I think that the "whole story" matters, even if the bits you highlight are a large part of it. A bit like the relationship between epigenetics and the rest of genetics -- it rather changes how you interpret what you already know.

Given that we cannot say what intelligence is better than "its what intelligent people do", I'd say we were far from the "whole story".

I think pretending that there is no "whole story" and using IQ to make policy decisions about populations is political. I don't think anyone cared that a bunch of researchers were tinkering with some psychometrics. They cared that a whole racial group could be shut out of certain jobs on the basis of a half baked abstract reasoning test.

>Given that we cannot say what intelligence is better than "its what intelligent people do", I'd say we were far from the "whole story".

I'm not opposed to this, and I doubt most people would be either. Take college admissions as an example. A low-SAT, low-GPA student in a one-on-one interview with an admissions officer could dazzle the interviewer to such a level that admission with a scholarship could be guaranteed.

We don't do that often for a variety of reasons, but one would certainly be because of the quasi-legal requirement to tick certain boxes to avoid trouble. Okay, but that has costs. We've been able to paper over a lot of this with economic good times, but that's unlikely to last forever. Hard reality always wins in the end.

Your point would be better delivered without the last paragraph.

Like I said, it upsets people, and since we value not upsetting people, that's the metric we optimize for. This has costs and consequences, like anything else.

It's the social sciences version of technical debt.

> I'm not a genderqueer left-handed ginger aboriginal, so I'm not very smart.

> we value not upsetting people, that's the metric we optimize for.

From the HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html):

> Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.

I’m a prime target for this flamebate, and you’ve managed to upset me quite a bit. I’m actually surprised I didn’t bite already. Indeed I’ll actually just leave it at that and pat my self on the back for resisting.

It intentionally upsets people without actually adding to your argument. That sounds like trolling to me, which is not what we are going for here.