Intelligence Theater

Nassim Taleb bombed every strategic planning session. He said,

"To outperform trial and error intellectually, you need at least a thousand IQ points."

Let that sink in...

I used to think smart people had the edge. If you were brilliant enough, you could think your way past the messiness of experimentation.

Model the system. Predict the outcomes. Win through intelligence.

But Taleb? He did the math.

Applied options theory to knowledge discovery.

The numbers? Brutal.

Here's what he found:

Complex systems... markets, careers, businesses... have too many variables and unknowns.

To outthink trial and error, you'd need to predict these chaotic systems with near-perfect accuracy.

Hence the thousand IQ points.

(Even that might not be enough.)

Do you know those beautiful strategic plans that never work out?

The ones with perfect logic and color-coded spreadsheets?

They're playing a rigged game. The math proves it.

Small bets with big upsides beat big brains every time.

Consider this...

Every major innovation came from someone trying and failing, not from someone who figured it all out in advance.

Amazon started selling books.

Twitter was a podcasting platform.

Play-Doh was wallpaper cleaner.

We teach people that intelligence beats experimentation.

What if that's exactly backwards?

The real insight isn't that trial and error works. It's understanding why it HAS to work.

Embracing small failures with asymmetric upsides changes the game.

One where the system teaches you what no amount of IQ could figure out.

(Somewhere, every management consultant felt a disturbance in the Force.)