[nullc]

You do risk weeding out those parties: The tests aren't perfect and can give low results from people who are otherwise intelligent. 125 wouldn't pass the above conjectured 130.

A piece of intuition is that if you select a population based on a criteria, the correlation between that criteria and the target in the selected subpopulation is usually greatly diminished, and sometimes reversed.

Imagine you know that being very tall is very good for basketball... so you select very tall people to be players. You will likely find that among the selected players height is not very correlated with performance, or even inversely correlated because your initial selection wiped the correlation out and potentially noise or other effects (like agility) which are correlated with being short begin to dominate the differences within that population.

This also holds for correlated traits-- e.g. if you select very tall players it may wipe out or reverse the correlation shoe-size has with performance.

As a result if you first select people for an intelligence requiring task specific capability and also select for IQ you're likely selecting for noise, and potentially selecting for people who are just really good at taking tests and which weren't actually as good at the task specific capability as a randomly selected person in your first selection would be.

[in3d]

125 on a high school-administered test might have just meant average verbal ability and a perfect score on nonverbal questions. Presumably you would count the nonverbal section much more when picking candidates for a job in physics.

I agree overall that task-specific selection is better, I was just questioning the example given.