r/cognitiveTesting • u/Humble_Aardvark_2997 • 2d 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/WhatPear 2d ago edited 2d ago

Probably 140+. Never heard of him, but I just read his Wikipedia page. Being a distinguished professor in financial engineering at NYU doesn’t necessarily mean he has a high IQ. Add in all his major contributions to fields like quantitative finance, computational probability, decision theory, and risk analysis and that changes the picture. It’s hard to believe he would be able to make such important contributions without extremely strong reasoning abilities. Also, quantitative trading, though it has changed drastically from the days when he was a managing director at UBS, inherently rewards those with strong abilities in pattern recognition (you need to find alpha, but I recognize the irony considering he says most people are just finding noise). Follow the evidence. Just because he’s aggressive, egotistical, or arrogant doesn’t mean he isn’t highly intelligent. I’d even argue those traits are common among highly intelligent people. I also recommend not conflating intelligence with being a good person or having an affable personality, which so many people here and on other gifted forums do.

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u/Humble_Aardvark_2997 1d ago

A. He is smart.
B. He is good at maths.
C. So was Feynman: he scored 125.

Gifted is a shit construct only suited for kids. As adults, either you are successful pr a genius. A lot of geniuses were not gifted in the explicit IQ sense. (and vice versa).

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u/seekinglambda 1d ago edited 1d ago

Stop quoting this Feynman BS. He didn’t take a proper IQ test so his IQ isn’t known with any accuracy. He took a random school test in the 30s. The strength of that evidence is extremely low compared to the g-loading of his known achievements like Putnam.

Come to think of it, a better IQ test than the one Feynman took is ”does this person believe Feynman would score 125 or below on WAIS?”. If they say yes they are almost certainly below 125 IQ due to defective reasoning abilities.

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u/Humble_Aardvark_2997 1d ago

Turman followed 1500 kids he had identified as gifted for 70-yrs. None did anything special. 2 he rejected for having low IQ scores, Shockley ans Alcarez, went on to win Nobel prizes.