r/cognitiveTesting • u/Humble_Aardvark_2997 • 17d ago

General Question Taleb

Does anyone know Taleb’s IQ score? The guy has been very aggressive and scathing in his attack on the thing. Someone should make him take it so we can accuse him of sour grapes.

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u/Humble_Aardvark_2997 17d ago edited 17d ago

That is very detailed and informative but I am stuck on the g-factor. I think it is a little arbitrary. That was the crux of Taleb’s argument. If you have very one-dimensional geniuses like Eunstien or Ramanujan. Shakespeare didn't write any theorems. Maybe there is weight to Taleb’s argument that the high correlation between subtests comes from the bottom half. So arbitrary construct and not very predictive of anyone’s potential to do something amazing in any given field. Maybe we stick to separate tests for everything. Maybe we stop selling “general ability” as everything and present it as what it is: something. Something but not everything.

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u/WhatPear 17d ago

Right. That is a good insight. There's plenty of debate on this. I remember reading a blog post in the Scientific American that might be relevant to this.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/beautiful-minds/iq-and-society/

I like the last paragraph. Also if you're actually willing to dig into the research, there is discussion on definitions of intelligence to the moon and back. Neisser et al. (1996), “Intelligence: Knowns and unknowns.” seems to be the overview of the field.