Good thread on violence in Latin America -

https://twitter.com/davidluhnow/status/1080212239519342592

Taleb on IQ -

"IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle"

https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39

The most vulgar American president ever? It sure as #$@!%* isn't Donald Trump

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/the-most-vulgar-american-president-ever-it-sure-as-isnt-donald-trump

Crypto Theses for 2019

My thoughts on the state of crypto in 2018 and where we’re headed

https://medium.com/@arjunblj/crypto-theses-for-2019-dd20cb7f9895

The Black Caucus is robbing Blacks of scholarships -

https://dailycaller.com/2018/12/31/black-lawmakers-charity-didnt-give-out-a-single-scholarship-top-pols-hide-financials/

Mansplaining: when a man calls out of woman for telling lies.

Jesus Christ, would you look at the time???

Taleb on IQ - "IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle" ~ Snoopy at January 2, 2019 3:40 AM

Love Taleb's writing, but he is often guilty of what he faults others for, using academic arguments that ignore reality to illustrate his point

In his Fat Tony and Dr. John example from The Black Swan, he presents an academic argument that ignores reality to argue that academic arguments too often ignore reality.

He uses 99 coin flips all ending in heads and argues that the academic person (i.e., the high IQ Dr. John) would argue that the odds on the 100th flip are still 50:50, whereas his ruled-by-emotions brute, Fat Tony, would argue that the coin is rigged.

However, an actual statistician, after seeing 99 heads results in a "fair coin" toss would, seeing at the very least a statistical anomaly, also question underlying assumption of a "fair coin" and would investigate.

Agreed Conan, but his point is fairly valid. The truth is that the correlation between IQ and income or wealth works for certain ranges and falls apart for others. Most work doesn't require that much IQ and once you have enough more doesn't really help. Also a lot of work that does require very high IQ doesn't pay proportionately well. You need a lot of IQ to be a particle physicist but while the income is well above the median it is well below what is required for many other jobs (easy example, management).

It is actually funny that Snoopy is the one posting this because it wasn't that long ago he posted a tweet saying IQ was the cause of all class differences. Which is clearly false.

Patrick, good one on the Christ clock. Very funny.

https://twitter.com/OrwellNGoode/status/1079784500052353024

Interesting.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/01/a-whole-years-worth-of-works-just-fell-into-the-public-domain/

The truth is that the correlation between IQ and income or wealth works for certain ranges and falls apart for others. ~ Ben at January 2, 2019 10:08 AM

True.

IQ has always been problematic as a specific measure: "Unlike, for example, distance and mass, a concrete measure of intelligence cannot be achieved given the abstract nature of the concept of 'intelligence'"

The Stanford-Binet scale, the most widely used scale, was originally developed by French psychologist, Afred Binet, to "diagnose developmental or intellectual deficiencies in young children."

In socio-economic terms, IQ measures potential only; it does not measure work ethic or ability to absorb specific subject knowledge; nor mechanical ability. An experienced or well-trained plumber can be a very good plumber and still have a below-average IQ.

Them Asian kids is good at math.

What is driving this episode of cultural citizens’ arrest is that the Parkland kids are untouchable.

> It is actually funny that Snoopy is the one
> posting this because it wasn't that long ago he
> posted a tweet saying IQ was the cause of all
> class differences.

I don't agree with Taleb - just thought it was an interesting article.

Conan:

In socio-economic terms, IQ measures potential only; it does not measure work ethic or ability to absorb specific subject knowledge; nor mechanical ability. An experienced or well-trained plumber can be a very good plumber and still have a below-average IQ.

This might be naive of me, but I always assumed that personal interest was what drove the ability to absorb specific subject knowledge. My IQ is well above average, supposedly, but put me in a cake-decorating class and I will probably absorb the knowledge a lot less quickly than the other students, because I would be -- at best -- a disinterested learner.

Nothing against cake decorators. Just not something I'm overly interested in.

This might be naive of me, but I always assumed that personal interest was what drove the ability to absorb specific subject knowledge. ~ Patrick at January 2, 2019 7:22 PM

I'm certain that interest plays a vital role, but it's not all that drives the ability to absorb subject-specific knowledge and skills.

Practice and persistence play a major role in absorbing subject-specific knowledge and sills, too. They're what get you to Carnegie Hall, if the old joke is to be believed. Of course, those can be counted as being on the "interest" spectrum.

I'm with you on the cake decorating class. While I have little interest in learning that skill, I also have little ability to do it right. I find squeezing the icing bag while trying to effect a design on the side of a cake awkward. If I had the desire, perhaps I could catch on.

Look at Michael Jordan and golf. A spectacular athlete in other sports, Jordan struggled with the fundamentals of golf. He persisted and eventually became a decent golfer. His natural athletic ability did not make him a good athlete in every sport (if golf can honestly be considered a sport).

Likewise, a high IQ will not automatically make engineering or math easy for you. Unlike TV, where genius is an over-used word and smart characters move easily from hacking mainframes to lecturing on art history, you won't automatically be an expert in any subject solely because you have a high IQ; you will still have to study and practice the fundamentals.

Have you ever attended a Mensa meeting? The sole requirement for membership is an IQ in the top 2% of the general population as evidenced on a standard test. My IQ is high enough to make me eligible to join. So, I attended a few meetings expecting a modern-day Algonquin roundtable full of smart people and dazzling conversation. Um, no.

While there were scientist- and accountant-types, there were also under-employed and under-educated oddballs - conspiracy theorists convinced the government brought down the towers and anti-vaxxers convinced Big Pharma was hiding a cure for the common cold in order to sell more cough syrup. IQ does not measure work ethic, ambition, or even common sense.

"His natural athletic ability did not make him a good athlete in every sport"

Yep, that is a large problem with IQ and the concept of intelligence in general. Many people feel like it is all additive. I.e. if you are amazingly good at one thing you must be able to do everything I can plus that thing. But in reality there are trade offs. Being amazingly good at one thing usually means being well below average in many other areas.

Another yep on Mensa. There is a Mensa investment club. Don't follow their advice. You will go broke.

I've also seen another problem with high IQ in my personal life. And the people with the highest IQ usually aren't doing that well in general. They are amazingly good at learning what they are taught. So what happens when they are taught a bunch of garbage? The truth is that US public schools push a bunch of Marxism and other crap that flat isn't true and actively hurts people. But some of the smartest people absorb that bullshit and can't get it out of their heads later. While at the same time the lower IQ people just can't learn the bullshit that well. Consequently they do better financially as well as in their personal lives. In essence they avoid becoming Mensa conspiracy theorists by being too stupid to believe a bunch of made up bullshit.

Conan Says:

"However, an actual statistician, after seeing 99 heads results in a "fair coin" toss would, seeing at the very least a statistical anomaly, also question underlying assumption of a "fair coin" and would investigate."

Out of curiosity, in a group of 20 random coin flips of a truly fair coin, what kind of streaks would you expect to see?

The reason I am asking here is because there really isn't a great reason to put fair coin in quotes here based only on the information provided.

Random events tend to actually be much streakier than people might otherwise expect. In general the population has a distorted perception that random also implies a certain degree of homogeneity of the results. This could not be farther from the truth, for truly random events we expect streaks.

That you manage to get 99 heads in a row is less concerning than if the coin in question has only ever been flipped 99 times since its creation and only been observed to generate heads.

If the coin has been flipped 10,000 times and there happens to be a streak of 99 heads in there somewhere (even if those all happened on a separate day than the other 9901 flips) it would not necessarily be cause for alarm that the coin was unfair.

Ben Says:

"I've also seen another problem with high IQ in my personal life. And the people with the highest IQ usually aren't doing that well in general."

IQ is only positively correlated with income up to ~1 standard deviation or about 115.

Beyond that IQ and salary become decoupled.

The reason for this really doesn't have much to do with high IQ folks absorbing "Marxism and other crap" though.

It has more to do with the fact that the professions that having an IQ of 160+ qualify you for do not necessarily correspond to high salary positions. Furthermore, our economy financially rewards the financier of a good/revolutionary idea more than the individual who came up with the idea and executed it.

Our system tends to reward capital over genius.

On that basis it is silly to then blame the genius for failing to reap the lions share of the financial reward... the investors in the idea expect a ROI that often exceeds what the genius who came up with the idea will ever make.

Artie, you'll have to ask Taleb about the coin. I'm just referring to his example - and it's not about the coin, but about his use of an academic scenario to debunk the use of academic scenarios.

His scenario called for the logical person to simply accept a streak of 99 heads without question, while the emotional person was presented as readily questioning it.

I merely pointed out that a statistician (or other person with knowledge of statistics) would question 99 straight heads on a fair coin. He might ask the questions you did, or ask other questions. At the end of those questions, he might conclude it's a streak or question whether it really is a fair coin.

Academic scenarios often make use of archetypical characters to illustrate points, characters who often do little else than sit around being archetypical - in this case blindly logical or helplessly emotional.

The redeeming thing about Taleb's argument is that he illustrates that clinging to the assumptions underlying the conclusion you've drawn can get you into trouble - in this case, that it's a fair coin.

Ben Says:

"In essence they avoid becoming Mensa conspiracy theorists by being too stupid to believe a bunch of made up bullshit."

Also... being at the lower end of the IQ scale doesn't make folks immune to bullshit.

There are quite a number of anti-vaxxers for example who are in absolutely no danger of accidentally proving the Riemann Hypothesis.

Being stupid as you put it does not insulate/protect you from faulty or irrational beliefs.

What inoculates you from scams and bullshit is education. Anyone who tells you that you are better off being ignorant isn't your friend.

Conan,

I am not saying that the example was of your own making, just pointing out where common sense deviates from reality when it comes to randomness.

There was an article on spotify dealing with this issue years ago:

https://labs.spotify.com/2014/02/28/how-to-shuffle-songs/

They had a truly random shuffle algorithm (as random as algorithms get anyway)… and people did not like it because it seemed to streaky to be random.

They expected that random would imply a homogeneous distribution of artists without clumping.

So they changed the algorithm to be less random to meet customer expectations for what random feels like.

The point is that generally speaking, people don't have a good intuitive sense for what randomness really is.

"In essence they avoid becoming Mensa conspiracy theorists by being too stupid to believe a bunch of made up bullshit."

Bringing to mind the old saying about "an idea so stupid only an intellectual could believe it"... I think that a huge factor in having an actual useful intelligence capability, one that can accomplish meaningful things, is that you have to figure out how (and why) to learn on your own. Schooling and instruction can only take you so far; if you rely on it too much, you become gullible to every crackpot idea that comes along, whether it be Marxism or conspiracy theories or perpetual motion machines. The thing is, I'm not sure anyone can teach a person to learn on their own (the very idea of doing so seems self-contradictory).

But can intellectual curiosity be killed by enforced conformity? We seem to be running a big social experiment now to find out. Will it succeed, or will it merely drive the self-motivated learners underground?

So they changed the algorithm to be less random to meet customer expectations for what random feels like. ~ Artemis at January 3, 2019 10:04 AM

If song = x is independent for each iteration, than the song that was played in the last slot has an equal chance of being played in the next slot in the rotation.

Whoever wrote the algorithm should have written it with less independence to begin with; should have known they'd have trouble with the same song twice in a row being randomly chosen.

There's a benefit to having some real world experience mixed in with your logic.

The point is that generally speaking, people don't have a good intuitive sense for what randomness really is. ~ Artemis at January 3, 2019 10:04 AM

Your state lottery commission is counting on that.

What inoculates you from scams and bullshit is education. Anyone who tells you that you are better off being ignorant isn't your friend. ~ Artemis at January 3, 2019 9:59 AM

Some people can read other people, a skill that does not rely on IQ.

Good salespeople develop this skill. Good con artists, too.

Good job missing the point Arty. Yes, education is great. But when only maleducation is offered having a higher capacity to learn isn't helpful.

"On that basis it is silly to then blame the genius for failing to reap the lions share of the financial reward..."

Who said blame? Don't read too much into things. You aren't successful at it.

I will admit when I wrote "lower IQ people" I ment lower than the top IQ people. Apologies if that was confusing. Though in that context truly lower IQ people (but not retarded) actually did better than the highest IQ ones.

"Your state lottery commission is counting on that."

Actually CD I've found the lottery is depending on desperation and despair. People I've dealt with that actually play understand they aren't going to win. They just are unhappy enough that even a long shot looks like an option.

Ben, I think part of the answer there is that there are a lot of everyday jobs that simply don't require genius to do effectively. And I'm not necessarily talking about manual labor or retail. You don't have to be a genius to be a phlebotomist. You do need a certain amount of knowledge, and a certain amount of manual dexterity. But I can't think of how the IQ 160 person would have an advantage over the IQ 100 person in that job. And if the IQ 160 person doesn't have the manual skill with the needle, they aren't going to be successful in that job no matter how smart they are.

Further, I think that a lot of the jobs that do require a very high IQ are highly specialized jobs for which there are few employment opportunities. Consider astronomy. There are a handful of well-established astronomers who, although they aren't wealthy as such, are leading very comfortable lives based on the results of their research and their fame among academics. There is a larger group doing astronomy as graduate assistants or observatory gofers (very low pay) and a still larger group doing it as amateurs (no pay at all). You'd be amazed how many comets and asteroids have been discovered by amateur astronomers. A lot of them could make it as professionals if there were job opportunities, but there aren't.

"What inoculates you from scams and bullshit is education. Anyone who tells you that you are better off being ignorant isn't your friend."

If by "education" you mean "going to school a lot", I disagree. I have known far too many highly educated people who fell for crank theories or scams, either through hubris (they thought they were too smart to be out-smarted), or just to fit in with their peers. Read some of what James Randi has written about how gullible well-known scientists can be when it comes to scientific frauds. Education is good at imparting information, but it is not good at teaching people how to think.

I mentioned that Cousin Dave. Or at least tried to.

What is equally interesting to the individual value of IQ stuff is the value of outliers to whole population groups. Most of your very high IQ obsessive inventor types don't get rich. In fact they are often lucky to not end up broke. But their work increases the wealth of everyone around them. Acceptance of not obviously harmful outliers is very important for both economic as well as technological improvement.

Conan Says:

"If song = x is independent for each iteration, than the song that was played in the last slot has an equal chance of being played in the next slot in the rotation.
Whoever wrote the algorithm should have written it with less independence to begin with; should have known they'd have trouble with the same song twice in a row being randomly chosen."

You are misunderstanding the issue.

It wasn't repeat songs that was bothering people... it was repeat artists.

Such as getting 2 Beatles songs in a row, not the exact same song.

Conan Says:

"Some people can read other people, a skill that does not rely on IQ.
Good salespeople develop this skill. Good con artists, too."

Almost everyone believes they are good at reading people... the vast majority are wrong.

They remember the times they were correct and conveniently forget the times they were wrong, it is a cognitive bias.

This is where many novice poker players go wrong. You aren't likely to win by trying to "read" the other players at the table when you are playing against strangers. You are much better off playing statistically and using position betting.

I feel like people tend to overestimate their skill at reading people in the same way they tend to overestimate their skill at speaking off the cuff.

Very few people are really good at this, odds are if you think you are one of them, you aren't.

Ben Says:

"Good job missing the point Arty. Yes, education is great. But when only maleducation is offered having a higher capacity to learn isn't helpful."

Well of course "maleducation" is useless... that is tautological.

So you are accusing me of missing the point that you were making a completely trivial claim?

You were saying that bad education is bad???... well whoopdeedoo… I will add that one to my collection of Ben classics.

Would you care to specifically define what constitutes "maleducation"?

Furthermore, can you please explain how being unintelligent insulates you from said "maleducation"?

What exactly prevents an unintelligent person from believing vaccinations cause autism if they are "maleducated" that it does?

There is even an entire subreddit devoted to these antivax loons:

https://www.reddit.com/r/vaxxhappened/

These folks don't exactly strike me as being the brightest bulbs in the box.

You are free to disagree of course, but then we might have wildly different criteria for what actually constitutes intelligent.

My point being, I don't actually buy this nonsense that being intelligent makes you more susceptible to stupid ideas.

Cousin Dave Says:

"If by "education" you mean "going to school a lot", I disagree. I have known far too many highly educated people who fell for crank theories or scams, either through hubris (they thought they were too smart to be out-smarted), or just to fit in with their peers. Read some of what James Randi has written about how gullible well-known scientists can be when it comes to scientific frauds. Education is good at imparting information, but it is not good at teaching people how to think."

There was a claim made that lack of intelligence insulated folks from falling prey to bad ideas in a way that high levels of intelligence made you more susceptible.

I am simply arguing that this style of argument makes no sense.

There is no scarcity of unintelligent people who hold completely irrational and unsupported beliefs.

This also doesn't mean that being intelligent makes you immune to absorbing bad ideas or falling victim to cognitive errors.

Education can in fact teach people how to think and avoid cognitive errors. One of my all time favorite courses was a methods of reasoning class that gave voice to something I had long felt but didn't have the language to describe.

Often times we have a sense that something is "off" with an argument, but we lack the tools to explain what exactly is wrong.

To the extent that we fail to emphasize this is a tragedy, but it is actually something that can be changed.

Artemis, we may have to agree to disagree on this one, but I sort of get where you're coming from. Regarding this quote:

"Often times we have a sense that something is 'off' with an argument, but we lack the tools to explain what exactly is wrong."

This is often true, and it is a skill that does indeed agree with education. (Provided that the student has actually made an effort to understand the principles involved, and isn't just regurgitating answers for tests, but that's a different problem.) I can often look at the results of a calculation and tell right away if it is "in the ballpark" of what the correct result should be. If not, I get suspicious. I think I mentioned in another thread a colleague and I looking at test results for a piece of hardware. The test passed, in that the results met the test criteria. However, plotting the results on a graph, the graph does not look like what it should look like, based on our understanding of the hardware. Because of this, we suspect something was wrong the test procedure, and so we are left in doubt about whether the test actually passed.

Where I was trying to get at: People who sit and wait for educators to spoon-feed them, rather than making an effort to learn things for themselves, do not seem to learn inductive reasoning. In almost any field, a four-year college degree program can really only cover a small sample. People who don't make an effort to learn outside of their classwork don't seem to learn inductive reasoning, which would help them apply their knowledge outside of their specific classroom topics. I also think that this makes them way over-trusting of authority in general, and that describes a lot of academics today.

Let's put it this way: When the '60s liberals said "question authority", I took them seriously, and I still live with that motto. It seems to me that a lot of the people who count themselves as "liberal" today have turned their backs on that foundational principle of their philosophy.

Cousin Dave Says:

"I can often look at the results of a calculation and tell right away if it is "in the ballpark" of what the correct result should be. If not, I get suspicious."

This is something I like to call "number sense" and it is incredibly useful for a variety of things. As a trivial example, when multiplying two 3 digit numbers on a calculator you should certainly be aware that the output should have greater than 3 digits. If it does not then you cannot just uncritically accept that it is the answer.

When I am unclear on here is why you believe this kind of thinking cannot be taught in the classroom?

This is a very common exercise in physics and mathematics courses (even within the realm of quantum mechanical calculations where initial intuition is typically useless... one eventually builds up a new intuition based upon experience with the calculations, which is provided by classroom examples and problem solving).

"People who sit and wait for educators to spoon-feed them, rather than making an effort to learn things for themselves, do not seem to learn inductive reasoning."

Inductive reasoning is at the very core of the scientific enterprise... how exactly do you think scientists are trained if not through an educational process?

We certainly don't just sent them off on their own into the lab without any educational guidance or oversight to just see what happens.

"People who don't make an effort to learn outside of their classwork don't seem to learn inductive reasoning, which would help them apply their knowledge outside of their specific classroom topics."

I think what you are talking about here is intellectual curiosity. This is something that can and should also be encouraged through education.

There is certainly nothing wrong with going out and learning things on your own. I simply don't agree that an inherent property of education is to inhibit the formation of reasoning skills.

Your personal experience may be markedly different than my own, but I never felt that education involved just rote memorization of facts. Education also involved exploration.

As an example, one of the advanced lab courses I took as an undergrad involved replicating many of the classic experiments and then writing up the results in a formal technical format.

Each student got to select 6 of these experiments from a variety of options and we recieved a packet detailing the experimental equipment and the general setup to guide us through so we weren't trying to reinvent the wheel from scratch.

We then had meetings with the professor each week on our indepdent progress where we had the opportunity to discuss unforseen roadblocks, observations, concerns, etc... It was during these discussions where we had the opportunity to solicit advice on how to proceed if we identified an impass.

I was enabled to measure the gravitational constant, replicate the Millikin oil drop experiment, measure and plot the phase diagram of the superconducting state of tin, amongst several other classic experiments.

What I do not understand is how you do not see these kinds of experiences as driven by education... and how they do not encourage inductive reasoning skills.

Setting up and carrying out experiments properly more or less requires the development and implementation of inductive reasoning.

I suppose where we may disagree is that in some sense you don't feel practical applications of education are part of the education process where as I see them as integral... they aren't separate items, they are part of the same process.

"What I do not understand is how you do not see these kinds of experiences as driven by education... and how they do not encourage inductive reasoning skills."

Because I see way too many (supposedly) educated people who don't have those skills.

"I suppose where we may disagree is that in some sense you don't feel practical applications of education are part of the education process where as I see them as integral..."

No, actually, it's the opposite. To take an example, I had an English lit course (in high school) where the instructor's main focus was passing moral judgement on the authors of the works studied, not what the works themselves might have to say to us. That was spoon-feeding: parrot the instructor's opinions back to him, you pass the class. No thinking required. And there's way too much of it in higher education. It's worst in humanities, but it's in STEM too and it's growing.

Cousin Dave,

In a conversation regarding flawed reasoning being applied to problems I feel it is necessary to point out a few things. When you say the following:

"Because I see way too many (supposedly) educated people who don't have those skills."

There are several logical problems that need to be highlighted. First, anecdotal observations do nothing to prove your contention that education in some sense fails to encourage inductive reasoning skills. That you have seen "too many" (whatever that means since it is a completely subjective assessment... is 1 too many, is 10 too many... it hasn't been defined) does nothing to actually prove or disprove your contention. The reason for this is that the relevant data is in the comparison between two populations.

To demonstrate that education fails to encourage inducting reasoning skills requires the following:

1 - Take a population of uneducated folks and gather a baseline of what their inductive reasoning skills are.
2 - Educate that same population and see if their inductive reasoning skills have improved or not.

That is the relevant information.

No one has argued that education is a 100% antidote to flawed reasoning. As such, the fact that you have run into educated folks who don't have those skills isn't surprising at all... it also doesn't demonstrate the point you want to make.

Your argument is analogous to someone claiming that seat belts have nothing to do with automobile safety because they have seen way too many folks die in car crashed who were wearing them.

That is a seriously flawed argument, and in the same exact sense yours is as well.

This discussion is about comparing uneducated versus educated populations of people... no one is claiming that all educated folks have perfect reasoning ability, I am only claiming that education can positively contribute to peoples logical reasoning ability.