Put aside the gratuitous name-calling and this is a worthy and important critique of IQ. https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1275464383540445185

Basically, my take is that IQ measures something real, but that that real thing is a subset of general intelligence ("processing speed", mainly, although computer analogies when talking about the mind are very dangerous).

Other take: when it comes to success, IQ is mainly a gating function. There’s a minimum IQ you need to be successful but once you have passed that bar it is other qualities (mainly hard work but also EQ, ability to think differently but not too differently) that matter.

(As an aside: who cares about what it takes to be "successful"?)

Also: people just assume that IQ is on a spectrum. I mean, by construction, statistically, it is. But people infer from that that someone with a IQ of 160 has the same thing as someone with an IQ of 130. I don’t believe that’s true.

In my experience & from my reading, 160+ IQ people have brains that are *different* from even 150 IQ people. To stick with the (again, flawed) computing analogy, it’s like PC vs Mac. A Mac with a faster CPU is not just a faster PC.

The main thing 160+ IQ people have in common, apart from 160+ IQs, is engaging in self-sabotaging and self-destructive behavior.

(Even Terence Tao talked about self-sabotaging during his grad studies at Princeton. Without his extremely fortunate home environment & social support network, he would probably be a homeless man today. Many such cases!)

The irony (which makes perfect sense) is that Taleb is a very high IQ person. Just from watching him speak, I’d bet he’s 160+. And he exhibits a lot of psychological traits that often go with it: loneliness, arrogance, impatience, prickly hostility.

This is not ironic because 160+ IQ people are often very uncomfortable with that designation or the concept of IQ. I know someone, IQ tested at "genius-level" at age 3, who from the age of 5 refused to take IQ tests because he didn’t "want to be reduced to a number"; classic.

Also: lmao. (True!)

The best definition of genius, that notoriously elusive quality (perhaps undefinable by definition), that I’ve seen/come up with so far is an ability to see things other people don’t see.

The problem is that it’s also a definition of sanity.

I know nothing about chess, but this quality of just seeing things that nobody else sees recurs in descriptions of Bobby Fischer’s style of play. He didn’t just play better, he played differently, by seeing things others didn’t.

But that means that there’s an intrinsically social dimension to genius. If you see things that "aren’t there", other people will tell you you’re crazy, and you may believe them and self-censor, leading to potentially incalculable loss for humanity.

By contrast, if you just ignore social, you may be in danger. Success in chess made Bobby Fischer trust in his ability to see invisible things, which later led him to "see" that the Jews did 9/11.

Another genius who notoriously just saw things nobody else saw was Steve Jobs, and thanks to this ability he became one of the greatest innovators in all of human history. But it also led him to "seeing" that drinking carrot juice is a better cure for cancer than chemotherapy.

The frustrating thing about this "seeing" ability is that it’s definitionally unexplainable. We all want to understand how geniuses "see", but there is nothing to understand, or at least nothing to explain.

"How did you see the car?"

"Well, it was in front of me, and I saw it."

There is literally nothing more to say.

The other thing about "seeing" is that once you have seen something, you can’t unsee it. The genius sees something, points it out, and then things are never the same. Fischer didn’t just play genius chess, he changed the way serious chess players played forevermore.

Monet not only saw things (literally in his case) that others didn’t, but once Monet showed us to see things his way, we could never look at things in the same way.

Lee Sedol won one game out of five against the AI AlphaGo. That game was won with just one move, which was universally described as transcendentallt genius. Neither the AI nor the grandmasters watching the game anticipated it; right after the move, it was obvious who would win.

In the post-game interview, he was asked how he came up with that move, and gave the familiar answer: he just saw it. It wasn’t easy, or even obvious, it was just self-evident.

"How did you see the car?"

He had seen something that had previously been invisible to all, but once he had pointed it out, it became utterly obvious to all who saw it. (Computer or human!)

To play at a very high level, Lee Sedol has to think hard, which he can do better and faster than most people, since he has a very high IQ.

To play at a genius level, Lee Sedol doesn’t have to think *at all*.

(Obviously, this description of "seeing" might just be some self-effacing modesty, but it recurs so thoroughly, in every domain (sports!), culture, and era, and comports so well with how we see genius spread its wings in the world, that I can’t discard it.)

Now, presumably there are some unconscious cognitive processes at play (although maybe you can see why the Ancients believed in genius as a form of divine inspiration, which is literally what the word means), and presumably it is linked in some ways to the processing speed ...

... or whatever we call the "IQ ability" that geniuses share with "merely" high IQ people, but it is still *different*.

(* insanity, obviously) #EditButton https://twitter.com/pegobry/status/1276854820931088384?s=20