And why would anyone believe it should be? Do you really think a test with a relatively small set of questions, written by a biased group of individuals is going to be representative of human intelligence?
It baffles me that IQ is used as any kind of meaningful measurement beyond showing whether someone is mentally retarded or a prodigy.
First we should understand that IQs and life outcomes follow normal distributions and there's plenty of exceptions to the rule...but as a general trend, the relationship is indisputable. This has been studied for over a century. This suggests that IQ tests are fairly good at gaging mental faculties.
Height gives an advantage in many ways across human society. This is a physical attribute that we have little control over, yet it influences outcomes in jobs, social interactions, sports, dating, etc. Height also follows a normal distribution across populations. There is no reason to believe that mental faculties do not have similar physical mechanisms and that a normal distribution does not exist across populations.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120329142035.h...
Your IQ is correlated with your parents' IQ. But so is your social status, physical appearance and wealth.
IQ is not independently responsible, and it's covariant with other heritable traits.
'One study on nine groups of soldiers differing in job and reading ability found a correlation of .96 between the AFQT and reading achievement (Sticht, Caylor, Kern, & Fox, 1972)... Another study obtained reading scores for 17-year olds for those same ethnic groups and dates (Campbell et al., 2000) and found a correlation of .997 between reading scores and AFQT scores.' [1]
'Cognitive ability tests taken at age 11 correlate 0.81 with national school examinations taken at age 16.' [2]
Note that .96 and .81 are huge correlations. These results have been replicated across 100+ years of psychological research across cultural boundaries and across multiple disciplines.
Can you make up for lower IQ with higher work ethic? Yes, but like a shorter than average NBA player, you're going to be at a disadvantage. By no means does the existence of shorter than average NBA players suggest that you should expect shorter than average men to be just as likely to succeed as taller than average men.
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[1] https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED101297.pdf [2] https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Intelligence...
While I don't dispute that IQ tests correlate with smarts, the argument that "The WW1 military was very motivated, therefore their decisions must have been rational" isn't a particularly good one IMHO - because there are a great many counter-examples.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/iq-tests-are-fund...
“It has always seemed to be odd that we like to call the human brain the most complex known object in the Universe, yet many of us are still prepared to accept that we can measure brain function by doing a few so-called IQ tests,” Dr Highfield said.
I wonder, what is your opinion on Murray's and Herrnstein's The Bell Curve?
But not really. You pulled those numbers out of the air, and they aren't very descriptive.
Will someone with a 140 IQ fair better academically and economically than someone with 130 90% of the time?
140 vs 100, sure. But as the # of standard deviations converges, it's less meaningful. And there are still other covariant factors you are failing to consider, as mentioned before.
On average, people raised in poor environments who have higher IQ do better than people raised in poor environments with lower IQ. More likely to be more upwardly mobile, more likely to be more whatever.
And on average, people raised in good environments who have higher IQ do better than people raised in good environments who have lower IQ.
If you're a person of color, on average, you're going to do better if you have a higher IQ than if you have a lower IQ.
Same if you're a woman.
And 140 vs 130 is a bit unfair. You're talking about looking for meaningful differences between less than 2% of the population as compared to less than 0.1% of the population.
And just because there are diminishing returns with something like IQ, doesn't make it useless.
That wasn't the point. I would say the same for 100 and 110.
Some MENSA members in this thread seem very attached to their scores.
That's the other thing, you do have to look at the whole. Because there is likely overlap. But the trend of note is that IQ tracks through it.
If you sort people by earning potential, you'll find that as average income goes up, so does average IQ.
When you sort by health outcomes. As average healthiness goes up, so does average IQ.
Even the outcomes that are colloquially contrasted with intelligence actually correlate well. In other words, if you sorted people by EQ, you'll find that better average EQ means better average IQ.
IQ is the aspartame of psychology. So maligned that it's been probably studied more than other things. And just like aspartame is perfectly fine, IQ does what it says on the tin.
100 vs 140 will be a very strong indicator. 100 vs 110 will not; I would not trust 110 to yield a better outcome 80-90% of the time, as GP claimed.
Which is why the comparison of IQ scores at that coarseness is plain silly.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3248886/
"Childhood IQ and achieved education level were significantly and independently associated with upward mobility between the ages of 5 and 49-51 years. Only education was significantly associated (positively) with upward social mobility between 5 and 25 years, and only childhood IQ (again positively) with upward social mobility between 25 and 49-51 years. Childhood IQ was significantly negatively associated with downward social mobility. Adult height, childhood housing conditions, adverse events in childhood and sex were not significant determinants of upward or downward social mobility in this cohort."
This is the point in the discussion where you should be rolling out some supporting evidence.