[walkhour]

That article is largely a pseudoscientific swindle, and it has repeatedly been rebutted, please see https://archive.ph/PCvgk.

Overall I'd recommend not taking a single article and using it as something that can refute a whole science.

[runarberg]

How about a whole book:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man

How about a video essay which summarizes other critiques:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo

What if you look at the numerous false predictions of IQ research:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations

Or a peer reviewed summary which got published in an academic journal with over a 100 citations:

http://www.swisswuff.ch/files/richardson2002whatiqteststest.... (PDF)

Overall I’d recommend regularly reviewing the literature to assess where the scientific consensus is around a theory is. To date, the literature does not support any consensus around the theory of general intelligence nor the efficacy of IQ as a theory for intelligence.

[walkhour]

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man

Doesn't this author have a terrible reputation? And he's known for standing by disproven theories? I'm surprised you didn't find a better example.

> How about a video essay which summarizes other critiques:

Sorry, I haven't watched these 2 hours and 40 minutes, can I read the summary somewhere? Hopefully it's better than Nassim's article.

> Or a peer reviewed summary which got published in an academic journal with over a 100 citations

What is a peer reviewed summary? Is it like a meta-analysis? But honest questions: how much weight do you think this has? Are the citations supporting it or criticising it?

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations

Looks like an example of bad science that was caught and exposed? Why do you think this reflects badly on the rest of the research?

> To date, the literature does not support any consensus around the theory of general intelligence nor the efficacy of IQ as a theory for intelligence.

You are asking for consensus. Do you mean an ultra majority? There's no consensus even on whether climate change is real, only 97% of scientist think so. Could you give percentages of who supports what on the science of IQ.

[runarberg]

Is there any source of scrutiny you’d accept as valid criticism?

Seriously though, the burden of proof shouldn’t be on the anti-IQ crowd. IQ is a new construct, that proponents have been trying to justify for over half a century. At some point, repeated failures to convince a broader field of its utility should be evidence enough that it might not be worth investigating. Yes, sometimes there are worthy theories which receive unfair treatment, like e.g. continental drift, however even Wegener’s theory took less than 50 years to be accepted, and I bet IQ research has received orders of magnitude more funding and attention than Wegener ever did.

To date, the only evidence for IQ and the g-factor comes from the tests them selves, the construct is not used in any models outside of the field of psychometrics (while psychometrics them selves is becoming more and more fringe as a science). It’s use has historically been focused around racist conjectures and eugenics.

Even though I shouldn’t I’m still gonna give one more shot at finding evidence of the increasing irrelevance of IQ in modern science. I searched for “IQ cognitive psychology” on google scholar. While I did find some attempts of researchers trying to merge psychometrics and Cognitive Psychology, however when Dennis et.al (2009) actually went ahead and looked how useful IQ was in a common neurodevelopmental model, they found it was simply in the way:

> Using IQ as a matching variable or covariate has produced overcorrected, anomalous, and counterintuitive findings about neurocognitive function.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-the-inter...

In my search results I also found another paper, which I couldn’t access, dating all the way to 1988, which seems to be making the same case as I that IQ is on its way to the history books: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0168863880840087...

[thworp]

The most important point of Taleb's is right near the top, in particular anything with graphs. This article pretty much just ignores that entire section (especially the quiz part is a very nice illustration for the statistically challenged). It doesn't even address the point that the outcome graph with the lower tail blocked is basically an entirely random distribution.

Then it happily continues to use the graphs and averaged results, that Taleb showed contain almost no signal, as if nothing happened.

This is not a serious rebuttal.