[teilo]

I never claimed that intelligence is nothing. I said that the IQ measurement is itself not worth much except as a general guide in fairly broad ranges.

Intelligence is certainly something. It is relevant. But it is not precise, and is useful, as I said, only in the broadest strokes. And like all psychometrics, the manner in which it is measured is itself not stable.

But comparing intelligence to mass or any other physical measurement is a non sequitur. Mass is precisely measurable with perfectly repeatable results, and has perfectly repeatable interactions.

[jlawson]

I think it's worth separating out different tasks in terms of how g-loaded they are (that is to say how much they require intelligence).

General life success is g-loaded but not to an extreme degree. As many have noted, it's certainly possible to have success without great intelligence by working around one's limitations and finding other strengths.

But consider other tasks like "invent a new theorem in particle physics and get it published in a top journal" or "improve a mature database/load-balancing system to save a million dollars a year for a large computing company". These are extremely g-loaded tasks. Intelligence, as measured by IQ, is an absolute requirement to be able to do these things at all in my opinion. My sense is I don't think anyone could ever do such things without scoring 120+ IQ at absolute minimum and probably much more, though I'd be happy to hear counterexamples.

That's an example I'd say where intelligence as a concept and measure is useful in narrow strokes: When you need such a task to be done and done well, you can use intelligence measures to filter who does it (the same way you'd use stature to filter who you put on your basketball team).

In any case, however useful intelligence is, it's the most useful of all psychometric measures. Everything else is worse. That makes it not a great tool necessarily, but the most generally important among the tools we have.

[teilo]

I can agree with that.

[toasterlovin]

> I said that the IQ measurement is itself not worth much except as a general guide in fairly broad ranges.

IQ predicts about 30% of a whole host of life outcomes (mostly related to job performance, educational attainment, earnings, etc.). That might not seem like a whole lot, but it's the best single predictor of life outcomes that exists, aside from looking at a person's parents and siblings.

[pessimizer]

But IQ itself is predicted by parental earnings and parental educational attainment (and, IIRC, mostly by the sheer volume of reading for pleasure during childhood.)

There's a chicken/egg thing here that I think is a cart/horse thing.

[colemannugent]

Education doesn't have as much effect as you might think. It seems that nutrition has a very significant effect on IQ: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0191886990...

[toasterlovin]

It has roughly 30% predictive power after controlling for the most obvious confounding factors (like the ones you mention).

[lellotope]

As someone who does research in this area, broadly defined, I think you're on to something, but I also think there are some misleading things about this article (which I nevertheless think is interesting) and caveats to what you're saying.

Lots of thoughts:

1. Intelligence is a broad construct. It is by definition, and it is not the only cognitive construct. It does have a lot of utility for certain purposes though, such as in identifying pervasive neurological disease.

As others are noting, this is relevant to the article in that we tend to focus on extremes when making these kinds of comparisons, when the full spectrum is really what's important sometimes. We tend to fixate on whether someone went to some prestigious university or less prestigious university, or whether our incomes are in the upper middle class or upper class, but in the sense of outcomes, compared to all outcomes, these can be relatively minor distinctions and hard to predict.

2. There are other variables that are relevant, like conscientiousness, ruthlessness, and so forth. This is certainly true.

3. There are still other variables that have nothing to do with the individuals involved though. The elephant in the room are societal and other random factors that prevent any individual attribute from mattering as much as they could. The article starts out by dismissing prediction among females out of hand because of societal limitations, which is reasonable. But there are lots of other variables involved, random and nonrandom societal and environmental forces at play. The hidden story is that there are limits to predicting outcomes at all from the individual at hand, meaning that other variables in the environment are working.

4. Measurement of intelligence is fuzzy and imperfect as you're alluding to. It's stochastically imprecise, in the sense that giving the same test twice, or two different tests, will give you somewhat different answers. But it's also imperfect in that the thing it's measuring isn't really what we probably want to measure in an ideal case. Even if the tests were giving the same answer all the time, it wouldn't really be intelligence in the way we want to talk about intelligence.

5. I'm not sure that we really want cognitive functioning measures to be perfectly stable, because I don't think cognitive functioning is actually perfectly stable. It probably varies across the day, for example.

6. Physical measurements are certainly more precise. But the objects systemically are much less complex. It's easier to talk about measuring the mass of a cubic meter of oxygen than it is to talk about measuring climatological variables; something analogous is in play with things like intelligence.

Also, even physical measurements at a certain level become fuzzy and highly interdependent. Measuring mass "precisely" depends on your scale and other variables.