[throwaway41968]

While Taleb himself is kind of an asshole an endearing thing about him (to me at least) is that he pisses off bigger assholes and doesn't pull his punches when calling them out on their quackery. See e.g. the whole IQ debacle. Regardless of what you may think about him, his problematic views and his personality, call him abrasive, inflammatory, full of himself, whatever, but he's not ignorant, he's not a charlatan, he's not pretending to be someone that he's not.

In a way NNT reflects the original hacker ethos in all of its pristine and glorious ugliness.

[agent00f]

The problem with Taleb is that he's incapable of recognizing any error, and he's not smart enough to do novel intellectual work. I recall pointing out some trivial mistake in the stat reasoning on some Facebook post of his, in a comment section full of fawning adulation by sycophants, and was immediately banned.

What really draws people to him is that controversial overconfidence, mostly from folks who don't understand the math anyway but are drawn to the personality. It's the standard confidence con frankly not much more sophisticated than Alex Jones. He mostly got lucky publishing a book about market crashes right as the market crashed, that's pretty much the extent of what his fans understand about the matter.

[frenchpress1234]

“Quackery” https://ideasanddata.wordpress.com/2019/01/08/nassim-taleb-o...

[throwaway41968]

A few things:

-It's basically a HBD blog. HBD proponents love to pretend they're doing "science" by posting huge walls of texts that masquerade as papers but would be thrown out of any respectable peer-reviewed popgen journal. (popgen, not psychology.). Here's an example of titles on this blog: "The Catholic Church and Western Genetics", "Racial Ancestry and IQ", "Population Differences in IQ-Related Genes", "Expert Surveys on Race and IQ". Note that at no point in any of those posts, any actual geneticist is mentioned, only "intelligence researchers". Many of these, like Lynn, Rushton and Kanazawa were found to be guilty of conducting absolute trash science or outright fraud (https://medium.com/@evopsychgoogle/a-critique-of-rushton-and..., https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3332228/, http://risk-resilience.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/jour...). Many of these researchers also get funding from very shady sources like the Pioneer Fund. This alone should send all kinds of warnings about the motivated agenda of the people putting forward arguments here.

-It does nothing to address any of the points raised by Taleb, such as nonlinearity and convexity. This sentence right here shows how mathematically illiterate the author is: >I’ll say more about this below, but here note in passing that Taleb never explains why a non-linear trend would invalidate IQ in the first place. The author also doesn't seem to understand that covariance between a fat-tailed distribution and a gaussian one isn't well-defined in the first place and as such measuring samples' covariance makes no sense. You don't need "a study" to prove it, it's just math.

-It basically parrots the same points over and over again, distorting the word "predict" to the point of meaninglessness: IQ predicts this, IQ predicts that. Well of course when we live in a society where many of your life outcomes are somehow tied to your ability to sit down and take a pen and paper test, IQ is going to correlate well with these! "An artifact number that drives a bunch of correlates" is not what normal people (read, people outside the Pioneer Fund buddies) mean by intelligence! In fact, nobody really agrees what is meant by intelligence, which is why AI isn't a thing and likely won't be within our lifetimes.

-You're basically a one-reply account, who posted just so that challenges to your debunked notion of IQ wouldn't get the last word. Again, let me doubt good faith is involved here.