this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.

AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)

This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.

[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]

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Taleb dunking on IQ “research” at length. Technically a seriouspost I guess.

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[–] TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

This is good:

Take the sequence {1,2,3,4,x}. What should x be? Only someone who is clueless about induction would answer 5 as if it were the only answer (see Goodman’s problem in a philosophy textbook or ask your closest Fat Tony) [Note: We can also apply here Wittgenstein’s rule-following problem, which states that any of an infinite number of functions is compatible with any finite sequence. Source: Paul Bogossian]. Not only clueless, but obedient enough to want to think in a certain way.

Also this:

If, as psychologists show, MDs and academics tend to have a higher “IQ” that is slightly informative (higher, but on a noisy average), it is largely because to get into schools you need to score on a test similar to “IQ”. The mere presence of such a filter increases the visible mean and lower the visible variance. Probability and statistics confuse fools.

And:

If someone came up w/a numerical“Well Being Quotient” WBQ or “Sleep Quotient”, SQ, trying to mimic temperature or a physical quantity, you’d find it absurd. But put enough academics w/physics envy and race hatred on it and it will become an official measure.

[–] corbin@awful.systems 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Unlucky 10000: There is an EQ, or emotional quotient, and I was given an EQ test in high school (like age 17-18, don't remember exactly). Fortunately, it was just done for fun by a lone teacher, but I could see it becoming popular in a future school system.

[–] jonhendry@awful.systems 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Testing EQ would probably be opposed as "woke" by conservative parents in the school district.

[–] corbin@awful.systems 9 points 1 year ago

Nah, they're okay with it because it reinforces their belief that a person is either high-empathy or low-empathy, with higher EQ being better. In general, conservatives love standardized tests and grades, because it grants the appearance of merit, which is essential for meritocracy.

[–] lobotomy42@awful.systems 4 points 1 year ago

This shit is just as bad, frankly. The quest to quantify and then rank All The Things is inherently dangerous.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Side note, I know Taleb is widely appreciated, but man this is some badly written stuff. Is all his stuff like this? I realize blog post != book, but c'mon, some pride in craftmanship is in order.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 12 points 1 year ago (5 children)

yes, way too much of it is. Taleb is extremely smart, but nobody is as smart as Taleb thinks he is.

[–] zogwarg@awful.systems 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I think the most bitter part is him taking pride in his "real life" intelligence and his condemnation of test takers as "lifeless bureaucrats who can muster sterile motivation". There is a callous hubris there, I suspect fueled by resentment of past interactions with quacks and/or holier than thou academics, the remedy isn't becoming holier than thou in turn.

Sneering is fun/cathartic, othering less so.

NOTE: As a mindless drone pencil pusher myself, prone to to investigate things that don't clearly matter immediately to the "real world"; I might be a tad defensive here ^^.

[–] pdcawley@mendeddrum.org 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

@dgerard or as insufferable. I couldn't get more than half a chapter into Black Swan because his writing style was so damned offputting.

[–] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 1 year ago

he really gives off that condensed "stick it to the man" vibe

[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 3 points 1 year ago

All the same content is in fooled by randomness and it's far far shorter

[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 4 points 1 year ago

Unfortunately he is an atrocious narcissist

[–] pja@awful.systems 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

High-end stats is kind of Taleb’s thing, so he gets to be as insufferable as he likes dunking on IQiots imo.

[–] fnix@hachyderm.io 4 points 1 year ago

@pja @dgerard Taleb’s like that with just about anyone he dislikes for whatever reason tho, so it’s not just about high-end stats or the caliper-curious.

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[–] pja@awful.systems 3 points 1 year ago

Yeah, he needs an editor. But the relentless dunking on IQiots is worth the verbiage imo.

[–] pizza-bagel@kbin.social 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ignoring the racism behind IQ tests for a second...

IQ can't measure intelligence, because even if you're smart as hell in one topic you can be dumb as hell in another. Hell, people in MENSA prove that themselves by paying YEARLY to validate their intelligence lmao. Gives me Peggy Hill "certified genius" vibes

[–] maol@awful.systems 9 points 1 year ago

My dad is a smart guy so he applied to join Mensa in the 80s. Incidentally he was also an amateur soccer player at the time. Anyway he did the first test which was free and passed it. There was a second test which you did have to pay for but it wasn't that expensive so he did it and passed. But then there was a third test you also had to pay for....so he didn't join. Gave him a good story.

On the rational wiki page for Mensa it says that the founder of the organization left when it was quite young, commenting that conversations between self-validated smart people quickly devolved into "mental masturbation"....

[–] Can_you_change_your_username@kbin.social 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The big problem with IQ is that it's horribly misapplied. It's a predictor for how you will do in education. That is all it was designed to do and all it has ever been validated for. It does that ok, not great but well enough to be statistically significant. It has some reasonable use in identifying extreme outliers (the roughly 5% of people more than 2 standard deviations from the mean) which is useful for getting the roughly 2.5% of people more than 2 standard deviations below the mean the additional resources and care they need. There are no other valid community uses for IQ and for the vast majority of people it's a meaningless number. It unfortunately found a place in pop culture and in business and government recruitment when realistically it's use should have always been limited to research and selective clinical/educational applications (identifying people that need extra resources). Mass testing is undisputably a waste of resources because of how little useful information it generates and the high risk of misuse of basically meaningless results of the 95% that are within the normal range.

[–] corbin@awful.systems 13 points 1 year ago

Don't forget its other use: corralling high-IQ children into Talented & Gifted programs. Gotta stigmatize them early. (It's okay, I'm allowed to joke about this; I maxed out an IQ test as a child and was shoved into T&G for grade school.)

[–] lobotomy42@awful.systems 5 points 1 year ago

I'll go one further: "intelligence" as conceived by "IQ" is a mostly meaningless concept and the word, when used in everyday English, mostly just means "agrees with me"

[–] willsitting2@awful.systems 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What books(ideally books pls) would you guys recommend to anyone caught up in IQ stuff? Especially for people outside the US? Ignore if wrong place to ask this, my bad there.

[–] TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man is always a good place to start.

[–] willsitting2@awful.systems 3 points 1 year ago

Will find a copy, thank you!

[–] xilliah 3 points 1 year ago

I know a really smart guy who apparently scored 70. This guy invented a complicated machine that is now widely used.