The headline is just clickbait and not how you actually do statistics when there are tremendous levels of non-linear and random effective parameters in the system.
An Introduction to Pareto, Power Laws, and Fat Tails (good summary of Taleb's important ideas) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wcqt49dXtm8
IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle - https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-...
In order to achieve success, you need to focus on five different aspects;
1) Timing 2) Context/Environment 3) Means/Tools 4) Talent/Hardwork/Self-Effort and finally 5) Random Chance. While all of them are important and must be considered, the effects of each will be substantially non-linear in the spectrum of Mediocristan (low to non-existent systemic effects) to Extremistan (very high systemic effects) events. See also Complex Systems - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_system
The "advanced" western countries built an all encompassing political/economic/financial/social/etc. system where the first four are maximized to amplify the efforts of even just above-average people. Such a system does not exist in China/India and that is the reason Chinese/Indians do far better when they move to western countries rather than in their own countries. It is the overall system which matters the most. Also quality over quantity is the axiom in Science/Technology research.
alyxya•2h ago
noir_lord•2h ago
It also plays with statistics quite a bit (lies, damn lies and government statistics been the old refrain).
All of that is putting aside that IQ itself is deeply flawed both because a) you can't reduce human intelligence down to a single number that way at best it's a weak measure of the type of intelligence been tested for b) IQ tests vary, both in type and scope and are deeply flawed when applied across socio-economic groups in the same society never mind across societies.
There is always variation within a population but I suspect that culture plays a much bigger role.
Case in point - Jewish people are 0.2% of the world population, they've won ~20% of all Nobel prizes awarded.
mjh2539•1h ago
tptacek•40m ago
noir_lord•22m ago
bloak•40m ago
So the Nobel prize committee might not actually be racist ... :-)
gdulli•2h ago
But before measuring, some referee has to take the ball from the player who was holding it at the end of the play and put it down at its official spot from which to measure. But they do this part so quickly and carelessly. It's amusingly incongruous with the pomp of the measurement.
This makes me think of how data science operates on whichever data set happens to be conveniently available and then conducts very serious and literal downstream analysis as if the raw data is settled reality.