Taleb is having another one…
Reframing Christoper's excellent study in terms of much much of life's results ARE NOT explained by IQ test results.
By now the matter should be closed. https://t.co/K58wm9qVaA pic.twitter.com/ZCh5ZuKfm4— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) January 22, 2025
I already refuted his points 2022, but to reiterate:
1. The claimed low correlation between IQ and job performance or employer satisfaction is conditional on getting the job, which means clearing the necessary screening (e.g. interviews, Wonderlic test, background checks, etc.). All of these act as IQ filters. It’s not like Google picks employees blindly from the general population, unlike McDonald’s workers, who are more representative of the general population.
2. I’m sure many have seen the below scatterplot from one of Taleb’s articles or posted on Twitter claiming that IQ does not matter for wealth or income:
It looks convincing, but it overlooks two key factors: First, it’s based off of old data from a 2007 study of data compiled from the ’70s. Second, it does not control for individual preferences.
The obvious confounder is individual preferences. Among individuals who aspire to wealth, having a high IQ helps, among luck and other factors. The high-IQ guy who studies comparative literature is not going to earn as much as the contractor. Thousands of of people apply for engineering jobs at Google, Meta, Amazon etc.—the smarter applicants tend to get those jobs. Same for top quant firms like Jane Street. Outlier wealth is a lot to do with luck, but this does not invalidate the role of IQ too, controlling for preferences.
On Reddit’s popular ‘FIRE’ communities (e.g. /r/FatFire) those who achieve financial freedom earliest in life or who earn the most money tend to also have lucrative tech jobs or are early employees at tech start-ups. IQ plays a major role in these. Sure, there is survivorship bias, but high IQ still a necessary condition to get the job at all. ‘Blue collar’ 30/40-year-old multi-millionaire retirees are few and far between.
Also, smarter people will tend to have more years of schooling and thus may not earn as much initially (or have student loan debt) compared to their peers who enter the job market immediately after high school. But they close the gap and earn more later.
3. Studies claiming a low correlation between IQ and profession, or a low IQ threshold for certain professions, are based off of ’90s or older data and thus inapplicable to America’s much more competitive economic landscape today. From my 2023 article Old studies about income/wealth and job success vs. IQ are unconvincing: Such studies may have been accurate then, but does not generalize or extrapolate to America now.
Recent trends likely point to a stronger correlation of IQ vs career success, due to higher salaries at the tails (e.g. lucrative and highly competitive tech and finance jobs), as well as increased pre-employment screening especially post-Covid. Employers today have more ways than ever to screen applicants, such as automated background checks and resume filtering, checking the applicant’s social media profile, and so on. All of these can be done at scale, fully automated. None of these things existed or were as prevalent in the ’90s.
4. There is no evidence to suggest career success, academic achievement, eminence, etc. diminishes with increasing IQ. The oft-claimed 120 IQ threshold of diminishing returns as popularized by Gladwell and others is wrong, especially not for STEM-centric fields. Is it a coincidence that arguably best mathematician in the world, Terrance Tao, is also likely among the smartest? Where is the diminishing returns? Being smarter can only help when it comes to solving difficult outstanding problems.
Again here is the famous SMPY study that shows no diminishing returns of achievement:
“Whether we like it or not, these people really do control our society,” says Jonathan Wai, a psychologist at the Duke University Talent Identification Program in Durham, North Carolina, which collaborates with the Hopkins centre. Wai combined data from 11 prospective and retrospective longitudinal studies2, including SMPY, to demonstrate the correlation between early cognitive ability and adult achievement. “The kids who test in the top 1% tend to become our eminent scientists and academics, our Fortune 500 CEOs and federal judges, senators and billionaires,” he says.