common g

A high IQ doesn’t mean you’ll “get” everything; case in point: NN Taleb

I understand the intent is to make it a test of native intelligence and not bring in cultural advantages. Hence, they likely stay away from verbal reasoning, math, data analysis etc.. But doesn’t that make the assessment rather limited?

That’s the key result of psychometrics: there is a common factor ‘g’ behind all these things like numerical prowess, shape rotation, verbal capacity, inverse digit recall. Thus, the idea is even if you create a culturally unbiased test you will capture a measure that accurately estimates g.

Empirically we know that verbal IQ & numerical IQ are not perfectly correlated but the angle between those vectors is small. Hence, a proxy that measures something correlated with both is a decent psychometric probe.

Taleb’s view of IQ is one of disdain. Is there any other measure which can show the differing levels of cognition?

Taleb is totally wrong on that one. IQ is a useful measure but it is not perfect because it has two vectors verbal & mathematical that are not perfectly aligned.

[See also unmeasured-viveka-etc note]

Denialism

And then there are some mathematicians who might be so enthralled by the fat “uropathology” of the Cauchy distribution that they might forget about the good old normal distribution of everyday experience
गणिते चातुर्यं विवेकं न प्रत्याहरति ।
also: Lūtikā-Somākhyoḥ pravādaḥ

That IQ is not everything becomes rather apparent
when you have high IQ traders and math teachers deny basics of genetics.
That shows that being smart
does not necessarily mean you will “get” some relatively simple things.

The bright side of this is
even if you do not have the meteoric IQ of an esteemed trader or a math professor
you might still be able to make some good contribution to knowledge for,
who knows, they might have missed something that you can quite easily see and apprehend.

There something really disgusting
about the high IQ occidental academics denying the individual gradation in human intelligence:

first, they probably spend their time in the company of rarified intellect
hardly bothering to think about
what life might be for the plebian.
Then they claim that
such gradation in intelligence is non-existent
implying that the plebian did not scale the heights they did
probably because they did not do the hard work.

Second, they sell hopes which might be as false as telling your kid
that he might become Usain Bolt if only just kept running.
Of course we then have the Nature magazine then allow pontification on its platform
that Kenyans are probably not doing those marathon records due to a genomic basis.
Well just keep running you may reach Kenya after all.

these worthless occidental academics really need to come back to their plush offices
after getting a bit dirty in the real world after spending time with some plebians.
It will do them and the world some good

In case you thought I was kidding this is actually a quote from something approvingly published by the Nature magazine. We knew the magazine did its share of harm to science but this…

Evans zooms in on two focal points of racial stereotypes: sport and intelligence. His section on the success of Kenyan marathon runners in global contests is brilliant: it demolishes the idea of genetic explanations for any region’s sporting achievements. Some have speculated that Kenyans might have, on average, longer, thinner legs than other people, or differences in heart and muscle function.
Evans notes, however, that we don’t make such generalizations about white British athletes when they do disproportionately well in global athletics.
Such claims for athletic prowess are lazy biological essentialism, heavily doped with racism.

It appears that they want to use their offices to deny the obvious for things like athletic differences are the most obvious signal that the emperor’s genitalia are indeed visible

Anti Verbal IQ bias

Source: TW
This claim about verbal IQ is a highly flawed take on this matter.
This seems to follow the boosterism of Hsu who favors shape rotators to “wordcels”,
seeing the later as less intelligent (perhaps an ethnic bias creeping in).
Similarly, one could claim that due to our IA culture giving primacy to verbal IQ,
we would be biased to favor the “wordcels”.

However, one may note that the early Internet IQ researcher La Griffe du Lion had pointed out to the IQ x GDP correlation
was specifically related to the verbal component.
While some have tried to counter that claim of his,
I remain unconvinced by these rebuttals.

I just suspect there is a serious bias on part of those hammering “wordcels”
in underappreciating the real world utility of verbal IQ
and its superiority over pure over a somewhat autistic population of rotators. The success of chatGPT/Dall-E gives you some insight into this.

g correlation

As per the theory of g both verbal and rotator iq stem from a common factor g. While IQ tests are designed to capture g as much as possible, they might not succeed in doing so. The so called “g loading” of tests differ be they testing math or verb IQ