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Comment by wizzwizz4 | Hacker News Reader

> The results are positively correlated to many things (such as academic success.

They would be so correlated even if they were a bad metric. Imagine a score that multiplies academic success and the highest Tetris score obtained within 100 miles of your birthplace, then subtracts 50 points if you're a girl. That would also be positively correlated with academic success.

IQ tests measure something, yes, but they're not magic. (See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law) I received a high-quality education including what amounts to IQ-test tuition (to pass an entrance exam); do you know of any studies that attempt to factor out this particular confounder?

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IQ tests measure the g factor and also happen to be the best way to measure it. So those opposed to IQ should either come up with a better way to measure g or be open about their rejection of the existence of differences in cognitive abilities.

If the best way we have to measure something is very bad, perhaps it's best to say we just can't measure it and keep looking, rather than using a very bad measure. It's like instead of trying to invent scales, we kept trying to measure objects' mass by their volume, which happens to work decently for many common objects, bud fails spectacularly for others. And instead of admitting we just can't measure mass, we'd fill our bags based on volume, and be consistently annoyed when we found we can pick up the "heavier" bag of balloons, but can't pick up the "lighter" bag of bowling balls.

Don't you first have to define what you want to measure and demonstrate that it exists?

Only if you're doing science. It's possible to find things out without science slowing you down, but I wouldn't ordinarily recommend it; science is a great way to avoid the common traps that humans invariably fall into when they try to bypass the scientific method.

There's a pretty obvious false dichotomy between "rejection of the existence of differences in cognitive abilities" and assumption that such differences are as shallow as a single factor called g stably related to scores on a collection of pattern recognition tests.

> IQ tests measure the g factor

Ah, yes. The g factor: “that which is measured by IQ tests”.

The main arguments for IQ tests, as far as I understand, that they correlate with an assortment of cognitive metrics, which all correlate with each other. This is a question. “It's the g factor” is not an answer; you've just stuck a circularly-defined label on the question (or, rather, on a particular frequentist analysis of the question) and declared it solved.

The best evidence for the existence of the g factor are IQ tests, and IQ tests are optimized to measure the g factor.

Do you see a problem there?

The g factor—or more descriptively—the theory of general intelligence has little support outside of the field of psychometrics. And the field of psychometrics is not known for it’s scientific rigor. Needless to say, there is little reason to believe that the theory of general intelligence has any grounds in reality, nor that the g factor exists outside of an operationally defined concept that might not hold any descriptive power for human behavior outside of a narrow setting of pen and paper tests.

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