Nassim Taleb's Anti-IQ Article Deconstructed (Yes, IQ Matters)

Malcolm and Simone do an in-depth analysis and critique of Nassim Taleb's controversial article "IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle". They break down his motivations, concessions, rhetorical tactics, and arguments against IQ testing. They explain why his solutions are impractical and highlight where he contradicts himself. Malcolm outlines a framework for reading critiques like this - looking for motivation, proposed alternatives, concessions, repeated bad arguments, and more. They agree IQ isn't everything but make the case it still matters, especially if IQ is declining.

Malcolm: [00:00:00] when you look at our prison system, the vast majority of people in it are at Very low accused. And when you deny that they had a systemic disadvantage when compared to you, when you tell people to throw that out, what?

You are taking the most vulnerable people in our society who are in a situation to do something they had no control over. And completely acting like they had the same advantage as you did in life. It is sick. It is sick. It is not moral. And you need to get your f*****g s**t together and actually look at the data instead of trying to blow smoke in people's faces so you can play your little virtue game.

Okay? Because people are suffering for your b******t. And so you can feel like a hero without having to challenge actual real world problems and fix them and take responsibility for the advantages that you were born with, which other people weren't. he ends up making an argument. That needs to say that he has achieved everything that he has achieved in life without systemic advantages at [00:01:00] all.

He has just willed himself to this. Place that he is

Simone: simultaneously while flaunting that systemic advantage, right? In every sense like to a fault, like to a point of illegibility.

Would you like to know more?

Simone: So Malcolm, what if I told you that obviously a wealth doesn't predict success because there are tons of millionaires and billionaires who just do nothing with their lives and piss away all their money. And obviously being like super, super poor, like under the poverty line is a problem, but like above a certain level, it really doesn't matter about how much money you have.

Oh, I think that

Malcolm: would make a lot of sense. I think that's exactly the type of thing a wealthy person would argue. Right. So I got to talk about how we got on this topic. We had a fan of the show stay over at our house because they happened to be passing through the area. And one of the things that they mentioned, because they were like, well, this is an area where I question something that you guys talk about a lot.

Specifically, he believed that [00:02:00] IQ didn't matter at all. And the reason he believes this is because another smart person who he looked up to had argued this very passionately. Specifically, Nassim Taleb. and he wrote this medium post about this

called IQ is largely a pseudo-scientific swindle. And I read this medium post and I saw it as a really interesting opportunity because self-contained within the me the post its itself was the proof that he was manipulating data and essentially lying to the reader. But what we want to try to do on this episode is to not just show that yes, IQ likely does matter, but give you the tools necessary to, even if you don't understand the scientific language was which a person is arguing, i.

e. in this case, like advanced statistics. Even if you don't [00:03:00] understand that. Understand the telltale signs that a person is lying to you and be able to tell that they are lying to you even if you don't understand what they are saying and better than all of that, get to deeper truth than you even could from reading an article from the perspective of somebody who is Agreed with what is true or what you already believe.

And by that what I mean is if somebody who really believes in career is invested in IQ mattering, writes an article that IQ matters. Well, they can't really trust it either because they might be lying with statistics as well. Right. There's somebody who deeply believes IQ doesn't matter, or at least.

tries to argue that has sprinkled throughout his article, little admissions to where IQ does matter. You can know that at least in those areas, it definitely matters because he has everything at stake in showing that it doesn't. So that's why learning to read articles in this way is really important.

Now, before we go further with [00:04:00] this, I want to elaborate on the analogy that Simone started the show is because I think this is where we're going as a society. And a lot of these people today who, We're born with advantages over people, born with usually really high IQs, and then they pretend like they've achieved everything that they've achieved on their own.

It is not the look that they think it is. It's very much the new, I don't see race. Pretending you don't see a systemic advantage that you have had over other people your entire life, and taking credit being like, well, I was starting from the same position they were, is not humble, okay? It is dehumanizing, and it is cruel and evil, and it prevents us as a society from potentially solving systemic issues for people who weren't born with your immense privilege.

I say this to Nassib, because he is somebody who was born with this immense privilege. Yeah, he's

Simone: clearly someone... Who [00:05:00] is very smart and who benefits from a high IQ. And if he were to, in good faith, take an IQ test, he would probably end up with a very high IQ score. Like it's pretty apparent.

I want to start off too with some caveats that like, you know, a lot of what he says is we agree with, you know, IQ, like if you have a really high IQ, it doesn't mean you're going to be super successful. Obviously not. You know, this is why with our school, we still like for, I will, as we say, and not IQ, because, you know, being really smart does not predict success, but he claims that's what like IQ enthusiasts also claim, which is not, it's just not true.

So he makes a lot of false claims on that. I just want to say that we agree. He also says that a really key thing with IQ is like it, where it is most predictive and where it is the biggest deal is where there's really low IQ, but he seems to like. I don't know. Just discount that that's not important when actually like it's been a really big deal.

This is why lead remediation, you know, like reducing lead exposure for populations has been such a big deal. He

Malcolm: also caught and measured through IQ. This is the place where IQ in [00:06:00] public policy has had a Has made a big impact on the lives of pretty much everyone living on earth today.

Simone: Yeah, because people were willing to admit that, you know, the low IQ is a problem.

And then also he talks about you know, people misusing IQ often in very unsavory, disgusting ways. You know, he points to racism a lot. That's totally true, but all sorts of messed up people use like misuse all sorts of science and pseudoscience and other nonsense. To forward their agendas.

Just because you see one idiot use something in a poor way, doesn't mean it's not. You know, it's not a, it's not a relevant field in other ways. So

Malcolm: before we go further with this I think we can break this down into a few core points when you're analyzing an article like this. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Let's go.

So one is you're looking for what the motivation is. Then you want to look at the data sets that they present, you want to look at. that what they think the alternatives are that they're presenting, if IQ doesn't matter, what are the alternatives? [00:07:00] You need to