Nassim Taleb's Sixth Sense: He Sees White People

I must admit a tiny bit of trauma seeing a guy I was basically a fan of taking out a giant can of fail and drowning himself in it.

So, naturally, I wondered why. Why would an intelligent man ignore several basics facts and try to convince us IQ is no good?

I noticed immediately that he was writing as if the halls of academia were filled with high IQ people. He doesn't like these people.
On the surface, you'd think that would be an area of agreement. I don't like many of these people either. They do poor research. Most aren't even as smart as me, much less Taleb, and even should you find one with high IQ there- if he has a high IQ and a successful academic career, he'd have to be a sociopath.

Non-sociopath high IQ people can't assent to the narrative. They can't try to make you fear CO2, or pretend plant based protein is superior to animal protein. They couldn't abide the communists in the English department, and might feel the need to drown the entire economics department in the nearest body of water.

High IQ people can't put up with such nonsense. Often to the point of their own detriment. Indeed, this is why another one of Taleb's nonsensical statements is so dangerous- the same tendencies that would provide us with people capable of generating hypotheses and testing them also provides us with people capable of dying early due to a variety of unfortunate circumstances. His insistence that survival is somehow relevant to this debate is idiotic.

So why would he make such mistakes? Racism. Yep. Taleb looks at the paper-pushers, the academicians, etc...- and he sees white people.

He also sees a lot of us who argue that IQ is real are white.

What his racist mind won't let him see is that we are different.

Who are the white people in academia?

People who assent to the narrative.

Children of people who are rich or connected.

A small collection of oddballs who, politically speaking, are perceived as eunuchs by the mainstream left.

It's a rigged game and the high-IQ people aren't allowed in it. Ask the Chinese. Of course, I am not advocating for IQ to the exclusion of all else. We need to take care of our own people, for example. Which is another thing American academia needs to be reigned in to do, because they have some extremely perverse incentives. They make a lot of money letting people who should never be their take out loans to go. And they make a lot of money catering to foreign students.

But since Taleb can't distinguish between white people and... other white people, he's just given aid and comfort to the very people he doesn't like.