This really needs to be the top post.

It's increasingly acknowledged, even in the "soft" sciences, that r-squared is not an appropriate analysis tool.

Anyway, wasn't the IQ test originally created to determine whether or not someone was mentally disabled? It seems like with more modern statistical methods it still could be useful measurement for that purpose, even if it doesn't accurately "scale" beyond 80 points. Ultimately, if you just want to answer the question "Does this person have significant cognitive deficits?" it still has its place even if it's not a good measure for broader intelligence.

but it does scale beyond 80 points. why ignore all the available evidence and trust instead the Taleb's evidence free assumptions?

I don't understand. Are you saying the author shouldn't point out these errors, given what Taleb is arguing against? Or they aren't actually errors, given that the author hasn't grasped the specifics of Taleb's argument?

Taleb argues against R^2, and the author of this article seems to just ignore those points. I think Taleb has valid points, but the author here seems to be doing just the same conventional analysis that people writing psychology papers tend to do, which Taleb specifically argues is an invalid way of doing things (because assumptions built into linear correlation measures doesn't apply in this situation).

This is a really frustrating issue with criticism/response to Taleb.

Taleb: "There are problems with A because of B reasons"

Response: "B reasons prove A"

I really don't understand why this is so common. I don't fully agree w/ Taleb that the academic demographic he tends to pick on is so lost to navel-gazing that it is completely unable to understand the context of his arguments, but it's really odd how common this is.

To clarify, I'd love to see someone who actually understands Taleb's arguments to push back at him from the same premise. He says some really controversial (and potentially hugely important) stuff that needs to be challenged and peer-reviewed just to get a basic second opinion on it. This has yet to happen really because of what I described.

I used to think Taleb was too harsh on academics. Seeing how academics respond to his well-worked critiques, I now think he's not harsh enough.

His critique here isn't particularly well-worked. But the author here doesn't seem to have read his post....

Exactly. For example recently Taleb made a lot of fun of these linear fits, which are pretty ridiculous even for a non-statistician like me:

https://twitter.com/aedmans/status/1147494932183179264

Not only that but the best argument shows almost (but not quite) marginal contribution.

Taleb's IQ is simply too high.