[tptacek]

It's beyond contest that the g factor is real in part because it's a statistical inevitability in any series of related tests, be they for intelligence or product/market fit in automobiles. It's an exploratory statistic, a hint at underlying causality; it is not a dispositive revelation about the structure of human thought.

Sure: there's a battery of general cognitive tests, and if you smush data sets together a dominant factor will emerge. And?

[Gareth321]

This is exactly my point. It's tautological to argue that IQ isn't correlated with intelligence. It is, definitionally. You seem to acknowledge this so perhaps I don't understand your original comment.

[tptacek]

I just don't think there's anything meaningful about that. Group of related tests is related. Ok, now what?

[tptacek]

(I misread your original comment --- no, it's not tautological. It's tautological to say that IQ isn't correlated with IQ test results. "g" has nothing to do with "intelligence" as a construct.)

[Gareth321]

If IQ tests measure one's ability to do most other cognitively demanding tasks then it's measuring more than the test itself. Whatever you want to call that thing is irrelevant. In sociology and psychology we call that the g factor. The vast majority of people call that intelligence.

[tptacek]

That's the tautological argument! Note that I'm not even really engaging with the validity of IQ tests, just the surface logic that you're using. You literally just argued, in effect, that IQ tests measure intelligence because people call them intelligence tests!

[Gareth321]

That's a semantic point you're making, and I'm not contesting it. To repeat myself, you can call the correlation anything you like. I'm merely explaining that the correlation exists and is incredibly material.