We do not. Are there answers to the questions I presented?
You can't observe any exact thing and say "Right there! This person is exactly 49 intelliunits smart". IQ tests may give you an idea of one point of view of a measurement of intelligent is, but it is certainly not concrete like 12 inches is. Not concrete like we know 2 hydrogens & one oxygen is water. I think our obsession that everything must be measurable & categorized fails when it comes to the human mind. We are more than the sum of our measurable parts... for now. You can look at a car engine specification and know exactly the maximum speed given optimum conditions and assuming no mechanical failures. There's no such measurement for the human brain. You cannot know what my top performance is. At the absolute best, you can have a ball-park guess. You could end up being right or being way off.
Human personality contains any number of traits that can be measured. To pretend that pyschometrics does not exist is the equivalent of refusing to look through Galileo's telescope.
> We do have concrete ways to measure intelligence, and have had them for over a hundred years.
Concrete, yes. Accurate, absolutely not. Any number of people have exploited the systematic errors in I.Q. testing for purely racist and political objectives.
> The literature on this subject is quite extensive.
No, but it tells us that it's not rigorous enough to resist such exploitation. There's nothing inherently evil or morally wrong about sloppy measurements. That comes from its uses, not the thing itself.
Interesting how you never bothered to ask that while reading the fraudulent book itself.
It's like skimming a poorly-researched paper on vaccines, taking it as gospel, proceeding to claim that they cause autism, and yet reflexively responding with "citation needed" to anyone that dare call into question your insane ideas.
> Interesting how you never bothered to ask that while reading the fraudulent book itself.
This is your evidence that Gould is a fraud? Nice dodge, but scientists and educated people will notice you avoided your responsibility to back up your words with evidence.
> And you dare to pontificate on this topic on HN while not even knowing the basics.
The basics of IQ testing and its many misuses? Gould didn't invent this topic, and he doesn't define it. You remarks about Gould and IQ testing remind me of the creationists who think evolution was Darwin's private fantasy. If you take away Gould entirely, you still have any number of terrible examples of misuse of IQ testing for racist and other deplorable objectives.
Obviously psychologists are defensive about IQ testing (they should be), and Gould made himself an easy target. But this substitutes substance with ad hominem, a mode of argument you appear to prefer.
That's pretty big talk from a dude who couldn't find the first link in Google, and tried to wave off any discussion of Gould's fraud as equivalent to all the crackpots talking about Einstein.
Yep. That works for "Einstein" and "fraud" also. In fact, it works for any well-known name in any field.
Gould missed things that happened after the writing of Mismeasure, and ignored some later developments that challenged aspects of his original work, but he made a number of important and legitimate points about IQ testing and its abuses, points that have stood the test of time.
This is a reasonable perspective. But people other than the parent sometimes read comments! I'll do my best at a level-zero explanation of "intelligence" in the literature:
Let's start by modestly noting that I routinely got the top score on Latin tests in high school (this was worth a small box of chocolates!). Someone applying the concept of "intelligence" might predict that I would also do well in math class. The traditional explanation for this given by Latin teachers is that learning Latin trains the mind to think logically, and getting high scores on Latin tests means that the training has taken. The intelligence-based explanation is that Latin and math are two of many tasks subject to the influence of g, the "general factor".
Moving to a more general level, the observation is that for many, many tests that appear to involve "mental abilities" to a greater or lesser degree, a person's score on any one of them is predictive of the same person's score on all the others. It's rare to find someone who is good at one and bad at another; instead, people tend to be uniformly good or uniformly bad (known in the literature as the phenomenon of the "positive manifold"). This suggests that there's one quality driving all the results, which we can call "intelligence", since that's the label commonly applied to people who tend to do well on those types of tests.
The question isn't, "Is there intelligence?" The question is "What is intelligence in terms of a definition?"
You're saying that if many people find you beautiful, there's a quality driving that, and it's "beauty". That's fine. Beauty exists. But aren't you almost admitting that it is a quality and therefore subject to what evaluates it? In other words, if 5 people call someone beautiful or ugly, are they beautiful? If someone is good at Latin and languages, does that mean they are intelligent? And if someone is not good at Latin, does that mean they are not?
Further, how many people do you have to find to say you are beautiful to be you are "defined" as beautiful? That's not a definition, that's just further confidence-building; the more you have the more confident you can be. But that still doesn't mean there's a point where you can say it is definitively so, and therefore you don't have a true definition.