>If you read Steve Sailer you very much knew that all those Mexicans buying real estate with no down payments were going to unleash a subprime mortage crisis at some point. Not so! Said Taleb: that was a Black Swan. While I do think Taleb is making a fool of himself, this isn't a fair reading. That something bad happened to Fannie Mae was entire expected because the whole enterprise was founded on nothing going wrong. Taleb's point is that things go wrong all the time but nerds don't realize this because they think they know things. But you can't know the unexpected because then it would be expected. The smart thing to do is to have lots of options when things inevitably go wrong so you can come out ahead. There's a mathematical statement of this as a power law distribution as opposed to a bell curve. Applied to something like IQ, you would see more profoundly gifted people in the long tails. I think this is actually true. It's true that bugmen love him, but given how he spends four books railing against nerds, this seems to be fueled by the same masochistic tendencies behind Ta Nehisi-Coates. It must make them feel good to have a deadlifting brown man telling them they're all idiot cucks.

NNT seems intelligent, in part, because he stumbled on a very effective heuristic for dealing with public intellectuals on Twitter: Just call them imbeciles. You won’t be wrong often enough to matter, until you bump into a smart dissident like Sailer. In general his one insight seems to be to search for dumb heuristics that allow lazy, arrogant, impatient people to get away with their laziness and impatience. I have a lot of sympathy with that approach to life.

>he won’t be able to be able to keep being called to TV if he can’t claim to be part of the Bioleninism racket by hating on white people at regular intervals. He may not like being brown (half his waking hours are spent in loud reminders that he’s not an Arab), but he surely enjoys the privilege of not looking white. I don't think that's true at all. He had a positive opinion of Trump during the election, the most unhandshakeworthy of positions. He's also been a champion for fractal localism or local fractalism, or whatever, which would be in accordance not just with tight borders, but an outright ethno-state. If you implement his political values, you'd arrive at the same end sought by many on the right. His failure in this tweetstorms stems from confining intelligence to the ability to earn money on wall st. and not blow up. Everything else is IYI to Taleb. That's the reason for the retardation.

Defining and measuring "IQ" is complex and a certain amount of subjectivity is unavoidable. IQ doesn't mean nothing and it doesn't mean everything either. I'm more concerned about hearing about Mr Taleb calling the 2008 debacle a "Black Swan." Black Swan my ass!!! Any bird brained nit wit could have seen it coming. Millions of people incurring loans they could not afford at a risk level they could not withstand is not a Black Swan. The guy is not stupid, though. Believe me when I tell you, there is no doubt that he is working for The Banksters. He is a sock puppet of the Globalists. His job is to baffle as many gullible dipshits with his bullshit as he can.

[…] Source: Bloody Shovel […]

R E K T

But IQ is real all the same. All else equal, a higher IQ is a desirable trait in any living thing. A high IQ may not guarantee success at any particular endeavor, but a low IQ absolutely guarantees failure at pretty much any advanced skill.

That this doesn't occur to him is astonishing. He argues that "street smarts" are more important than IQ. This is off in crazy land - he compares "Fat Tony" to "Dr John" but the right comparison is "Fat Tony the successful mob boss" to "Jimmy who's doing 10 years for breaking into cars and stealing car stereos". The key is that Fat Tony is also high IQ compared to men who are as street smart. This really isn't that complicated. That he digs up math to adorn his awful reasoning points more in the direction of him using intentional deception rather than sincere confusion. Here's NNT-perfect natural experiment. Northern Italy vs Southern Italy. Southern Italy is better on every metric that Talib cares about - they're lower trust (more "street smart") and lower IQ - by his reasoning southern Italy should be the developed center and northern Italy the provincial backwater. How does this prediction hold up?

I think Spandrell is making the same sort of mistake Taleb is making: Making judgments across fields. Taleb’s understanding of statistics and its application to the market is solid. Being an expert in your field gives some experts carte blanche to make their opinions across fields public, portraying them as knowledge from an expert (though most people neglect that the expert is from a different field than the discussion topic). Spandrell is an expert but not a finance expert. Taleb’s books have never been dismissals of the financial institution for 2008. Instead, his books criticize institutions – banks included – for not understanding statistical distributions. To prepare for a worst-case situation, institutions look to the largest disaster in the past, completely ignoring the future probability space. They essentially cut the statistical distribution (which is usually erroneously modeled as a Gaussian distribution) off at an arbitrary extreme, make preparations for that extreme, and thereby confine themselves to working in a bubble. They are blind to kurtosis. I am not here to defend Taleb. I think Spandrell is correct on everything he has said here outside his comments on Taleb’s field of expertise, which is statistical finance and statistical finance exclusively. Spandrell’s article today is a bit of a disappointment in the same way an article on an actor’s political opinions or a politician’s movie criticism would be. Let’s confine criticism within our fields.

"Now, to be fair to the guy; he’s right there. IQ explains some things. But it doesn’t explain personality, drive, extraversion, focus, dominance; a lot of stuff. But it doesn’t have to. Quants are quants. If he found them to be bad at making money in Wall Street; well maybe making money in Wall Street is not just about IQ. Big deal." When I read that part of the tweetstorm I couldn't help but think of the asinine observation at the beginning of Guns, Germs, and Steel; roughly: "All peoples are obviously equally intelligent, so I'll waste no ink on that subject in this book. Having said that, the tribesmen of New Guinea are clearly more intelligent than Westerners. I can tell because I've noticed they are clever and resourceful at dealing with life in the rainforests of New Guinea, and Wall Street quants would probably die if they had to fend for themselves there for more than a week."

It's embarrassingly obvious that Taleb's hostility to IQ roots in him being from a racial/ethnic background that leans him towards lower intelligence than actual Whites. Taleb has what's called on anthropological/race realism forums as OWD (Off-White Dilemma) where he insults other MENAs in the hopes that the White Man will accept him. Levantines like him having much lower IQs than Western to Northern Euros is offensive to his image of himself, so he goes on the warpath against IQ (denying it, asserting that it "isn't really important").

Does Taleb think that his tweet about ancient Nordics is supposed to be an impressive own? Ancient Egyptians or what have you would have been completely justified in calling ancient Nordics stupid. Then they stopped fucking their cousins and introduced manoralism. Things change, my genetically Arab brother.

>"Taleb went on a Twitter rant (then about how IQ is a 'pseudoscientific swindle'). His observation was based on his experience with 'quants', high-IQ math people who work for financial firms. He found them to be good at numbers but lacking at other skills" IQ is a general score, right? Someone can have high arithmetic IQ; but low communication, creativity, and whatever IQ. Taleb's observation implies high arithmetic IQ is insufficient and not that IQ is worthless. His observation is basically the classic one of the high IQ Northeast-Asian society with low creativity, inventiveness, and high conformity.

>"After all, northern Europeans weren’t rich until after 1600... [who] were indeed not living in societies as complex as those of Southern Europe or the Middle East..." This is a common "Dark Ages" myth. It usually goes like this: "Northern Europeans were unwashed barbarians who smelled funny and lived in mud huts. Meanwhile the Arabs/Chinese were having an enlightened super golden age and basically we wuz inventors!!" This is stuff from outdated documentaries or dumb YouTube popscience/popeducation channels. It's only repeated ad nauseum as a coping mechanism or for political purposes.

On iPhone, so I’ll keep it brief: - you don’t understand what black swan is about - you don’t seem to know any people who actually work in finance - Taleb identifies as non - white - he is a curmudgeon, so he has a need to be against everything and everyone - he is saying stupid things about IQ and race, I agree. Not clear what he actually believes.

To describe the levant as a backwater for 2500 years is a pretty dopey thing to say. It was definitely a very important and prosperous part of the Roman Empire.

Taleb is a liberal of the social justice variety, has no original ideas, and is not a genius although he does do a reasonably good job pretending to be one. he uses the same rhetorical arguments as the left does. He denies absolute truth such as IQ as postmodernists do. been saying this for years. glad more people on the 'right' are seeing Taleb for who he truly is.

Not sure you got the point. The point that Taleb is arguing is that High IQ does not correlate to High intelligence and it has about a 10% correlation with success, which is basically worse than useless. Richard Feynman, another great physicist had an IQ of 126 and basically flunked MENSA. The point Taleb is making is that IQ has never been stress-tested for robustness. He is saying A good intelligence test is something Einstein, Ramanujam, Feynman, Bohr, Tesla etc would do very well in and Bureaucrats, HR Types, political commissars would do very poorly in. While it is true that much of the anti-IQ crowd hates the IQ test because some politically favoured groups score badly at it, Taleb has better reasons for heaping contempt on it. Taleb is basically saying, OK, so you think the IQ test is so great. Then show me the Data.

I don't care about Taleb's opinions on IQ, but I am kind of interested in Lebanese and Syrian racial theories. Apparently a significant fraction of Lebanese say they are racially "Phoenician" rather than Arab, and a lot of these people support the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, which dates from the heyday of fascism, and which aims to recreate a Greater Syria that includes Lebanon and Israel.

But to be smart, but a pussy, or a coward, or annoying, or just weird in personality is a bad thing. Nobody contests that. I contest that. "Normal" "regular" just mean assembly line like and, among other things, for humans, they mean culturally/psychologically programmable. Weird is all what isn't in line with colonies hives and packs.

Introduced to your blog in reading your first essay on Bioleninism this morning. Shared it all over the damn place and can't wait to get to P II and III. Nice ah-ha's. I know a fair bit of the Bolshevik revolution, Stalin, etc. Always kinda saw it as a top-down, "money where mouth is" sort of thing. Never considered it as a bottom-up thing too, where money, comfort, and financial opportunity are traded away for social status at the cost of loyalty. ...Anyway, on Taleb, I did like his first book, "Fooled by Randomness." Have never been able to get through any others, since.

Great post takedown.

I like the title, and personally I never *got* Talib and I'm inclined to think he's overrated until someone proves otherwise. However, this post illustrates the single worst tendency of the far-right blogosphere, which is to assume that everyone already agrees with you and has some align motive for pretending otherwise. My analysis of this spat is that Taleb has never thought about race and IQ before, gave a stock opinion and is now doubling down in response to criticism. The more he is attacked the more he will double down. He won't look at the evidence until the dispute is over and someone presents it to him in a way that evades his crimestop (which is somewhat different to most people's version of crimestop). Meanwhile, the smart set on the Right celebrate about outing another fake rightist, since the dopamine high they got from outing J Peterson has worn off. The fundamental problem you have namely that 99% of people think your ideas are false and wicked has only been made worse, but you did maximise your status within a shrinking circle of the already converted.

> What am I talking about? Most of you should know who Nassim Taleb is; a finance man turned maverick public intellectual by virtue of a book, called the Black Swan, which basically saved all the western financial establishment from blame about the great financial crisis of 2008. If you read Steve Sailer you very much knew that all those Mexicans buying real estate with no down payments were going to unleash a subprime mortage crisis at some point. Not so! Said Taleb: that was a Black Swan. > A what? Some completely unpredictable scenario, a massive statistical outlier, he meant. He then colored the theory with a lot of fancy math. All those financial traders in Wall Street then could finally look themselves at the mirror again and not feel like evil failures. “It wasn’t our fault! It was unpredictable! Look at all that fancy math in the book. Only a genius like Taleb could understand that stuff”. It helped that Taleb is a Brown Man; hence a genius by default in our modern culture. That's not what Taleb was saying. He wasn't making excuses for Wall Street. He was blaming them for stupidly creating an obvious house of cards. And Black Swans subjective. There's no problem with Sailer predicting the crisis. Read at least a wikipedia article on a book that you're shitting on.

Yes, Peterson is pretty sound on IQ. But Peterson is also adamant that Europeans having a collective identity is pathological, that there are only individuals and yadayada. He is our enemy by his own admission. To me, this is much, much worse, infinitely worse than ignoring or denying the importance of IQ. If we are allowed to keep our countries and continue to exist as peoples (is this so much to ask?), I am perfectly happy to let Africans believe they are as intelligent as we are. It could be argued that IQ-based arguments lend weight to our fight. But I am not sure it does. Of course, arguing that you don't want to be swamped by low-IQ, unproductive people sounds more than reasonable. But, like it or not, it also sounds "supremacist" to modern ears, for it obviously implies we are smarter (which we are). People (of the kind wecwaht to win over) will feel compelled (happy?) to denounce you in order to be handshakeworthy as soon as they hear IQ-based arguments. Going forward, I think the most astute strategy is to insist that all we want is to continue to exist and keep our lands and cultures. This argument: (a) Is clear, straightforward, intuitive and impossible to rebut in good faith and (b) appeals more to the modern sensitivities of the people we have to convince. Let them feel as smart as they like... in the Congo. As for Taleb, I had only heard him say sensible, wise stuff until now. He has denounced universalism because it destroys differences; he has spoken up against rules that are applied asymmetrically (to one group but not to the other, such as hate speech laws); he has warned against intolerant minorities imposing their will upon sleepy, dopey majorities; he constantly denounces the chattering classes as charlatans; he attacked "feminist" historian Mary Beard when she defended the idea of a multiracial Roman Britain; he clearly attributes great value to genetics (at least when it comes to ancestry); he strongly opposes the US interventionism that is bleeding Americans dry for the sake of you-know-who and aggravating refugee problems; he wrote an article called "No, Jesus was not a Non-White who would have voted for ...". I don't know what his beef with IQ is (probably the supposed IQ of Lebanon being 82), but I am willing to cut him a lot of slack in view of all of the above.

The Black Swan book looked really TL:dr so I watched the movie instead. Great flick, but no idea how psychotic bisexual ballerinas have anything to do with Wall Street, economics, or even HBD.

Again and again, people are definitely not talking to each other. And it's getting rather tiring. Taleb's analysis on finance can surely not be summed up the way you did it. And no, for 70% of it, it's not because of these bunch of bad loans given to idiots by other idiots that the crisis happened. But anyways that's off-topic (still it's nice to be familiar with what he is saying because he likes to generalize the lessons he learned from his experience). Take our high-IQ elites in the West : what makes them intelligent or "successful"? What makes the West, which is dangerously on the decline, a successful part of the world anymore? Taleb pretty much can't stop shitting on this class of people (who also happens to run Wall Street), IYIs, and it's probably the core of this problem. Concrete accomplishments are more likely to be correlated (actually correlated) to a person's hypothetical "worth" than a standardized test like IQ. It can only be a tool, and only up to a certain point as the "correlation" drops when looking at the higher ends of the data -- it seems to be a predictor of "unintelligence" (say from 60 to 100 points [maybe]) but not of actual intelligence. The argument is mainly about the statistical significance of vulgarized measures like IQ, which actually does seem to be pretty low. This is where the argument needs to happen, and it's not happening -- whether the IQ crowd don't want to respond or genuinely don't understand what is at stake, I don't know. Taleb hasn't been so clear about it all that's true. But his recent article was rather clear though.

When these “northern Europeans lived in mud huts” arguments come up, the thing to do is bring up the fact that the Yamnaya invented the bloody wheel and tell them to image search Hallstatt Culture bronze work. Northern Europeans lacked mass organization, population density and had barbarous religions. This is why they weren’t building aqueducts, not because they weren’t smart. Obviously the stock that yielded 19th century Britain and Germany must have had potential. The more interesting question is what happened to e.g. Greece, Anatolia, Syria and Egypt. I have hypotheses.

[…] Hate on Taleb all you want but “Intellectual-yet-idiot” is a good phrase. I recently read this quotation: […]

[…] by @nntaleb going FULL RETARD on the subject of IQ, James Watson getting stripped of his well earned titles, and LD50 gallery […]

[…] Spandrell Spanks Taleb. Twice. – Recently Taleb spouted off with normal Talebian gusto about the stupidity of using IQ or trusting the tests. It was pretty sad to see from an otherwise skeptical and questioning figure. Taleb did not endear himself to anyone by just doubling down no matter the argument’s progress. Is it a blind spot or more likely that he wanted to keep getting invited to fancy parties? If his blocks for specific tweets suggest anything, it is the latter. Spandrell takes him to task with a good scuzzing. […]

Except the North China plains region, Northern Europeans and other North East Asians lived in a harsh climate. In the agriculture age, the most important driver of your economy was how much grain you could grow. Northern Europe and Japan/ Korea/ Mongolia had limitations in growing enormous quantity of grains due to climatic conditions unlike places like Egypt, Iraq, the Indian subcontinent etc… Thus in the medieval era they were poorer. Even with Europe Germany/ Scandinavia though ample in water could not compete with say Italy in food production due to climatic restrictions. A similar case can be made for Japan vs China/ Indonesia etc… There was no way England could compete with the Ganges of India in food production even though England had good soil quality. Similarly Scotland could not compete with England because of the topography of the land (more mountains). That explains why England has about 10 times the population as Scotland and was wealthier. Take this difference and multiply it many times to get the difference between Northern Europe/ Japan Korea on one hand and the Brown zone (India, Middle East, South East Asia etc..) Besides Northern Europeans and North East Asians (The Japanese for example) were located at the edges of Eurasia unlike people in the middle zone and thus could not gain wealth from trade passing through their territories. Thus even if these populations of the North had higher IQs and other favourable traits, they were poorer than the middle IQ populations in the brown zone in the pre-Industrial era. The Industrial revolution changed all that. Now wealth creation was moving from Agriculture to Industry and wealth creation was no longer tied to the amount of grain they could grow in their lands. And it was now the high IQ cold climate populations of Europe (Whites) and North East Asia (Yellows) finally got their major advantage over the Middle Zoner Browns. Also thanks to innovations made in transportation technology in Britain (steam ships), moving resources from the tropics to the temperate zone for manufacturing was easy and cheap. This is what explains why the Indian Subcontinent, South East Asia or the Middle East-North Africa Region were quite wealthy in the agricultural age but now are failures (in some cases outright disasters) compared to Europe, Japan, Korea, Taiwan etc… and the Northern European settled places like North America, Australia, New Zealand in this technological age. And will probably remain so. China may be one of the few cases of success in the Agricultural age thanks to highly productive land as well as possible high success in this Industrial Technological age thanks to a high IQ cold climate population. Same might be said of Italy. Sub Saharan Africans? Well, failure in the Agricultural era (even though they possessed some of the most productive land in the World) as well as in the present Industrial era because of extremely low average IQ.

Taleb is opposed to IQ for all the wrong reasons, but he's not wrong. The methodology for IQ testing stems from Ronald Fisher's logical positivist statistics. An IQ test asks multiple questions and then, at the design stage, maps the distribution of correct answers to form a curve. Some people will answer more correctly and some will answer fewer. This inevitably produces that type of distribution, sometimes with a broad flat middle and sometimes with a narrow peak. Sometimes it's symmetrical and sometimes it's not. Then, at the deployment stage, the person actually taking the test has their result compared with this design-time test group distribution. There are a number of important assumptions written into this methodology. Firstly the answers are generally either not weighted, or else weighted by the test designers based on their own intuition. Since answers need to be some variety of multiple choice in order to be amenable to statistical transformation, the role of chance is proportional to the number of comparable test items for a particular skill level, so the designers cannot weight outcomes by prevalence of particular skill levels - and even then the very idea of comparable difficulty is subjective. In effect, answers are interchangeable, including not only trivially easy questions but also questions answered by fluke or misanswered in error! Secondly the agreed way to measure reliability is to assume the above and apply the 'standard deviation' method of pinning an outcome to the distribution as a probability. This is incredibly problematic: not only is it based on the above problem but it's greatly amplified - positive and negative are cancelled out!!! The standard deviation statistical transformation literally squares then unsquares, to correct for sign - see Wikipedia if you don't believe me: it's insane but that's the literal truth. So in effect, not only are answers interchangeable, but differences are also interchangeable: this is why the hypothetical curves in IQ charts are always symmetrical even though the data-sets are not. This means the mean's either left- or right-shifted, so even if standard deviation made sense, which it does not, then it'd be referencing the wrong mean, thereby introducing a further degree of inaccuracy. (Logical positivist tests such as 'standard error of the mean' and 'standard error of measurement' are intended to compensate for this, but instead they add further levels of aggregation of subjective phenomena! This is the core problem with logical positivism - ask David Gordon.) This means that a test of interchangeable and highly unreliable answers is interpreted according to a fictional distribution that nullifies sign and processes people and their particular answers as if they were interchangeable! Thirdly the scale of intelligence doesn't address the issue of adequacy. A stupid person may well fail at certain specific tasks that are beyond his cognitive reach, but this tells us nothing about which tasks these will be! Many things are easy for people of IQ110 upwards (say), but impossible below that. (Calculating the standard error of the mean is one example of something like this. IQ100 people simply cannot ever 'get it'.) So what difference does it make whether you're 115 or 135? Some tasks require an IQ of 90. Others 120. Far easier to just ask people to perform the tasks you want them to be able to perform, rather than do it via the indirect proxy of dodgy mental assessments. So in summary, IQ tests assume equivalence of subjective things which aren't equivalent; they're susceptible to fluke and error - especially at the very high or very low ends; they're founded on the statistical transformation of human beings and their psychological products, which is inherently absurd; and they don't help you predict behaviour or competence. The best that can be said of IQ tests is that people who do well at them do well in general. Fine, but you could just as easily use reputation, references or criminal record; perhaps set a trap for someone to test their honesty if that's what you're looking for - and if it's something drily intellectual, set them a sample problem and see how they perform. As for IQ as evidence in support of immigration restriction, it's completely unnecessary. The nation of Iraq would have done much better had much higher IQ Westerners not crossed its borders, and it had every right not to be destroyed by foreign invaders. None of this hinges on intelligence. The lowliest African has a right to exist and to be left alone to do it.

1. The agermans and the Celts didn’t beat the Romans all the time. 2) Being relatively close to Southern Europeans genetically means little to nothing. Before the Middle Ages they had no real achievements of heir own as a civilization. That’s his point. Race and IQ people need to come up with a credible explanation for the fact that they were failing for thousands of years.