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It's a relative measure of performance for narrow and specific set of tasks. It's not BS, that's like saying the 100m dash is BS. It's just that people have wildly overstated the general implications of the measure.
The people who have wildly overstated the implications of IQ are the ones who developed and use it. Your analogy would be more correct if the 100m dash was used to measure the freshness of your breath.
That's the central problem with IQ. Intelligence as a thing that can be measured is much closer to "freshness of breath" than it is to 100 meters. It's subjective and colloquial. You admit as much yourself that IQ tests measure something, but not intelligence.
I think there is and always has been massive contention in even defining intelligence. Is it the same as wisdom? What about being smart? Are these all the same thing? How does experience inform success in general problem solving? What even IS a "general" problem?
I think it's still a valuable tool to assess peoples ability to recognize and apply transformations, implications, boolean operators, and arethmetic sequences.
But the idea that it provides some insight into the innate nature of a mind is preposterous. You CAN study for an IQ test: exactly the 4 things I mentioned are things you can study, and once you've mastered you'll be sitting on a 160+ result.
So, the base underlying assumption that these things are not learnable. That is wrong.
But, the idea that mastery of implication, transformation, boolean operators and arethmetic sequences don't provide a foundational system for certain tasks is also maybe not quite right either...
A 100m dash time probably loosely correlates to some abstract measure of "athleticism", which may correlate to success likelihood for certain tasks. IQ correlates to some abstract measure of pattern recognition, which may correlate to success in certain tasks.
To your point that the designers intended it to be a measure of the abstract notion of innate intellectual capacity, yeah maybe that was the attempt. Maybe that's how they pitched it. It isn't. Tough shit.
But that doesn't suddenly imply it's nothing.
Like most things (a degree, years of experience, SAT score, story points, Myers-Briggs etc etc) capitalism has completely fucked them. Business is so fucking lazy they just want to boil down assesment for suitability to enumerable values on a form. Just because metrics are inappropriately used and abused by capitalism doesn't mean they're not measuring something.
So, this was a super lengthy reiteration that IQ tests measure something, but it isn't "innate general intelligence". But to say it's as irrelevant as "freshness of breath" is maybe hyperbolic.
Hard to argue that careful statement!
Hey thought of how it could be used for good, to support:
I imagine a school administrator examining the tails of their school‘s distribution and using the knowledge to personalize education. Say, a bright kid isn’t being challenged and achieves straight Cs. (Privacy and fairness implications, I know)
Yeah I think using a renamed version of the test could be a good way to try and find gaps between aspiration and current state of foundational skills, for certain aspirations.
If a kid dreams of being a lawyer, but their scores are on the tail end, that's a perfect opportunity to revisit the foundations of formal logic. Just because some kids have managed to grok those foundational concepts independent of school doesn't mean others are incapable. Because let's face it, secondary school isn't teaching formal logic.
That being said, real tailored mechanisms would be superior to finding gaps. But, in the absence of such mechanisms, an IQ test could be an accessible stand-in.