Are we really mathematically bound?

SUMMARY OF IQ AS A MEASURE OF INTELLIGENCE AS PER TALEB

"IQ" THREAD

"IQ" measures an inferior form of intelligence, stripped of 2nd order effects, meant to select paper shufflers, obedient IYIs.

1- When someone asks you a question in REAL LIFE, you focus first on "WHY is he asking me that?", which slows down. (Fat Tony vs Dr John)

2- It takes a certain type of person to waste intelligent concentration on classroom/academic problems. These are lifeless bureaucrats who can muster sterile motivation. Some people can only focus on problems that are REAL, not fictional textbook ones.

3- Look at the hordes with "high IQ" (from measurement) who are failures in real world rather than the ~50% correlation between IQ and success in 1) salaried employment, 2) jobs that select for edjukashion.

Yuuge survivorship bias: 37 out of 38 PhDs in finance blew up in 1998!

4 -If many millionaires have IQs around, 199 & 58 y.o. back office clerks at Goldman Sachs or elsewhere an IQ of 155 (true example), clearly the measurement is less informative than claimed.

5- If you renamed IQ , from "Intelligent Quotient" to FQ "Functionary Quotient" or SQ "Salary person Quotient", then some of the stuff will be true. It measures best the ability to be a good slave. IYIs want to build a top-down world where IYIs have the edge.

6- If you take a Popperian-Hayekian view on intelligence, then you would realize that to measure it you would need to know the SKILLS needed in the ecology, which is again a fallacy of intellectual hubris.

7- Perhaps the worst problem with IQ is that it seem to selects for people who don't like to say "there is no answer, don't waste time, find something else".

8- IQ is an academic-contrived notion.  And the problem is that in academia there is no difference between academia and the real world; in the real world there is.

9- It is PRECISELY as a quant that I doubt "IQ". I've spent 34 years working w/"High IQ" quants. I've rarely seen them survive, not blow up on tail events.

10- #SkininTheGame shows that the only robust measure of "rationality" & "intelligence" is survival, avoidance of ruin/left tail/absorbing barrier, (ergodicity). Nothing that does not account for ability to survive counts as a measure of "intelligence"-- just philosophaster BS.

11- A robust use of "IQ" is for low scores for special needs pple. But then practically ANY measure would work to detect problem & improvement.

12- If someone came up w/a NUMERICAL "Well Being Quotient" WBQ or "Sleep Quotient", SQ, trying to mimic temperature or oth physical qty, you 'd find it absurd.

But put enough academics w/physics envy on it & it will become an official measure.

That's what happened to "IQ".

PHASES TO LEVERAGE IQ

IQ in isolation becomes more than dangerous measure to evaluate intellect. 

1. Because human intelligence is beyond comprehension of humans at least till now. An age old measure and we’ve not found anything better

2. Academic performance cannot be a precursor to performance unless clubbed with inherent intent (scoring marks is one way but means and intent becomes critical - Albert Einstein was not an average student but was initially deemed average due to traditional education measuring him) 

3. Also very high IQ has correlation with inability to collaborate which is one of important aspects of success, as their satisfaction is via self certification (or educational certification and not via having made an impact on others, which is generally a high focus of very successful leaders)

4. A lot of “very intelligent” people I’ve personally met have limited ability to appreciate difference they’ve made to other people’s life and end up being inward looking how much “intellectually challenging” an exercise was.

There may be phases of professional career:

Stage 1: Where you’re supposed to learn, execute and be accurate (these are roles where high IQ facilitates growth as rightly pointed in point #4 & 5)

Stage 2: Where impact made by a person in the job and how s/he tackles relationship to grow becomes important ( IQ has now started going downhill as a required skill because collaboration and smaller decisions start becoming success parameters - high IQ -> too analytical -> slow decision making; Lack of collaboration works as I pointed before) 

Stage 3: Important decision making becomes key job scope (some high IQs May creep in here, most will be left in stage 2 and 1. Those who if don’t evolve end up wasting time and resources in “over-analysing” thus leaving opportunities behind especially people having survivor bias – “intellect only got me here”) 

Stage 4: Being a senior leader will need all of these skills (may vary in quantum) 

a. Collaboration 

b. Quick decision making 

c. Choosing right people 

d. Result orientation

e. Learning from failures 

Traditional measures of “intellect” measures none of above. In fact very high IQ becomes poison for each of the skills. 

Collaboration and decision making have been pointed out. 

High IQ leading to limited people orientation thus leading to choosing wrong people for job (see world through your lens - high IQ) or make existing people unhappy (again evaluation by your lens - high IQ) 

Because of academic certification which has been part high IQ peoples’ lives; desire for “intellectual superiority” trumps result orientation leading to self declared sense of superiority and inability to make “real impact” thus “real success”. 

Failure in field of academics, especially students is absolute/ binary – therefore there is generally limited ability to “look-back” and learn apart from “work-hard”. However, in real-life learning from mistakes becomes multi-dimensional and one needs to evolve in that direction.

Thus high IQ dwindles as a required skill as one grows and therefore should be taken with a pinch of salt whenever evaluating “reasons for success”  

Sitting at the Bangalore airport I overheard a conversation between two people lets name them P1 and P2 which went somewhat like this :
P1 : Oh my god who is this beauty in the photograph?
P2 : She is my girlfriend.
P1 : Wow!! Dude teri to life set ho gayi what a babe.
P2 : Nahi yaar abhi kafi tensions hai job ko lekar life me.

The conversation above is a daily banter amongst many friends, but it elicits an important paradigm of human nature: Jubilation or sorrow are not absolute. A little detail look into the events bringing joy or sorrow to your life will invariably beget a thought that none of the events in their absolutism were capable of making you happy or sad.
As a matter of fact I believe any kind of feeling of happiness or contrition is subject to three important dimension. Ill try and cover them one by one.

1. The grass is greener on the other side:
Voyeurism is an activity which has been an integrate part of human life be it the ancient chinese civilization where people used a sea-saw to peep into neighbour houses or be it the latest form of voyeurism in form of social networking. The reason why one man likes to peep into other's life is because it gives him a chance to compare their assets. Thus any event giving you a relative advantage on your peers will make you feel better when compared to equally distributed gain over a larger population. And mind it in above case the ecstatic feeling is irrespective of the material gain. Same goes for the feeling of compunction.

2. Incongruity is the biggest sin
Let us start our discourse with a simple sentence, Ram won a lottery of a 10 million dollars. This makes our fictitious character Ram a lucky guy doesn't it? But what if I now tell you Ram is a 95 year old man and might die any day now. Not so lucky now? By this not so sanguine example I just wanted to prove a point that any event given it happens at the opportune time will be desirable or undesirable subject to its effect on a person. Wrong timing has a propensity to obliterate the effects what so ever they may be.

3. This is not my first time
This is probably my favorite dimension because it subsumes Adam Smith's theory of demand and supply very well. It simply states that more the number of elations you get in your life the next happiness looses its value relative to the previous one given they stand at the same relative position when you go for grading them. For sorrows I am not sure if it holds true for every one.

Thus it becomes quite pellucid that all three factors working in tandem will lead to pertinent happiness , and even if one of the dimension is out of its place it becomes completely preposterous to declare any thing as a debacle or transcendent elation. Even though two opposite words , in real life which side you will be standing on will depend only on scintilla of differences between good and bad luck, a good and a bad decision. So next time when you have a proclivity to be arrogant because of a success or become too morose due to a failure. Just think that your big success might be a peanut for some one which means you are still not the best. Or your failure could have been the last failure for some which in turn means your worst hasn't yet come. Take all you get as a humble gift, and give what ever has been taken from you as if you are a king and donating an empire to some one poor.