‘Tooleb Tweets’ & IQ Edition, Andrew Tate

Time for the fifth installment of “Tooleb Tweets”, and an IQ-roundup.

Part 1. The only ignorant one is you, Mr. Arab man:

An obvious counterexample is IQ, which is highly heritable and thus can be optimized through eugenics, but also multidimensional. Not only is it intellectually unbecoming to lie or dissemble about IQ and IQ research, but almost anyone can see through it. It’s not even the sort of thing where lying is that effective. It does not take a renowned biologist as Dawkins to see that IQ is both a multifaceted trait and highly heritable, as shown in the comments of ordinary people telling Taleb he is wrong. This multi-facetedness is basically the g factor, which is that performing well at one highly g-loaded task is positively correlated with performing well at other tasks, even if the tasks are seemingly unrelated.

In school, for example, those who excelled at math competitions, which is a form of specialization highly predictive of IQ, there was also considerable spillover of overachievement at other subjects, too: one of the winners of an essay contest also placed well on a math competition. Same for Moldbug, who is a computer scientist and a top essayist/blogger too. Again, major spillover effects. This is why I think it’s wrong when some people say that high IQ scores are highly lopsided–it’s not really that lopsided. It’s more like scoring top 99.9-percent on a subtest, and then 98/99-percentile on the other subtests, too. Sure, I guess you can call that lopsided, but that seems pretty uniformly high to me. A similar spillover exists for physical traits too:

“You’re an idiot”…how convincing of an argument. He really showed him who is right.

Again, IQ is is positively correlated with many socially desirable things, and is not just predictive of memorization or test-taking ability. Smarter societies, countries, and cities tend to be wealthier (on a per capita basis) and have lower crime.

But in fairness, there are possible downsides, such as smarter criminals, as well as large-scale failures such as the Iraq War or Enron, in which the perpetrators or architects were quite intelligent.

Overall though, smarter societies tend to be more prosperous, nicer, and more peaceful. Data of national IQ vs per capita GDP would seem to confirm this:

[To go off on a bit of a digression, yes, there is also the whole wokeness paradigm, but the fact that the majority of right-wing and centrist commentators online choose to live in ‘blue’ areas (which tend to be wealthier but more diverse and woke) shows that the tradeoff is worthwhile at least going by stated vs. revealed preferences. One would assume given that ‘red’ areas are both much cheaper and more socially conservative, that they would be more popular, but evidently not. Given that the business model of running a Twitter account and a Substack blog or podcast is not constrained by geography, it’s not like one is physically constrained to living in a blue area out of necessity, like having to show up to an office.]

In regard to crypto/bitcoin, as evidence of IQ being more than just test-taking ability, I was able to apply superior pattern recognition by finding a chart pattern (the compressed candlestick method) which portended to downside, and then profiting from it. Right now Bitcoin is at $29,300 compared to $30,900 when I first pointed out the pattern. Second, I also found the front-running method of shorting Bitcoin intraday as the federal govt. sells its Silk Road holdings. AFIK, I was the only person to observe this, publish it, and then also profit from it (still am profiting from it).

As I wrote earlier:

I only short Bitcoin during market hours, when I expect news of the rejection of the recent Bitcoin ETF applications to be announced (the SEC and other govt. agencies tend to almost always drop important news in the morning on weekdays), causing the price to crash.

Knowing when the govt. releases important news is yet again more evidence of pattern recognition and predicted by IQ. It’s always at around 8:00-10:00 AM PST weekdays, usually Friday, when long-awaited decisions, documents, or indictments, or arrests are made. Anticipating that the Bitcoin ETF would be rejected, I went short in the morning hours before the announcement, and profited from the price decline after the SEC punted (I still predict rejection of all Bitcoin ETFs). Here you can see how the price fell:

[It’s going back to 24k soon anyway.]

Or Moldbug’s latest blog post. I don’t think anyone with an IQ in the 90-110 range can write like that, no matter how many hours of practice. This does not necessarily mean his style is good, but it’s not something that is easily replicated, nonetheless. It’s evident very high IQ is predictive of a sort of rarefied ability that is not easily reproducible. Sure, a genius IQ is not always practical (maybe Moldbug’s blog posts could benefit from editing for brevity, but given how viral and successful his articles and blog is, what do ‘professional’ editors know anyway–results will always speak for themselves), but people with very high IQs ‘do’ things that are out of reach of ordinary people, so to say high IQ does not mean anything is clearly and demonstrably false.

But sure, if you want to believe IQ is only predictive of test-taking ability or nothing at all, go ahead and keep doing that.

Part 2:

Is Taleb ever going to apologize for defaming the character, and being wrong about Andrew Tate’s wealth. Even if you think Mr. Tate is an execrable person, Taleb was (and still is) likely still wrong about his wealth being fake. I was right from a year ago:

Sounds like Taleb is projecting his envy on others again for being so mediocre at life. Why is it so hard to accept that some people who flaunt wealth may actually be wealthy? Does anyone dispute that the Kardashians are wealthy even though they flaunt their wealth? If Taleb was such a successful trader, why can’t he show the records proving such? Why can’t anyone vouch for him, such as secondhand accounts? Yet he’s calling other people fake.

We’re still waiting for someone to come forward to corroborate Taleb’s claim of being a successful trader. I am sure such a person exists…somewhere…in this universe.

It’s been a year and Mr. Tate has not been ‘exposed’ for having lied about his wealth. There have been no revelations, such as court documents or other information, that proves or even suggests that he lied about his wealth. So Mr. Arab man wrong again.