Article was specifically not looking at the non-quantitative ranting: "Most of the document is just a rant, but he does make some quantitative claims, which is good. I investigate the veracity of these claims using real data."

So he looks at the quantitative claims and they are just flat out wrong.

However, the non-quantitative "analysis" is just as faulty.

First huge mistake is that he claims that IQ correlating better with outcomes at the low end somehow shows that it doesn't measure what it claims to measure, "raw ability". That is nonsense, because ability is just one factor, but a necessary one, for outcomes. So if you don't have the ability, you're not going to get the outcome. But if you do have the ability, that doesn't mean you're going to get the outcome. You might not be motivated, for example.

In fact, I remember a talk from a couple of years back showing that financial success tends to be anti-correlated with the highest IQs, because those people figure out that it just isn't worth it.

But anyway, the correlation being stronger inn the "non-ability" part of the distribution does not show that it's not measuring ability.

Another whopper is that he claims that performance is is fat-tailed, without citing any evidence. According to Albert-László Barabási[1] who studies performance, success and how they relate, performance is more closely normally distributed, it is success that is fat-tailed.

And of course Taleb doesn't seem to distinguish between performance and success, which makes the whole rant pretty worthless.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert-László_Barabási