Okay. But he's the one who first applied the term in his book to

to things to be unimprobable events that take place in, say, the stock market. Okay. That our models don't account for. Okay. So when somebody says that's a black swan, and they're referring to some event on the stock market, that use of the term does come from Taleb. Okay. So before him, if you had said it was a black swan, no one would have known what you were talking about. You know...

That's a really good question. I mean, when he called it a black swan for the first time, he didn't need to do a great explanation for people to understand what he was talking about. The concepts that he's invoking, and this kind of goes back to Hofstetter, the analogy that he's invoking is so obvious that I think people just sort of get it the moment. You don't need to necessarily explain it to people. They kind of get what you're talking about usually. Okay.

And that was why he picked it. He picked it as his analogy precisely because it's such an obvious analogy that people's minds can pick up on. And it's got this really strong value because of that. But I don't think anyone, I'm not aware of anywhere where people ever used the term black swan to refer to improbable events of the stock market prior to Taleb. Maybe somebody can check us on that. Well, I actually already did. I've got chat GPT open and

It seems that you are correct. He was the first to use it to describe rare, unpredictable events that have massive consequences and are often rationalized in hindsight as if they could have been predicted. So there you go. I guess you're right. I was almost sure you were wrong, but okay. So his book, The Black Swan, is the book that introduced that idea into the public consciousness, right? Okay. Yeah.

So his first book was actually Fooled by Randomness, which is another, I mean, like the term Fooled by Randomness, I'm sure predates Taleb. But that's another idea that he popularized from that book. By the way, that's a really good book. His most famous book is The Black Swan, which is also a really good book. All of his books are really good books. Yeah. But I feel like Fooled by Randomness has been over-

It's the least well-known, least popular of his books. Okay. And I feel like more people, including especially Taleb, should go read that book.

Like, Taleb has so many things he needs to learn from his first book that he's long since forgotten. Okay. So it's really an interesting, well-done book in so many ways. And it's interesting to see how much he's changed since his first book, where he was really a pretty nice guy, to the total a-hole that he is today, right? Yeah.

And he's just completely just the voice from the first book to the last. I actually like listen to them all in series or something. And he changes over time into the a-hole that we all know and love today. Yeah. And-

But he did not start there. Like, it's hard to even believe it's Taleb in the first book. Well, that happens to some people when they get older or something. I don't know. If I can make one comment about that. One of the things I like about our podcast is that the vibe of our podcast is rarely talking about personalities, ranting and raving about what an idiot someone is. You know, I see us more as exploring ideas.

rather than doing anything that's too mean-spirited. That said, I don't really agree. We've talked about whether critical rationalism is an attitude or a methodology. To the extent that it is an attitude, I would say...

Taleb does not embody that attitude. You know, he's even in the piece, he's calling people names and all this. I just don't think that a rationalist truth seeker should behave like that. That said...

He makes a lot of good points, too. So, you know, I guess we should probably focus on those. So actually, let's talk about that for a second. I have in the past podcast before, Peter, you were part of the show. I referred to Taleb as one of the children of Popper. Yeah. So let me explain what I mean by that. OK, so there are certain thinkers today still alive. Well, like David Miller was one that I referred to, and he is now passed on. But he was alive at the time I said it.

who were students of Popper or just learned a lot with what they learned from Popper. And they have taken critical rationalism and they have a certain interpretation of it

And they're at odds with each other a lot. So they represent different interpretations of critical rationalism. So obviously, Lakatos, is that how you pronounce it, is one that's a famous child of Popper who took critical rationalism in a totally, totally different direction. Feyerbrand. I'm trying to remember who they all are. Like, there's a number of them, and I'm sure I don't even know who they all are. Yeah.

There's another one that we've talked about a number of times and his name's not coming to my mind, but I likened him to the guy from Harry Potter who brags all the time. He's kind of funny that way. But there's a number of these people who, after Popper died, or even while Popper was still alive, started diverging critical rationalism into their own take on it.

Are you talking about Joseph Agassi? Yeah, Agassi. Agassi's the one. He's one of the children of Popper. Okay. And each of them has, I mean, really, they each have a very different take on critical rationalism. On this podcast, the only take I really know is Popper's, right? Like I've had, I'm not an expert in critical rationalism.

the philosophy of critical rationalism. And I've spent all my time trying to make sense of Popper's take on critical rationalism. But I found that a lot of the things that when I have concerns with something Popper said that, and obviously I'm also very familiar with David Deutsch's take on critical rationalism, which is he's also one of the children of Popper. Um,

But a lot of times when I've had concerns with something Popper said, almost always one of the children of Popper has addressed it, right? Somebody else before me noticed the problem and has already solved it. And that's one of the things that's brilliant about having all these different takes on critical rationalism is that they've worked out what the problems of critical rationalism were, and they've come up with possible solutions to the problems.

So Taleb, in my opinion, I mean, everything you just said, I totally agree with. I think that he does not embody emotionally. He does not embody the critical rationalist attitude well at all today. He is without a doubt, one of the greatest intellectuals working within critical rationalism today. I might even go so far as to say he is the greatest one now that David Miller has passed away. So it's,

I think that we can acknowledge his emotional problems and the way he comes across bad. And as part of the podcast, we're going to talk about that. I actually have some things I put into my notes that I thought were kind of humorous. But we can acknowledge... And take some very confusing positions, too, like on GMOs and certain things. I can't really understand where he's coming from. You know, I...

I want to do a podcast on that. I have not read up on his take on GMOs. I know he's strongly against them. But we're going to do a podcast on James Shapiro, who is also against GMOs. And Shapiro explains his concern in a way that I can wrap my mind around. I don't necessarily agree with him, by the way. But in a way that I can look at it, I can go, oh, I finally get what Taleb's worrying about. Yeah.

Well, you know, just so no one thinks I'm completely closed minded about anything. I did try to read or listen to RFK Jr.'s book recently. I was just, I don't know, enough people that I semi respect had told me that it was worth checking out that I made it through 10 hours. It's 30 hours long and I kind of bailed on it.

Um, he is, I kind of concluded that he's, he's very much, he's a bit like Taleb, except more extreme, I think, and that he's very much in the conspiracy theory mindset, uh,

You know, everything is about pharmaceutical companies making money and all that. I mean, I tend to think I have a very charitable reading of other people just in life. You do. You're very good at that. Oh, yeah. I don't know. For better or for worse, I don't know. Maybe I'm too charitable. But I just think it would be much more likely that someone would be honestly...

um wrong with good intentions rather than just wanting to make money for pharmaceutical companies or whatever the way rfk jr seems to think but i was curious if to lab and rfk jr were aligned and i i looked it up on on twitter and and i apparently rfk jr had reached out to lab as a potential ally in the the struggle against gmos but that to lab

basically said he's an idiot and he doesn't like him either. So I don't know. Is there anyone that Taleb does like? I don't know. I'd be curious about that. Right. So now we got to give Taleb credit here though. When you think of talk about his books, one of his books was Skin in the Game. He popularized this idea. I mean, obviously Skin in the Game existed way before Taleb, the term, right? But he popularized its usage in trying to explain certain types of problems. Yeah.

And then Anti-Fragile was one of his books. He entirely invented the concept of anti-fragile, and you hear it all over the place now. That's true. I did know that. And I mean, like, this guy really is a genius. He's got a very high IQ, you might say. All right, let's talk about Taleb's stuff here. I have a lot of criticisms, but I don't want that to mean...

I mean, like, I really almost entirely agree with what he's saying here. At least I have no reason to disagree at this point, right? So, I mean, like, I really do have a super positive view, both of Taleb and of this article, okay? But I'm going to use it with a twist, in a way that maybe people wouldn't have guessed, okay? Because I think it'll be more interesting this way. So, back in episodes 53 to 55, we took a look at a disagreement between

Dvarkish Patel from the Dvarkish Patel podcast and the crit rat community over intelligence. Now, recall that the crit rat community argued that intelligence is purely a matter of time and interest and nothing else. And for those who think maybe I'm exaggerating when I say that, I sourced that. I had a chance to ask them questions. I had a chance to

try to get them to clarify that they didn't really mean that. And they very consistently made it clear they did mean that. And this was a large group of them that I was interacting with, trying to get them to explain their views, giving them counterexamples, getting them to try to explain these counterexamples within their theory, things like that. Okay. So when I say that they have argued that intelligence is purely a matter of time and interest and nothing else, that is at the time, at least,

what they were arguing. Okay. So moreover, as part of that, that meant that they denied the existence of mental disabilities or at least refused to answer questions about it, depending on which one I was interacting with. Some denied it. Some just simply changed the subject whenever it came up. And again, I've sourced all this. This is all in episodes 53 to 55 in detail. Okay. Nearly word for word examples of them saying this.

Now, Dwarakish Patel argued that there is a continuum of intelligence and offered the scaling hypothesis as his theory of intelligence. A theory, scare quotes, intentional, that I argued has no content, but that he claims that the, that it claims that the more neurons you add, there are sudden jumps in intelligence that explain the jump between animals and humans.

He needed that scaling hypothesis to explain why humans and animals weren't on a single continuum. Okay. Why there was some sort of gap between us. It's his way of trying to explain the same thing that the jump to universality and universal explainers would explain within the crit rat viewpoint. Okay. Now we criticized on this podcast, both viewpoints and found both viewpoints to

looked at him from a critical rationalist, Popperian standpoint, found both to be considerably lacking. Okay. Now, interestingly, in our interview of David Deutsch in episode 100, Deutsch

He disagreed with the claims of the crit-rat community. In fact, he outright said that there was such a thing as mental disability and that some people who would still be considered universal explainers may not be able to learn some subjects because of disabilities. He even gave a made-up example, wasn't meant to be anything but just completely made up just to illustrate, hypothetically, that maybe they have like a short...

not much of a short-term memory. And so it's just would be very difficult for them to learn certain types of subjects. Okay. Now that that's like available out on the internet, I suspect the crit rap view theory of intelligence is going to probably die because they do tend to conform themselves to whatever David Deutsch is currently saying. So I actually hope it will die because I don't think it was a particularly good theory.

So I thought that was kind of interesting. Deutsch, actually, I said to him that perhaps like a person with Down syndrome could in theory learn quantum mechanics, but you would need some sort of intervention to help them. He didn't even agree with me on that, right? Like he's stronger into this than I was on my stance.

And he said, well, it would actually depend on which disability they had, what the nature of the disability was, which is actually, in my opinion, a better answer than what I said. So I'm going to adapt my view to Matt Deutsch's now, because I think he's actually got this correct. So Deutsch does accept that mental disability is real, and that it may even mean that there are some subjects inaccessible to a mentally disabled person. Now,

Because I then went on in episodes 53 to 55 to reuse the crit, or after episodes 53 to 55, to reuse the crit rat theory of intelligence as essentially a punching bag for several episodes to help explain where I think the crit rat community has sometimes gone off the rails, epistemologically speaking. Perhaps inevitably, this means, meant that people thought I was quote, pro IQ realism.

Which would mean that I accept that the theory of IQ is basically correct, that it is a rough measure of a single measure of intelligence, presumably G-factor. But in fact, I'm fairly critical of both theories, and I don't consider IQ theory to be a correct theory, though I do accept that it has some verisimilitude. That is to say, I accept that IQ theory is measuring something that is real, but it may not be what you think it is, i.e. G-factor.

But I also accept that also about the crit rat theory of intelligence, that it has some verisimilitude. Specifically, if you don't include disabled people, someone who's – whether we're talking about someone with Down syndrome or even just someone who's going senile because of old age, right? If you exclude that there's something physically wrong with their brains –

I actually think that probably a lot, maybe all, but at least a lot of what we call intelligence probably does boil down to time and interest. It's just exactly like they're saying. So in this episode, I'm going to set the record straight on where I do or rather do not stand on the question of intelligence. I've kind of done this in brief in past episodes.

I say do not stand because my view is not advocacy for any current theory, but rather more criticisms of all existing theories. Yeah. Can I try to summarize what I got from the article first? Sure. Before we get into that and see if we're on the same page about what he's actually saying? Sure. Absolutely. What I got, okay, first of all, he's very clear. He says IQ measures extreme unintelligence. Yes. So it goes after, it identifies people with

basically disabilities quite well, which, yeah, okay, I'll buy it. He seems to think it's not as good at, or maybe not effective at all, at measuring people with exceptional abilities. And I've got to say, I mean, looking at the graphs and his arguments on that, other than his name-calling, he calls...

he calls Charles Murray a mountain bank several times, which I had to look that up. I guess it means someone like a fraud or something, an intellectual fraud, but that was, that was, uh, interesting. But yeah, he, he, um,

He basically argues, you know, he shows that like the bottom 25% of college professors have a lower IQ than the average janitor or something. And, you know, he has all these graphs that show that it doesn't really explain that much, which is...

Truthfully, I hope it's true, honestly, because I find that one of the things I love about the more optimistic universal explainer hypothesis, the cold Deutsch way of looking at humans is that, you know, it's just always a matter of.

It comes down to our theories. Our theories define us and what we're capable of and not these genes that are hardwired into our bodies. One of the points he makes, which I thought resonated with me, is that what an IQ test measures is...

in reality, is actually fairly simple. It measures how well you can score on an IQ test. That's something that the CritRack community says all the time. That's all it measures is how well you can score on an IQ test, yes. So how, you know, if you think about how multi-dimensional the real world is, you know, like you can tell if someone, if you're evaluating in whatever field you're in, if someone's opinions are...

are BS or not, you know? I mean, it's not like, it's never as straightforward as the kind of questions that would occur on an IQ test. So it plays right into his concept of, what do you call it, IYIs, intellectuals get idiots, which plays right into that. I kept thinking of something for my own

field, I guess you could say. I mean, you know, I've worked as a special education teacher in various kinds of positions. So, you know, I mean, I have a lot of experience working with people who don't, you know, don't seem to get math and you go over it with them again and again and

And they still don't seem to get it. And they seem to want to. But then you try to attack it in a different way, explain it differently. And it's just, you know, I mean, disabilities are real, I think, to some degree. I would never, I just have so much real world experience that suggests that they exist.

They are that, you know, but that does fit into his hypothesis here too, saying that, you know, he seems to suggest that IQ does measure extreme disabilities quite well. But that, you know, one of the treatments for autism, have you heard of ABA therapy? No, I haven't. Oh, I guess I've heard the term. I don't know what it is. Applied Behavior Analysis.

Well, you know, it's basically about 10 years ago or 20 years ago when I was getting my graduate degree, it would be popularly mentioned as the only scientifically valid way to treat autism or at least the thing with the most science behind it.

And I so, you know, but if you really when you get down into the weeds, well, now it's kind of fallen out of favor a little bit as people have kind of moved towards other things. But, you know, I when you get down into the weeds about it, you know, for in order for it to have any scientific validity.

They'll claim that you've got to do it like six hours a day or something, literally, like it's on every single day. And then you give them, you know, it's a complete sort of behaviorist model where you give the kid or the adult, I suppose, you give them, say, their favorite treat after they learn how to perform some task, like tying your shoe or something like that. Boom. So you do that again and again and again and again. And then they say, oh, look.

It works. We taught this kid to tie their shoe. And then we tried this whole like other sort of just like encouraging them or not really doing that in the same kind of methodology, methodology.

methodical way. And they, they did not learn how to tie their shoes. So look, this has scientific validity, but you know, you have to take that with a grain of salt. Yeah. If I could, I'm sure that I could be trained to all do all kinds of things. If you gave me my, my favorite thing to, to, to do this or that, but you know, it doesn't really change my personality or my interests or my abilities or, or, or anything. So you've got to, you know, I think when you get down into the weeds, you,

With that, you know, ABA therapy is not really all it's cracked up to be. And, you know, in the same way as an IQ, he seems to be saying making a similar claim about IQ. I mean, someone might be really good at, say, recognizing patterns on a test.

But then you particularly if they're motivated to take the test, maybe they come from a background where IQ really means a lot and they want to score well on the test. But then they you put them in a real world situation where where they've got to find, you know, look at the multivariate complicated things about humans and life and all this. They might not do any better than someone anyone else. So that seems to be the claim he's making. And I think it has some validity.

That's a pretty good introduction to this article from Taleb that we're going to be talking about. So let me say that this article, the first time I had... I think somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew about its existence from way long ago, but just wasn't interested enough to read it. And I started to see quite a number of crit rats starting to pass around this article at some point. It's, I think, a fairly old article. So I think that... 2019. 2019. Okay, I guess...

It's relatively old, maybe. So usually they would be passing it around to someone claiming IQ theory is roughly correct. So it'd be one of those things where somebody says something about IQ and some crit rat responds and says, oh yeah, you know, you poo head, look at this article from Nicholas Taleb. And that was the refuting article that showed that they didn't know what they were talking about or whatever. Right.

So I never really read the article until recently, but I ended up really liking it. And I think Taleb has some incredibly good data that supports his views. And yes, I do mean supports his views. Feel free to read that term as refutes views that aren't his, but I personally find that wording very confusing and difficult. So I'm going to say supports his views. Yeah, I don't think that's ever going to catch on, that kind of language. So...

In this episode, we're going to go over Taleb's article, which is a darling of the CritRack community and in detail, but we're going to do it with a twist. I'm going to use this article, which mind you, I think is pretty much entirely correct, okay? But I'm going to use it to demonstrate what we might call the art of counter-reading. So I think counter-reading is one of the single most important things you can learn to do, rationally speaking. To understand the art of counter-reading...

You have to understand a secret about human beings. We tend to pay way more attention to vibes than to actual content. I mean, to some degree, we all know this, right? Like we know that in a debate, if the person can get a good, you know, humorous knock against the other person in, then we go, oh, wow, he won the debate. You know, like we clearly care more about vibes than we do about content. Guilty as charged.

Um, so I'm going to, um, argue that the reason why crit rats love this article is for its vibes, not its content, uh, content wise, it undermines the crit rat theory of intelligence pretty strongly. Um, but, but that's okay because David Deutsch, his statements on our podcast undermine the crit rat theory of intelligence pretty strongly.

But vibes wise, this article is so negative on IQ theory that it makes perfect sense that the crit rats who hate IQ theory are going to love this article. Okay. So the name of the article is IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle.

So right there, you already know exactly what Taleb sets out to do. He's going to argue that every person that has ever advanced IQ theory is knowingly and fraudulently trying to advance a pseudoscientific theory to defraud you.

Probably because they're racist, no less. And I wish I was joking on that last statement, but he does actually say this. Here's a quote from the article. IQ theory is promoted by racist eugenists, people bent on showing that some population have inferior mental abilities based on IQ test equals intelligence. Yeah. Nicholas Taleb is far too famous for me to bother with much of introduction, which is why we made a giant introduction at the beginning.

But if you don't know who he is, he's a famous author. His first book was called Fooled by Randomness. In that book, he argued that human beings have a bad tendency to see non-existent patterns in randomness. And so they accidentally get seduced by theories which are incorrect due to misleading evidence.

He then went on to write three more books in which he argued vigorously that absolutely everyone who ever disagreed with him, which is basically every famous intellectual you've ever heard of, is knowingly lying and fraudulent because that is the only possible explanation for them having ever gotten something incorrect. Despite his overall attitude problem, I love Taleb's books. Everybody loves Taleb's books, actually, I think. Yeah.

And he is one of the best Popperians that I know of. If, you know, in terms of his intellectual output, if not maybe his attitude. Despite CritRats loving this article because it lambasts IQ theory, I suspect that they are prepared to overlook Taleb's excesses. For example, CritRats may despise IQ theory, but they tend to really like the news site Quillette.

And here's what Taleb says about Quillette. Note the online magazine Quillette seems to be a cover for a sinister eugenics program. It's hard to say this without laughing. With tendencies I've called neo-Nazi under the cover of Free Thought. Yeah, that's just so over the top. Wow. So this reminds me of a study that I read about somewhere about the National Enquirer.

The people doing the study were curious who would buy the drivel that the tabloids serve up. Did the readers really think that there was a bat boy love child of a cow and an alien? It turned out that the readers, mostly older women, were actually pretty discerning about what parts of the tabloid newspapers they believed.

These women knew that the Batboy alien love child story was made up, but they were pretty dang sure Kim Kardashian really was having a secret affair. So likewise, I suspect most crit rats know Taleb's personality well enough to ignore his ridiculous swipe at Quillette, but like what he has to say about IQ theory in general, at least in terms of its vibes.

But what does Taleb actually say about IQ theory? To answer this question, we need to counter-read. What is counter-reading? It is the art of understanding the bias of the speaker and utilizing that known bias to your advantage. Let's take the title of the article as an example. IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle.

This title contains two parts. First, the vibes. It's negative. You can tell he really hates IQ theory and also hates those that advance it. Second is the content. He is making some very specific claims about what is correct or incorrect about IQ theory. So let's go through this word by word. Sorry, go ahead. Sorry, can I just interject one thing? My favorite thing was amongst all these...

these complicated charts and graphs and all this. He's got a picture of someone wearing Birkenstocks and socks, uh,

And then captions it, Mensa members, typically high IQ losers in Birkenstocks. That's one of his scientific graphs, right? Yeah, that was so funny. Okay, let's go through the title word by word. IQ theory is largely a scientific swindle.

The vibe is the phrase "a scientific swindle." The content is the word "largely." Why is the word "largely" there? What purpose does it serve? Why not just title the article "IQ Theory IS a Scientific Swindle" and be done? Because at the end of the day, Taleb cares about being accurate and factual.

He simply could not bring himself to say IQ is a pseudoscientific swindle because then it would be easy to prove him wrong. So he threw a largely in there to protect himself. Largely will prove to be the most important word in this title. Why? Because we already know Taleb hates IQ theory and its supporters with a passion.

For someone that hates IQ theory this much to feel forced to include the word largely in the title means we can be sure there is something about IQ theory that is scientifically correct, though perhaps not what advocates of the theory thought. This is the art of counter-reading. We're using Taleb's biases against him. We know he wants to say IQ is a pseudoscientific swindle, but he can't do it.

So he tries to sneak in a largely so you can't accuse him of being wrong, but he hopes you will come away with the overall negative vibe he intends. Consider that we could take his title, including the word largely, and we could reword it and it would mean the same thing. Here's the reworded version. IQ theory is a bit scientifically accurate. Those two titles mean exactly the same thing.

This is the complement to Taleb's title. This is what he is saying but trying to hide via vibes. I call this taking the complement, by the way. It is a technique you use to see just how much someone against a theory is admitting the theory is correct. So this theory is a really interesting... So this leads to a really interesting question. What does Taleb claim IQ theory is getting right?

I don't think there's any doubt Taleb is pretty knowledgeable about IQ theory, and he hates it. So anything he begrudgingly admits is right is something we can be sure a highly knowledgeable hater of IQ theory was forced to admit was correct about the theory. That's the real content of the article that we're going to be interested in. Does IQ theory predict income?

This seems to be one of the main arguments those in favor of IQ theory use to support the theory. So here is Dvarkish Patel from his article. IQ scores are heavily correlated with job performance, school performance, income, lack of crime, and even health.

IQ is clearly measuring some underlying trait that determines your effectiveness across a broad range of cognitively demanding tasks, in many cases, even years down the line. You can call this trait whatever you want, but I call it intelligence. That's Dvarkish Patel. Taleb argues, I think correctly, that this claim is technically true but misleading.

To explain the problem, Taleb points out that if he hits someone on the head with a hammer, they'll perform poorly on an IQ test and also perform poorly at their job. So this argument is that IQ theory is getting something correct, but it isn't what you think it is. Taleb's counter theory is that IQ theory correctly detects mental disability, but tells us nothing beyond that about actual capability on the job.

Are you sure that's not a little bit of exaggeration to say nothing? I mean, he seems to say that there is a slight correlation, but he just seems... He does, but it's only for specific kinds of jobs. I'm going to actually get to that in a second. Okay. Okay.

But in terms of prediction of income, I should have said, he's claiming that it tells you nothing other than it detects mental disability. And that is what his chart, which we're about to talk about, shows. Fair enough. Now, this theory Taleb proposes is awesome from a critical rationalist standpoint because it is everything a critical rationalist wants in a theory. Why?

It explains why the old theory seemed to work, and it offers an alternative explanation that is independently testable, which means that it's not an ad hoc theory. If Taleb is correct, then we should find that if we remove people with mental disabilities from the data, that the correlation between income and IQ should disappear.

This is a bold theory in the Popperian sense, as it should be, because he's a Popperian. Precisely because it can prove to be incorrect. It can be refuted. It can be falsified. And if it does, his theory is refuted.

Now, compare this to the current version of the crit rat theory of intelligence, where none of them could conceive of what a counterexample to their theory of intelligence would look like. And I did ask them extensively on this subject, precisely because I was curious about how they would respond to that. And recall, in fact, from those episodes, that one of them even told me that if he found there was a large enough correlation between IQ and job performance, it wouldn't convince him of anything.

He would just assume that there was cheating on the IQ test. So Taleb's theory, by comparison, is a much better theory precisely because it boldly takes risks due to the specificity of the explanation being offered, whereas the crit-rat theory takes zero risks, okay? This is the concept. This is the critical rationalist concept of boldness versus ad hocness that Popper likes to talk about, okay?

And in fact, this is what falsifiable means, okay? When you talk about Popper being about falsifiability, it doesn't mean that we use negative language to criticize theories and we don't look for positive language to support a theory. It means you've made your theory so specific and so hard to vary in Deutschian terms that

that it makes predictions that can now prove the theory wrong. That is what falsifiability means, okay? It's about the nature of the explanation. It's not about everything else people think it seems to think it's about, okay?

Taleb then produces an actual graph of the correlation between income and IQ, and he shows there is a correlation, just as IQ theory proponents claims. Then he removes the bottom of the graph, the people with the lowest IQs at the very bottom, and redoes the correlation, and the correlation vanishes.

By the way, no need to do the math. You can look right at the graph and immediately tell that IQ theory's much vaunted correlation with income is entirely based on the fact that it detects mental disability because all the correlation collects at the bottom of the graph, and it's obvious just looking at it. Now, as a critical rationalist, I find this an overwhelmingly convincing argument.

Now, assuming, of course, Taleb is reporting data correctly, I don't have any reason to believe that he's not. Assuming he's not like cherry picking, he really isn't known as a cherry picker. So I don't have any reason to believe that he's a cherry picker. Even when he's deeply biased like this, he just doesn't do stuff like that. Okay. So I honestly think that he's probably right about this. All right. And maybe, maybe not. I mean, like everything, it's just a tentative initial stance based on

Our ability to do a test like this. And this corroborates his test. What is a corroboration? From a critical rational standpoint, it was a test that could have falsified your theory, but didn't. But it implies that your theory had to be falsifiable in the first place. Okay? Non-ad hoc in the first place. Make some sort of bold prediction in the first place.

This also hints at what part of IQ theory Taleb accepts: that it is a good measure of mental disability, as you've already mentioned, Peter. Okay, so notice how this completely contradicts the crit-rat theory of intelligence, where there can't be such a thing as mental disability, because we're supposed to all be universal explainers. This is why it's curious that crit-rats love and pass around this article so much. It's an outright contradiction to their own theory.

But clearly they agree with the overall vibe of the article, right? That IQ theory is bad, ridiculous, and maybe even immoral. So we kind of see the National Enquirer effect at play. Crit rats soak in the vibe and ignore the content of what Taleb is saying. Now, if crit rats were actually correct that mental disability doesn't exist, then this article must of necessity just be entirely wrong, okay? Their theory being correct would refute

what Taleb's theory is, okay, because it's based on the idea that IQ theory detects something real, which is mental disability. So, crit-rats should not like this article, because it's about, it's gotta be one of the worst things that could happen to their theory, okay, it's really direct data that undermines their theory. But they do like the article, because at the end of the day, they like the negative vibe against IQ theory.

You know, I'm kind of emphasizing this over and over, but I think that this is really important to understand about how we as human beings read things, right? Like we really pay attention to vibes. Like we strongly pay attention to vibes, okay? So here's a question then though. Have we just killed IQ theory with what,

Taleb is saying. Let me see if I can explain what I'm saying. Because obviously, he's accepting that IQ, at a minimum, does tell you something about income. Namely, it detects disability. And if you're mentally disabled, then you're not going to make as much. Okay? You're not going to perform as well on your job. Okay? So, but, so from a certain point of view, that accepts some part of IQ theory is kind of sort of correct.

But isn't this really just saying that IQ theory is dead? And I think if this was all there was to it, it would be. It would mean that. So let's be honest. If IQ theory really just detects disability and that's it, there's nothing else it does, then it really has very little going for it. So as Taleb points out, you hardly need an IQ test to test for mental disability. Nearly anything would do. It would be an expensive way of

testing for something that usually you can figure out just by observing for a moment.

So does this mean that we can now dismiss IQ theory entirely? Okay. Again, if you're reading only Taleb's vibe, he surely makes it sound like you can ignore the theory now. So here's a quote from him. If you want to detect how someone fares at a task, say loan sharking, tennis playing, or random matrix theory, make him or her do that task. We don't need theoretical exams for real world function by probability challenged psychologists.

So are we done? Not quite. It turns out Taleb, as much as he hates IQ theory, is forced again to admit that it's not quite as simple as that. Turns out IQ theory does predict success for some jobs. Here is the actual quote from Taleb. See if you can counter-read what he's saying here. There is no significant statistical association between IQ and hard measures such as wealth. Most achievements...

Scare quotes.

Buy food with a $30 bill, $30, not with other successes, essay, rank, social prominence, or having had a selfie with the queen. I do think he seems to debunk IQ, at least at the level of it being like,

If someone made IQ a significant part of their worldview, they're really not claiming that, oh, maybe it has some validity in some circumstances. They're really just saying that this is a central part of what we are as humans, the score we get on this test, and it really matters in all kinds of ways. He seems to be strongly against IQ on that level, right? Yeah.

Yes, I think he's more strongly against it than that. I don't think he has anything positive to say about IQ except where he absolutely has to. Okay. So let me go on. Let me give another quote here. Quote, if you renamed IQ from intelligence quotient to FQ, functionary quotient, or SQ, salary person quotient,

Then some of the stuff will be true. It measures best the ability to be a good slave confined to linear tasks. IQ is good for at David Graeber's BS jobs. Whoa, harsh much? He is funny. He's harsh, but funny. I can definitely appreciate, as critical as I am about some of his attitude, I can appreciate that he is funny.

So notice, though, that he is not saying merely what you just said, right? He's not saying, well, if you make IQ central, but it does have some uses. He is absolutely trying to tear down any possible use for it.

Okay. Well, I mean, he, you could, it could be a, he, he, he, he states, which is probably accurate that the original use for IQ was to identify people with disabilities. Yeah. And I don't think he's arguing against that, that it could be used to. Okay. Fair enough. Maybe that is the one thing he actually does seem to be positive on. Although even then he says, anything will do. You don't need the IQ test for that. He says, he says, does say that I'll actually quote him later saying that. Okay. So, um,

Now, here's the thing. This is another common theme with Taleb. He really dislikes regular guys, so to speak. Taleb sees himself as part of Atlas, and there's this mass of the shrug out there that he doesn't think much of.

Because of this, he has a really strong negative view of salarymen. But let's be clear. Taleb, as an outright hater of IQ theory, is admitting that if you're hiring a salaryman for a job, that IQ theory will predict success at the job. In fact, he even gives you a specific reason why. He says it's because those sorts of jobs happen to be similar to the nature of the test itself. Okay?

Since he can't get around that fact, he instead attacks the kind of person that holds such a job. Basically, they're just conformists. The conformists do well on the- Right. Okay. Well, that's his explanation, right? That's the negative vibe he's giving there. So here's the thing, though. What's exactly wrong with being a salaryman? Like, really, I want you to ask that question. Isn't that kind of an important role in society? Yeah.

And is it really true that, you know, that it's, you're a bad person just because you're a salaryman and you're a conformant? What's the terms he used here? A good slave confined to linear tasks. I mean, like he's so negative on this and it just so totally unnecessarily so. Okay. It's the vibe he's going for because he knows that's what you're going to pay attention to. Okay.

Why does an IQ test work? Taleb's answer is that IQ test in these cases works is because it's similar to certain kinds of jobs. Now, I think Taleb is right that an IQ test would not predict success here as much as, say, letting the person try out the job. I liked this quote. He says, real life never fails.

never offers crisp questions with crisp answers. Most questions don't have answers. Perhaps the worst problem with IQ is that it seems to select for people who don't like to say, there is no answer, don't waste my time, find something else. So it's the really smart people who are looking at the IQ test and thinking, this is stupid. I'm not going to think about this.

So he uses an example of what if I were to give you a sequence of one, two, three, four, and then ask you what the next number in the sequence is. And he claims that IQ selects for the type of person who thinks that the right answer is five. You know what? I guess I'm one of those because I think the right answer is five.

And I totally understand his counter-argument. It's not like I don't understand his counter-argument. The idea here is that because induction allows you to induce any... There's an infinity of possible inductions, that there isn't really a correct answer to this question. Sort of? Like, it totally ignores the fact that...

that when we ask someone, come up with the next thing in the sequence, there's always a tacit, give me the easiest possible explanation. There's even a really good critical rationalist reason why we want the easiest possible explanation. We don't want to have to throw in extra unexplained aspects to our theory, right? So as a critical rationalist, I think he's just wrong there, right? Like there actually is a correct answer

A best answer. It's not correct. It's best, right? There's, if you have nothing else to go off of yet, that absolutely five is the best answer for what's the next thing in the sequence. It might be wrong, right? Like, but that would be your best explanation at that point. So I can't agree with him here. I think he is kind of just doesn't understand this aspect of critical rationalism, actually. Right.

But here's the thing, though. I do agree with him that an IQ test would never be as good as just letting the person try the job. And this is a fair point, okay? But wasn't that sort of a given? I mean, like, isn't it always true that if you could afford to let the person try the job and then get rid of them at zero cost, that that would be a much better way of knowing if they could do the job than, say, reviewing their resume, you know, or giving them an IQ test or...

you know, checking their references. I mean, like, of course, letting them try the job is the best way to assess if they're the right person for the job. So here's the thing though. I feel like Taleb is basically selling the farm here, but he's hiding it. IQ tests could be considered, essentially he's arguing, although he's trying to hide it, that IQ tests could be considered a valid way to try to decide who is most likely to succeed at certain kinds of jobs.

Now, Taleb points out the circularity in this, i.e. an MD is required to have the highest SAT scores to get into medical school. So, of course, they're going to have very high IQs since an SAT is, in fact, an IQ test. This seems very fair to me. And this explains why doctors have higher IQs than janitors, right? It may have nothing to do with...

you know, anything other than, you know, we've already selected only for the high IQ people to begin with in the job of a doctor. Well, he seems to have almost a disdainful attitude against people who have score well on high IQ tests. He says, 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 only focus on problems that are real, not fictional textbook ones. So I have to ask, right? Like, let's try to actually take what he's saying and let's try to actually apply it to real life using MDs as our example. Okay. Is it true that when we give an SAT test to get into medical school,

That we are selecting for what you just said, people who only care about academic problems. And so they're not going to be able to deal with real world problems. Well, are we reducing how good our MDs are by giving them an SAT test and then give taking the highest scoring ones?

Okay, there's no way Taleb would actually argue that. He basically uses the vibe to argue that, but the way I just stated it would then be testable, right? And there's no way he would go for the test on this. You know, I think how I would read that is that you probably are, in a sense, selecting for conformists, I guess, sterile conformists, however you want to put it. But at the same time, I mean...

Those are probably the kind of people who would make pretty good doctors, right? I mean, they're not, you don't want like someone who, a free spirit. You're not going to be like, select the doctor who's the most like,

interesting and you want someone who hits the textbooks hard and has learned about all these diseases and is good at analytically thinking about the best diagnosis. I mean, obviously there's so much more to life than that, but it probably does select the best doctors in some ways. Okay. What you just said, let's take that. Okay. Let's assume that's a correct explanation. By the way, that may well be a correct explanation. Okay. Okay.

That's basically admitting that an IQ test like an SAT has a valid place and should be used for certain kind of jobs. Fair enough. Which is exactly the opposite of the vibe that Taleb is trying to sell you. Okay. That's my point. Yeah. Let me go a bit further here. Okay. Is Taleb prepared to boldly claim

that MD performance is completely unrelated to those SAT scores and that we're unnecessarily cutting out more excellent MDs from becoming doctors than we're screening out the bad ones. Okay. If he's prepared to actually say that, okay, then it seems to me that Taleb is admitting, unless he's prepared to actually say that, I mean, then it seems to me Taleb is admitting there is a place for IQ tests or SATs in this case,

or something equivalent to it, in other words, for some kinds of jobs, including medical doctors, professors, let's say mathematicians. He doesn't bring that one up. He admits professors. He admits medical doctors. Okay. But IQ fails, um,

IQ fails for most jobs and really should be thought of as a far more narrow way, in a far more narrow way than as a general intelligence factor. That's what I'm taking away from this, okay? Is that it's not going to tell you anything about whether this person's gonna be a good CEO or not, right? Which probably has more to do with other traits than specifically, I mean, obviously you don't want a mentally disabled CEO, that'd be bad, right?

But now we're getting right back to the one aspect of IQ that applies to all jobs that it detects for mental disability. Past eliminating that mental disability, what is IQ actually useful for? It probably isn't a good predictor of performance on most jobs, but it is for certain kinds of jobs. So then what does IQ theory actually get wrong? I really like many of the criticisms that Taleb offers.

So before I actually, you know, finish this up, I want to actually cover some of his arguments that I think are spot on. Okay. So here's the main thing I want to understand though. Taleb is admitting, although it's covered up by vibes, he's admitting IQ theory is useful for some kinds of jobs and that it will predict performance well, and therefore is a useful screen. And here's the thing I want you to understand is,

It's true that having them do the job is going to be a better predictor. That's absolutely true, but that's expensive. So of course, what we're looking for is some way to cheaply screen out so that we're only looking at a probabilistically good set of candidates to begin with.

And Taleb is basically admitting IQ tests will absolutely properly do that for certain kinds of jobs. Okay. He's very negative on those jobs, but those jobs include medical doctors. So most of us probably don't feel that negative about medical doctors, probably with good reason. Right? So,

As far as I'm concerned, this is an open admission by Taleb. As much as he hates IQ, he is admitting it's got a place. He doesn't want to have to admit that, but he has no choice but to. That's something. That's kind of a big deal. Now, before I finish this up, though, let's talk about some of his criticisms that I think are very good. The dead man bias.

Mental disability is equivalent to what Taleb calls the dead man bias. If you measure the IQ of both living and dead people, where dead people score zero on the IQ test and also do a very poor job at work, then of course your test is severely biased and not very meaningful. Agreed.

He talks about black people are X standard deviations away. He points out that trying to measure a whole race via standard deviation misses the point that say different populations have different variances. This invalidates your assessment unless you account for that fact, he claims. Here's some quotes from him now. But the intelligence in IQ is determined by academic psychologists, no geniuses, like the paper trading.

We mentioned before above paper trading for stocks versus being someone who actually has had success in the real world via statistical constructs Essay correlations that I show here in figure one, which I can't show you obviously that they patently don't understand it does Correlate to very negative performance as it was initially designed to detect learning learning special needs and

But then any measure would work here. A measure that works in the left tail, but not the right tail, IQ decorrelates as it goes higher, is problematic. Totally agree with him on that, by the way.

We have another quote from him: "We've gotten similar results since the famous Terman longitudinal study, even with massaged data for later studies. To get the point, consider that if someone has mental needs, there will be 100% correlation between performance and IQ tests. But the performance doesn't correlate as well at higher levels. Though unaware of the effect of the non-linearity, the psychologists will think it does.

The statistical spin as a marketing argument is the person with an IQ of 70 cannot approve theorems, which is obvious for a measure of unintelligence. But they fail to reveal how many IQs of 150 are doing menial jobs. So very low IQ may provide information while very high IQ may convey nothing better than random. It is not even a necessary condition. So let me actually now take...

At the very beginning of the article, he has a summary of his point of view. And now that I've kind of counter-read the rest of the article, I want to slow read and analyze his own summary. Okay? So...

Here's the first line from his summary. IQ is a stale test meant to measure mental capacity, but in fact mostly measures extreme unintelligence, learning disabilities. So my comment, he's admitting that IQ measures disability and mental disability is real. So...

That's our first takeaway. Then he goes on to say, as well as to a lesser extent with a lot of noise, a form of intelligence. So he's admitting IQ does measure a form of intelligence stripped of second order effects. So my comments, it might be genuinely helpful. IQ might be genuinely helpful in determining if someone is going to make a good mathematician or doctor.

That seems like sort of actually really useful to me. Okay. Now, going back to quoting him, how good someone is at taking some types of exams designed by unsophisticated nerds. It ends up selecting for exam takers, paper shufflers, obedient IYIs, intellectual yet idiots, ill-adapted for real life. Okay. My comments.

Taleb's negative vibe aside, this is probably exactly what you want for, say, someone in the military, which Taleb admits it has a high 50% correlation of success. He downplays this as circular in that basic training is similar to an IQ test. It eliminates someone with a mental disability. But I'll bet an IQ test is cheaper and faster than putting someone through basic training.

So it's really unclear why you wouldn't use it in a case like this, where it's probably an appropriate test for that kind of job. You have to ignore the vibe. You have to look at the content of what he's actually saying. So finally, he says, IQ is viva negativa, not viva positiva, designed for learning disabilities, and given that it is not too needed there.

So, but to me, that seems like it might actually be useful. Okay. He never really suggests what a better alternative would be other than doing the job directly, which is clearly more expensive. Okay. So a few end thoughts here. I feel like this final result, when we counter-read it this way, is one that's going to make no one happy. If you were a crit rat, this article basically devastates your view.

If you loved IQ, a crit rat that accepted the famous crit rat theory of intelligence, I should say. If you loved IQ, you're an IQ realist, this article devastates your view. If you hated IQ, counter-reading Taleb basically admits IQ has some real value in real life. So everyone's going to hate the results here.

That is, everyone's going to hate it if they have a kind of preconceived notion of what they want IQ to be. But if you don't have any such preconceived notions, the outcome here is about as interesting as you could have asked for. If you're just simply looking to get to the truth of the matter, this is kind of a really interesting outcome. It basically says...

IQ has some actual real-life uses. It does actually detect something. It's not what you think it is. It's not really going to detect a general intelligence factor that's going to predict success in every conceivable job. It might predict success for certain kinds of jobs, specifically jobs that...

are similar in nature to the types of things being tested for. Why is that even surprising, right? It gives this view of IQ that neither does away with it entirely. In fact, it really explains why it was so successful and maybe even suggests a way forward in terms of how we might look at intelligence by eliminating certain possibilities and opening up others.

I feel like from that point of view, this counter reading of Taleb is a super useful way of looking at intelligence. And that was why I wanted to kind of cover it. And at the end of the day, I think I agree with everything Taleb says, right? Like if you get past the negative vibe, I don't have the negative vibe view of IQ. I think that it detects disability. It's a cheap way to check for success on certain kinds of jobs.

And that's probably about as far as I'm willing to go with IQ theory, but those seem like really useful things to me. So I'm all in favor of using IQ theory for those circumstances where they've actually proven out through testing. So Peter thoughts. Well, the, the only thing I might add, he, he does say very clearly that the, that, that he, he thinks that a better way to sort of select people is

who are appropriate for a given job is that they will, he says, so the only thing for which IQ can select the mentally disabled is already weeded out in real life. He or she can't have a degree in engineering or medicine.

which explains why IQ is unnecessary and using it is risky because you miss out on Einstein's and Feynman's. As much as I agree with the overall gist of the article, I don't know if that's completely unrealistic. I mean, completely realistic. That would seem to imply that you can just do away with SAT scores, which are just IQ tests, essentially, and just let anyone into Harvard that wants to go

Eh, I don't know. I don't know if that would be better or not. I mean, maybe, I guess, you know, I think that maybe it would be actually. I don't think you can actually draw that conclusion from what he just said. So let me explain in terms of vibes. I think you're getting exactly the conclusion he wants you to draw. So I'm not actually saying you misread him, but I'm asking you to counter read what he said. Can you read it again?

So the only thing for which an IQ can select, the mentally disabled, is already beat it out in real life. He or she can't have a degree in engineering or medicine. Hey, stop right there. Let's counter-read. Okay. So I guess he doesn't say that you can't give someone...

An IQ test slash SAT. So you have to really think about this. If you're hiring someone and they have a degree, there's no point in giving them an IQ test too.

Right. Because that degree already implies the same thing. Okay. That's what he's saying. Fair enough. Now that's not an, I know I'm counter reading here, right? Like this is clearly not the vibe he's going for, but I'm taking the content of his theory against his will and I'm getting to it. Okay. What you're asking is, wouldn't it, what does it make sense to give them an IQ test and SAT in this case before they get the degree? Right.

Well, he doesn't, that whole quote avoids answering that question because the answer is yes. And he doesn't want to have to admit that because that would imply way too much positive about IQ testing, right? Compared to the vibe he's going for.

So he's what he's doing is is he's using vibes to avoid Answering the very question that you just asked but he's acting like he's worded it in such a way That it leaves you with the feeling he answered the question. That is what he's doing Okay, but you have to read the content not the vibe you have to notice that he never actually says if it makes sense to do an SAT test prior to getting into school and

And he never even addresses that question anywhere in the article, because if he does, he's in trouble. Okay. That's what we're looking for as critical rationalists. That's the most important aspect of his article, not the vibes, right? Is that SAT scores probably are meaningful for someone who doesn't have a degree. Yes. To determine who gets into the program to begin with. Okay. So I don't think,

content, like vibe-wise, yes, I can see that anyone reading Taleb's article is going to say, ah, we don't even need SATs, or at least that's what he's claiming. But he never actually says that, right? He actually says you don't need it for the job after you have the degree. And he leaves, he's completely silent on if it makes sense prior to getting the degree.

Okay. So this is the thing I noticed as I was going through the article, right? Like I kind of naturally counter-read articles. It's just kind of the way my personality is, right? And I...

Whenever I'm trying to study something out, I always read one point of view and then I go read the other point of view. And then what I'm looking for is what are the things that both sides that hate each other begrudgingly are admitting to, right? And then I've kind of got this idea, like, of course, that may still be mistaken. Like, this isn't some guaranteed justified true belief, right?

But if the people who are on one side of an argument, the people on another side of the argument are agreeing on something, those are the things I can probably just know. Right now, nobody knows of a good criticism of these, right? Because if Taleb could have said, we don't need SAT scores, right?

to figure out if he should get into Harvard or not. He would have said it, but he wasn't able to. So he had to talk around that problem, right? That's the main thing that I think is the most important in reading Taleb here. Okay. Well, I think you've given a pretty good take on this article that I will say, particularly given your

your ideas about counter-reading and looking past the vibes, it makes me pretty sympathetic to his claims. One more thing he says that I think would particularly resonate with other fans of David Deutsch. He says, if you take the Popperian

Hayekian view on intelligence, you could have added Deutsch's name in there too, probably, you would realize that to measure future needs, it would, it, you would, I think that's a typo, needs, it, you would need to know the mental skills needed in a future ecology, which requires predictability of said future ecology.

So basically, he's saying that the growth of knowledge is unpredictable. Yes. A major critical rationalist talking point. Other than the fact that he completely tears down the popular crit-rat theory of intelligence, there's a lot to actually like in this article as a critical rationalist, right? Yeah. So for example, doesn't he actually say the great Karl Popper?

Yeah, something observed by the great Karl Popper. Psychologists have a tendency to pathologize people who bust them by tagging them with some type of disorder or personality flaw, such as childish, childish, narcissist, egomaniac, or something similar. Well, he does the same thing all the time, so I don't know what he's talking about. Right. I know. It's hilarious, isn't it? So...

What are the things that I think critical rationalists would like about this article? Well, first of all, or even Deutchians would like, should like about this article. One of them is that it's a very good example of what I think is the correct understanding of universal explainer, right? And its connection to intelligence. A universal explainer does not imply that everyone has to have exactly the same intelligence, but it does seem to imply that

more of a negative version of that, that a person could have a disabled intelligence rather than a positive version of that, that someone could be a super intelligence. Okay. And,

There's still some things we'd have to talk about around the edges here. Like what if they could think, you know, a hundred times faster? What if they had a hundred times the memory? Would that then count as a super intelligence? I don't think universal explainership directly addresses those particular questions, right? Because there could theoretically be someone with a hundred times the processor speed or, you know, a hundred times or a thousand times the processor speed or a thousand times the memory of a human, right?

But that's very different than this idea of a superintelligence where they are to us what we are to ants, right? Because all of us, past a certain point, have made that jump to universality. All humans, not all humans, all humans past a certain point have made the jump to universality. One of the things that I...

brought up in the interview with David Deutsch, as I said, there are some humans with no neocortex that I assume you would agree that they are not universal explainers. And I don't know if he actually answered the question, but he absolutely nodded his head that he agreed with that, right? We're talking about people who are so mentally disabled that they can never learn to talk, that they've only got, you know, a portion of the lower portion of the brain. It's well known that the neocortex is where the higher thinking happens, right? So they've got that part of their brain just doesn't exist.

Yeah, I think he definitely, given the vibe of some of his other comments in that conversation, I think he fully accepted that. Yeah. So you've got kind of two levels, right? You've got humans that are not universal explainers because they're severely, severely disabled. And then you've got humans that are universal explainers, but they're still disabled in some way. Some aspect of their ability to think well doesn't work right, right?

And so that has caused them so that they learn at a much slower rate.

Or even can't learn some things that's one that I've said in the past I don't agree with but David Deutsch has convinced me now that I should endorse that point of view that there may be some things where with a specific kind of disability They simply don't have at the ability to learn those things you might argue. That means they're not universal explainers It depends on what you mean by universal explainers. They have all the necessary modules there to be a universal explainer There's just something off

So it doesn't work right. Right. That they can't hold interest long enough. They can't, they just can't get past certain barriers. Right. He seems to be saying that essentially that there's a hardware malfunction. That's right. Which could be in principle fixed.

Right. But at the core, the person is still a universal explainer. Yes. That seems very rational to me, actually. It does, yeah. But that's why they can learn to talk, right? You can maybe tell, like, I bring up my neighbor who's both Down syndrome and severely autistic. He can totally hold a conversation with you, but you can immediately see that he's not...

I'm trying to use a politically correct term here. You can immediately see that he is mentally challenged, is what I want to say here, right? He talks slow. He can't do super complicated. He can do super complicated topics, but he's never going to learn quantum theory, is what I mean, right? Like, it just isn't happening in his lifetime. And it's because there is some sort of hardware malfunction, right?

To be a true, full universal explainer probably implies that your hardware is basically working together. And that if it's all there, but something's kind of misaligned, then you're going to end up as this mentally disabled person who is still technically a universal explainer, but there are certain things they won't be able to learn, realistically won't be able to learn, right? Right.

And I think that's actually a pretty good take on universal explainership. And I feel like this article matches that, right? Like it's a strong corroborating evidence for this idea that past a certain point, universality kicks in. And yes, you might have someone who's quote high IQ. And so they're really good at math in a way the average person isn't, but overall, they're not going to be necessarily more of a genius than anybody else, right? That the,

And I've seen this, like there are things, there are people out there who we would probably never think of as geniuses who are very geniuses for their area. Right. Like let's, let's take the idea of a plumber, right? Like probably nobody's going to say, oh, you know, plumbing is an example of a job that requires genius. Plumbing is a very intellectually demanding job, right? As someone who's passed,

Several plumbing inspections. I would agree with that. I have absolute intellectual respect for plumbers. Right. And I think you're going to find that in a lot of human jobs, right? Like, there are jobs that we give to humans that...

require little or no creativity. But I think the vast majority of human jobs require a great deal of creativity, right? And it's not really just the mathematician who's creative or the artist, you know, the great artist that's creative. Yeah. I think...

I mean, even the bartender or something, you're performing a... Complex, creative, demanding job. And you're talking to, interacting with other humans. Yeah, there's a lot to it, I think. And this is where I actually do agree with the, I think, faults.

crit rat theory of intelligence, right? Is that once you get past a certain point, it doesn't make sense to keep putting people on a scale of intelligence. It makes tons of sense, negatively speaking, to measure disability. But past a certain point, it starts to become a much different question, right? It's what we call intelligence doesn't map easily to what we call IQ, right?

And I think that is the truth. And this article, I think, does a fantastic job of backing, of re-putting that same thing, which I think is what the crit rats in question were actually interested in saying, but it does so in a way that's actually testable. And that's really what I found so fascinating about this article. Okay. Well, thank you for compelling me to read this article. I would

I suggest that anyone who is interested in our conversation should definitely go and read the article. It's very short, too. You can probably read it about five times in the time we've spent talking about it, for better or for worse. But I think it's a great article. And I thank you for your thoughts, Bruce. Right. Well, you have a great day. All right. You too. Thanks, Peter. Thanks.

Hello again.

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