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> I have yet to see good evidence IQ tests measure anything more than "how good at IQ tests you are",

See, for example, Schmidt, F. L., & Hunter, J. (2004). General Mental Ability in the World of Work: Occupational Attainment and Job Performance, cited 1600+ times:

> The psychological construct of general mental ability (GMA), introduced by C. Spearman (1904) nearly 100 years ago, has enjoyed a resurgence of interest and attention in recent decades. This article presents the research evidence that GMA predicts both occupational level attained and performance within one’s chosen occupation and does so better than any other ability, trait, or disposition and better than job experience. The sizes of these relationships with GMA are also larger than most found in psychological research.

One main reason why you might not have seen this is that you didn't go out of your way to find it, and the mainstream publications systematically hide, distort, and often blatantly lie about the existing evidence.

Lots of research has been done controlling for income, adoption studies, and such, showing your words to be completely untrue.

So you believe that IQ alone is the most predictive metric for a person’s ability to what?

Seriously who cares about a couple of IQ points?

IQ is generally thrown out entirely. Im shocked to see it treated as a legitimate metric on hacker news

Really? HN in 1822 would be filled with educated people seriously defending phrenology. 1922 HN would be falling over itself to defend eugenics. Apparently 2022 HN hasn't come very far from 1922.

No one falls for pseudoscientific groupthink like communities of affluent, well-educated people.

The military still uses it because it is highly predictive. They also have a hard cutoff at the bottom which wasn’t always the case (see McNamara’s Folly for the history of when the army accepted literally retarded people - it didn’t end well). We also see a very strong correlation between eg IQ and occupation.

It is a legitimate metric of *something*.

The U.S. marine corp promoted its first black 4 star general this year. I don’t think it’s the shining example of a race-blind institution, at least as far as leadership is concerned.

You are cherry picking data. The US military has historically been far more progressive than the country as a whole. It integrated in 1948 - long before the voting rights act or the end of Jim crow. We had a black chair of the joint chiefs long before we elected a black president. Rights and privileges were extended to gay members long before they existed elsewhere.

Only on HN would the prevailing thought be that leet-code interviews are stupid but IQ is a magical, unbiased metric of a person’s ability and potential.

What are you talking about? It has statistical predictive ability when used on groups of people. Of course it can be very inaccurate for an individual but the reality of being able to make testable predictions makes it pretty hard to throw out, except for ideologically motivated people who don't like what it reveals.

I thought IQ was correlated quite well with the idea of "Spearman's G", and unless people actually use something else on a massive scale over decades I'm not sure how you can avoid using it as a metric.

Please cite it. Every time someone claims this, they come back citing something laughably easy to disprove like The Bell Curve, which claims this, and is just an absolute mess of obvious nonsense:

Using deeply culturally and/or language biased IQ tests.

Using IQ tests that essentially just test the quality of education they received.

Sampling unrepresentative populations.

Using studies from an Apartheid state as an example of "a state without systemic racism".

Using tests that aren't IQ tests and the author explicitly say isn't equivalent and "converting" them with arbitrary systems. Literally just making up data.

Cherry picking the worst data from studies which the original study explicitly calls out as less likely to be accurate.

Every correlation vs causation mistake you can possibly make.

Just discounting every environmental factor except parental socioeconomic status.

Assuming environmental factors are a result of genetic factors (which is literally just assuming their conclusion).

Regularly citing a literally white-supremacist funded source as unbiased.

I don’t care to get in some debate at all, but first you’d have to offer up a very precise question and not some general smear campaign. If it’s some of the sentences you’re arguing with upthread, I might agree with you.

You refuse to cite studies because you don't care to get in some debate?

A lot of that research is flawed:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo

A very good video, and goes over a lot of the points I've made in this thread in good detail, I also recommend it.

Innate was too strong a word. I meant to say that it was pre-existing. Any discrimination in a job application is not the discrimination that causes low IQ, if any. That occurs in early childhood.

Even if we accept that (and I gave plenty of reasons above why IQ is deeply, deeply, flawed as a metric, and the link to race—both at all and in terms of amount—is deeply questionable, and just because there is some difference in early childhood doesn't mean all of what you claim is, so plenty of it could be later racism), you are still just arbitrarily saying that accounts for the disparity, when there is evidence that isn't the case, because tests have been done with matching candidates, or presenting the same applications with different photos, etc...

That is wrong. Discrimination doesn’t cause low IQ. Every major American race has a very high median income, by international and historic standards.

Uh, can't it? Stuff like lead exposure is higher in disfavored groups, and lead exposure is very bad for IQ. All sorts of environmental pollution is bad for child development, developing brains are pretty susceptible to this stuff, and guess which people end up having to live in more polluted areas?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_racism#Impacts_o...

That’s completely hypothetical and easily refutable by rural/urban breakdown, county-level breakdowns, outperformance by poor Asians, historical LA smog, etcetera.

no, subcounty level breakdowns actually support the thesis that higher pollution is at least correlated with lower educational attainment. Don't post misinformation. "historical LA smog" isn't a statement that refutes anything. The international consensus is that pollution is bad for educational attainment as well as other iq-like metrics, this is true in India, China, Brazil, and the UK, as well as impacts of prenatal exposure being bad in NYC and internationally.

The performance gaps are too high for this kind of nonsense.

> and as a child I obsessed over them and got very good at them by learning how to approach them

Then you weren't doing proper IQ tests. They must be administered by suitably qualified professionals and not made available for practice. You were cheating. Of course you're going to get good at a game by breaking the rules.