| 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). |