I want to go back to a point you said on your first post on this topic (
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35517864):
> As a consequence, social policy resembles the cycles and epicycles of Ptolemy's cosmology. Namely, all manner of social, economic and historical outcomes which are explained parsimoniously by understanding IQ as heritable are instead attributed to a Rube-Goldberg machine of racism, class warfare and the like.
Now I find it interesting you would say this while also believing that “High SES correlates with IQ” and “You're just measuring the same thing, going round and round in circles.”
Now a sibling post goes into why IQ and SES aren’t the same thing, but suppose for the sake of argument that it is. SES is pretty much just a function of wealth, it can be measured by things like your family income, education and occupation, all pretty straight forward. You don’t need constructs such as intelligence, g-factors, you don’t need to do factor analysis to find correlations within massive tests etc. You just take the income, education, and occupation, and you have your SES.
Now, if I were to look for epicycles within a model which predicts “success”, IQ would be a prime candidate here. Nothing predicts you income as well as your parent’s income, the same applies to education and occupation. So if these are the things you’d define as “success”. Or as you put it:
> If jumping on chairs were what advanced modernity, we would test for that instead. And, that too would "work" because it would surely be a marker for people who were likely to be successful in life.
Now ponder this for a moment. What if instead of creating a construct called intelligence and using that as the predictor for this “success” as you call it, instead we allow society to be unequal. That we grant different people different access to things like good jobs, healthcare and education. Now if said society would enforce this limited access by using something we can actually and objectively know runs in families, say money, fame, and valuable assets, that those that have less of these things get less access to the tings which grants you “success”. Wouldn’t we have a pretty good model to predict “success”.
Now leaving aside this thought experiment (and snark on my part) IQ seems like a giant epicycle of you theory of success. Instead of forming our social policies around intelligence, wouldn’t it be better to form them around something we know is a prime cause of hindrance, inequality.
Now you know my political stance here, so I’m not afraid to say: Solidarity among the working class! Eating the rich! Those are the real solutions. Not being gaslit by the wealthy elite that we are stupider then they.