Taleb is clearly someone who is willing to bend his intellectual arguments to fit his politics and preconceptions, rather than the data. Just look at how badly he failed on Bitcoin and COVID.

Not unfair to call him a crank...

https://medium.com/incerto/no-covid-19-is-not-an-old-person-problem-6968f720d153

Anyway, the ugly reality is IQ is certainly real, genetically heritable, and IQ distributions vary. The reason why so few engineers are black isn't primarily racism. It's because black populations around the world tend to have lower IQ.

Conversely, in spite of vicious racism in the past (and present...) Jews still managed to dominate the sciences is mainly because their average IQ is high. Same with Asians, though not as extreme.

Of course, distributions are distributions, and some people will beat the odds and you should evaluate individuals on their own merits. But as long as the genetics (and culture) of so much of the world is awful, those parts of the world will remain poor and backwards. And allowing the more talented people in those parts of the world to immigrate to western countries just increases that inequality through brain drain, while dragging down our countries if we're not careful. Canada's prior immigration policy was careful... and probably did the rest of the world a disservice by taking their best people.

The irony here is convincing yourself that IQ isn't real takes intelligence... 😂