I'm not sure how what you're saying contradicts my point (apart from vague accusations of 'wishful thinking'). What Taleb is arguing, what I'm arguing, what the original designer of IQ was arguing and what seems to be common knowledge among everyone I know in neuroscience or medicine is that IQ is a very good predictor of life outcomes if you are mentally impaired to begin with. When you venture into the realm of >100 IQ, it loses a lot of its predictive power, which is why (where I live at least) it is mostly administered to people, mostly children, suspected of needing 'special requirements'. In that sense, it is a very good 'unintelligence quotient' but not much beyond that. It is disingenuous to argue for its general predictive power when what most people have in mind is definitely not disadvantaged children when arguing about it.

> When you venture into the realm of >100 IQ, it loses a lot of its predictive power, which is why (where I live at least) it is mostly administered to people, mostly children, suspected of needing 'special requirements'. In that sense, it is a very good 'unintelligence quotient' but not much beyond that.

According to whom exactly? There is a very large body of work predicting chess outcomes, productivity in maths, etc. in the upper range of the scale. Maybe it is not as proportionally meaningful (i.e. in most cases people are not running up against a limitation in general cognitive ability), but that doesn't mean it's meaningless, it means you're trying to predict the wrong thing with it.

I think a lot of this rhetoric stems from insecurity. I don't know my IQ, I don't personally care, but if somebody produces a study with me included then IQ (or similar measures) could yield good results.

It is not useful for all questions, nor is it useless for all questions; it is a simple measure of a specific stable characteristic of the mind, which is correlated to other characteristics which are harder to measure or predict any other way. IQ is not intended to judge your overall worth as a human being, it is just there to estimate your general cognitive ability. The fact that general cognitive ability is not sufficient on its own for you to succeed is immaterial to its utility as a measure.

You know, your arguments wouldn't sound so much in bad faith if you stopped implying IQ detractors were insecure or guilty of wishful thinking, as opposed to simply skeptical of the science behind it, especially in a field that's not exactly well known for the solidity, reproducibility and falsifiability of most of its findings.

All that said, what you said still doesn't contradict Taleb. Being able to (badly) predict a narrow range of outcomes like chess makes IQ a lousy indicator with respect to the ambition of psychometricians to elevate it as the best representative of general intelligence. Or to put it into other terms, if the best you can come up with is that, better drop the whole thing and move on to what actual hard sciences can show us (see the GGGP paper).