IQ is not a meaningful shorthand for anything, but yes, they want to catch the "idiot in a hurry", not someone who's paying enough attention that they could be set off by some smaller mistake later into the process, wasting the scammer's time.
If IQ wasn’t a meaningful shorthand for anything it wouldn’t show positive returns for higher amounts at every level we’re aware of.
> Can You Ever Be Too Smart for Your Own Good? Comparing Linear and Nonlinear Effects of Cognitive Ability on Life Outcomes
> Despite a long-standing expert consensus about the importance of cognitive ability for life outcomes, contrary views continue to proliferate in scholarly and popular literature. This divergence of beliefs presents an obstacle for evidence- based policymaking and decision-making in a variety of settings. One commonly held idea is that greater cognitive ability does not matter or is actually harmful beyond a certain point (sometimes stated as > 100 or 120 IQ points). We empirically tested these notions using data from four longitudinal, representative cohort studies comprising 48,558 participants in the United States and United Kingdom from 1957 to the present. We found that ability measured in youth has a positive association with most occupational, educational, health, and social outcomes later in life. Most effects were characterized by a moderate to strong linear trend or a practically null effect (mean R2 range = .002–.256). Nearly all nonlinear effects were practically insignificant in magnitude (mean incremental R2 = .001) or were not replicated across cohorts or survey waves. We found no support for any downside to higher ability and no evidence for a threshold beyond which greater scores cease to be beneficial. Thus, greater cognitive ability is generally advantageous—and virtually never detrimental.
https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2021-brown.pdf
IQ was literally invented by a believer in "race science" and has been used to discriminate against ethnic minorities. That's its original function and its limitations are why it has been discredited by many sociologists for a long time.
IQ measures how good people are at IQ tests. As much as some people like to pretend otherwise, it does not measure "intelligence" by any meaningful definition and certainly nothing inherent or genetic. If you improve socioeconomic factors, IQ rises almost automatically.
People who do well in life don't generally score higher in IQ tests, they score higher in IQ tests because they had the means (access to education, parental wealth, access to mentoring and care as a child, etc) to do well in life in the first place.
The paper you're citing is guilty of HN's favorite academic crime: Correlation does not imply causation.
Inversely we've see plenty of historical evidence of higher IQ scores in groups being directly influenced by socioeconomic factors in populations where these factors have changed. It has also been demonstrated that training for IQ tests (or growing up in an education system that routinely uses similar exercises) improves the scoring on those tests.
IQ is a shitty shorthand because there are far more reliable factors you can use instead (e.g. generational poverty) in most scenarios without bringing an arbitrary metric in that only exists because of one scientist's obsession with demonstrating the superiority of the White race (followed by post-hoc rationalizations about Asians actually being "too smart" and thus still inferior, because that's the kind of nonsense you end up with by narrowly hyperfocusing on one made up stat so you don't have to deal with the complexity of socioeconomics).
Seems like I recall reading an article that stated very high IQ corresponded to lower income and career success due to churn in their careers due to boredom factors. This makes intuitive sense as well.
who suggested that being intelligent was bad? the problem is that there's no "universal intelligence test" and reducing human intelligence to IQ testing is what those "race science" people do.