The fact that you can use so many diverse tests as IQ tests and still get well correlated scores is itself a discovery. So is the fact that those scores correlate with various other life outcomes and that we can't find any lasting intervention (beyond very early childhood) to improve people's IQ. These are all important results about how humans work. It's not just made-up.

> we can't find any lasting intervention (beyond very early childhood) to improve people's IQ

We have, actually! It's just that they've all been implemented already. Iodine supplementation was huge. (Childhood Iodine deficiency results in an adulthood IQ deficit of ~15 points)

The next big IQ improvement looks like it might be iterated embryo selection [0] which is currently possible and will soon be practical, but has a whole host of ethical issues attached to it. (Is it right for the children of the rich to get another advantage like this? (Not a question for the Talebs of the world who think IQ is bunk, but one I'm sure many will be asking) Is throwing away dozens of viable embryos ethical? Are we 'playing god'? And further down the line, is using CRISPR-Cas9 to directly edit the genome of your descendants OK?)

0: https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection

It gets a bit trivial if you count deficiencies as improving IQ by "correcting" their dose. I would think any simple intervention doesn't really count as improving IQ so much as enabling some latent potential that was already present. We can also ingest less lead or get bashed on the head less, but once everyone's doing that perfectly, we'll still have people with lower IQ that can't be brought up to the level of those with the highest.

Is it though? I bet you get similar correlation with wealth. Many different measures of wealth give correlated scores. People that are born in wealth usually stay wealthy. People that have more wealth generally occupy higher status work.

Sure wealth is an interesting thing to look at societally, but it offers no insight into human psychology.

That argument makes no sense. IQ is something that we have created a scale for, that correlates with lots of life outcomes (as well as being useful in predicting school success, which was the original goal).

Wealth is not a feature internal to an individual, it's something defined by a society/particular social structure and as such, it doesn't make a lot of sense to compare it to IQ (an individual difference variable measured by a test).

> useful in predicting school success, which was the original goal

Wrong. The original goal of IQ testing was to predict which students needed special care. It is still very useful (albeit expensive) metric for that.

I just mentioned wealth here just to demonstrate that just because something correlates and predicts something, it doesn’t make it interesting. We know how wealth is inherited, and how people of wealth are privileged and generally more successful (at least if we measure success the same way as IQ proponents do). We know the mechanics of how wealth works and we know it is more societal then psychological. I took wealth as an example here just to weather the possibility the IQ is correlated and has this predictive power because of similar mechanics, i.e. not descriptive of psychology, but society.

> Wrong. The original goal of IQ testing was to predict which students needed special care. It is still very useful (albeit expensive) metric for that.

You are entirely correct, turns out I misremembered.

Wealth is definitely not inherited the same way as IQ, in that it doesn't show any regression to the mean. We also know that adopted children from a lower-IQ family will show an IQ between their birth and adoptive parents, which is again very different from wealth.

I do agree that IQ is not a perfect metric, but can you describe why you think IQ is more reflective of society than anything else?

> Is it though? I bet you get similar correlation with wealth.

Why aren't those two sides of the same coin? I mean, smart people can generally figure out how to accrue and maintain wealth.

Someone will say by way of counter-example that, let's say the Kardashians are not smart. But they seem awfully clever at manipulating their publicity in ways that bring them wealth.

So it really seems to have more to do with whether one has a narrow conception of intelligence as being able to, say, find new theories in QCD or derive relativity, rather than being able to figure out how to accomplish things beneficial to themselves. Which might be D-K in effect, but who knows?

Note that the purpose of my earlier comment was not to compare wealth to IQ, it was simply to provide an example of a phenomena that both correlates and predicts but is not of interest to explaining human psychology.

That said, if wealth and IQ correlates—which I’m not sure it does—you cannot say which causes which, or even if either causes the other. It is just as plausible that wealthy folks have better training taking tests which will lead to higher test scores in general, including IQ scores.

The fact that IQ of biological parents is a much better predictor of kids IQ than their foster parents pretty much invalidates the theory that the causation goes wealth -> IQ.

https://rpadgett.butler.edu/ps320/coursedocs/Richardson-Norg...

First, lets establish whether there is a correlation between IQ and wealth before we conclude the causation.

Now if you manage to convince me that there is a correlation, twin studies is not enough to convince me of the causation. Twin studies are controversial as they do not provide a random sample and have a number of inherit biases.

And even if you find a way to convince me that the causation is not wealth → IQ, it is still not enough to convince me that IQ causes wealth. You still have to eliminate any third variable that causes both.

This is all after you’ve convinced me that IQ is a useful and interesting metric (see nibling comments), as well as useful and unbiased, all of which is up for debate in academic studies as of yet. Good luck.

>, twin studies is not enough to convince me of the causation. Twin studies are controversial as they do not provide a random sample and have a number of inherit biases.

I wasn't talking about Twin studies. It is a fact that among adopted kids their intelligence correlates almost as much with their biological parents as for non adopted kids. Adopted kids is such a big group that there is no lack of data.

I thought it was pretty widely known that there was one. I mean, the article discusses salary vs. IQ and it should be clear that salary ends up correlating with wealth, especially if it accrues over many generations.

> wealth

Assets/wealth is actually pretty uncorrelated with IQ among adults.

Saying that wealth is the same thing as IQ is a conservative position, IMO.

I wasn’t saying that. I simply provided an example of something that correlates and predicts but is not an interesting psychological phenomena.