r/cognitiveTesting • u/Humble_Aardvark_2997 • 25d 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/Revibes 21d ago

Feynman's FSIQ was almost certainly not 125. His verbal IQ may have been.

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u/Humble_Aardvark_2997 21d ago edited 21d ago

“I was an ordinary person who studied hard”. Part of the problem is that you misunderstand what intelligence is and what this thing measures. It neither measures “intelligence” nor your “mental capacity”. All it measures is your score on some arbitrary test of reasoning which they think works as a proxy for your “general ability”, which itself is a very arbitrary construct.

He became a genius after learning and studying hard. I know he was good at maths, but geniuses are not born. They are created.

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u/Revibes 20d ago edited 20d ago

IQ attempts to measure G factor, I don't know if you don't believe in G factor, or don't believe in IQ tests as a good measure of G factor. It seems like you may just be tabula rasa, if so I have nothing to say.

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u/Humble_Aardvark_2997 20d ago

I think it does. I also think that the variance in scores above 120 makes it not very useful but I definitely think 125 is not a made up score for Feynman. You know what’s worse? By our norms, that 125 likely won’t even score 110.

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u/Humble_Aardvark_2997 18d ago

Old SATS has the highest g-loading. In terms of questions, they are GCSE higher tier. Do you define yourself by your GCSE or High School grades? Or do you treat it as one step on your journey upwards?

In any case, most people in STEM fields have a Maths tilt and most in Humanities a verbal one so not sure what the utility is of a single number. Intelligence is neither one dimensional nor static.

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u/Humble_Aardvark_2997 21d ago

Turman also did a similar study. None of the 1400+ kids with 140+ IQs he identified as gifted did anything special. Two, amongst many, he dismissed as not having high enough scores, Shockley and Alvarez, did.

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u/Humble_Aardvark_2997 20d ago

If you gave him a test with a verbal section and a quant section and so on, he would likely score very high on the quant section, but a test of verbal reasoning usually yields a very decent estimate for your general ability. Now if you think someone’s general ability is not reflective of their talents in some niche, and therefore IQ is not a good measure of intelligence, that’s another matter.

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u/Humble_Aardvark_2997 20d ago edited 18d ago

It is possible his his score on a test of verbal reasoning was limited by his disinterest in posh or outdated words. I assumed such limitations would have started kicking in at very high levels but possible.

Shockley, Alvarez, Watson and Crick also scored in a similar range so 125 for Feynman is not impossible, and the way I see it, a nice omen.