But people who think this makes the universe fair are living in a dreamworld. Who says that tendencies toward rationality are any more fairly distributed than IQ? And could you really teach the skills to someone with IQ 70? The answer is not necessarily "No", I suppose, but I'm skeptical; I'll believe it when I see it done; and the universe is still unfair, because it will still always be easier to learn and perform the skills if you start with IQ 130 instead.
(Those asking "What are these 'skills' of which you speak?" are directed to http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences )
If you want to make the universe fair(er), you are going to have to develop human intelligence enhancement technology at some point or other - teaching rationality classes may make everyone cognitively richer, but it is not going to cure cognitive inequality.
I mention this because I suspect that people applauding "IQ isn't everything" are actually applauding a seeming implication that the universe isn't quite so unfair. I'm afraid I can't back them on that implication - though, of course, IQ isn't everything.
But then they show some examples of questions for which you supposedly need these "other skills", and sure enough, they're typical little math puzzles that could be taken straight from an IQ test, or SAT/GRE.
Although there are only two comments there, and already more comments here.
Predictor R Predictors R
HSGPA 0.54 (0.36) SAT-M, SAT-CR 0.51 (0.32)
SAT-CR 0.48 (0.29) HSGPA, SAT-M, SAT-CR 0.61 (0.44)
SAT-M 0.47 (0.26) SAT-CR, SAT-M, SAT-W 0.53 (0.35)
SAT-W 0.51 (0.33) HSGPA, SAT-CR, SAT-M, SAT-W 0.62 (0.46)
Take a middle-tier state school: if someone has a Harvard-worthy GPA and chose the mid-tier school, it's probably because of other factors that kept them out of Harvard -- and those other factors will probably lead to a lower GPA. If another student's SAT's would imply community college, you might expect them to have some kind of focus or determination that would let them perform at the state school level (and you could detect that determination in their extracurriculars or in student interviews).
So this is only surprising data if you try hard not to think about it. What's amazing is that a four-hour test has almost as much predictive value as four years of GPA data -- is four years of your life and tens of thousands of dollars really a good investment, when the result is a ~20% more accurate measure of your abilities? Doubtful.