Nice quip, but what's your point? ;-)
> Anyhow, my lukewarm take is that no level of "social and emotional intelligence" will allow you to assess the likely effectiveness of a political system, because why in the world would the built-in intelligence for interacting with a couple of hundred people be any good at predicting the aggregate behaviour of billions of people.
I at least have a high degree of belief in the contrapositive -- if one doesn't have a high degree of social and emotional intelligence then they won't be able to assess the likely effectiveness of a political system.
We don't need to rigorously quantify the cause to notice an effect, whatever it turns out to be.
Since you seem knowledgeable in it, what would be a rigid definition of IQ? As opposed to the vague definition of social intelligence?
All online IQ tests are fake, no exception. Most "Mensa online tests" are unrelated to Mensa; they just say so, because it makes people more likely to click on them.
A serious IQ test would look like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven%27s_Progressive_Matrices
> I can't fathom it being anything other than an indicator on how well someone can solve these matrix association problems.
Well, this is one of the interesting findings about intelligence. Turns out that how well people can solve these tests, correlates strongly with many other things.
At some moment in history, there was a competing theory of "multiple intelligences", assuming that the kind of intelligence for doing math is independent from the kind of intelligence for solving verbal problems. But when people were given different tests, it turned out that the people who score high on one kind of test are also likely to score high on the other kind of test.
So the reason why the "matrices" tests are so popular is that it doesn't matter much what kind of test you use, and the matrices are less culturally sensitive (i.e. in English verbal test, it would matter a lot whether English is your first or second language).
> what would be a rigid definition of IQ?
Approximately: That thing that allows you to do better in a wide range of problems. (As opposed to a talent or learning disability, which is that thing that allows you to do better/worse in one specific thing.)
We definitely won't be measuring it with a self report questionnaire though.
Instead, we have more general problem-solving skills that allowed us to develop things like statistics and economics and political theory. I leave it to the reader to determine how much social and emotional intelligence is required to excel at those. (As opposed to the merely analytical intelligence that IQ measures, I suppose. I have yet to see a definition of social/emotional intelligence that is coherent enough to be measured, and also actually meaningfully exists when measured.)