By “wide ranging utility” you mean “detecting and diagnosing mental disabilities” right?
If not: Using IQ for anything else is, at best, quite useless, and at worst, severely problematic as you found out when you heard about scientific racism (such as the eugenics movement).
By useful, I mean saving the US military hundreds of millions of dollars. It's not perfect, and I would argue it's not even very good, but it does work. Which among several reasons is why it's been outlawed for US companies.
Re:Taleb is wrong about IQ
by reasonaway on Tuesday July 30, 2019 @05:24AM
(#20563271)
you keep claiming that there is some threshold above which it does not predict anything even though this contradicts all available evidence. like taleb your beliefs are based on nothing more than unfounded speculation.
No I don’t claim that (even though Taleb might have; didn’t read him thoroughly enough). I say that there is a (muddy) threshold where these tests become useless. They still hold predictive power, but what they do predict is useless.
> If your measurement is predicting everything, it usually means you are measuring nothing.
The goal of IQ was to predict everything as it's a one dimensional scale. You can always find a better test for any given quality, and frankly should. However, that does not somehow invalidate it's wide ranging utility.