IQ is controversial because it's not obvious:

1. How it relates to g-factor and whether it tests it accurately

2. How it's influenced by parenting and class/cultural factors, including class-specific parenting practices

3. How it relates to academic and professional success

4. How much apparent academic and professional success is influenced by parental cheating and influence - including bequests, donations, "special" deals behind the scenes, in-group networking, and so on

It's not controversial that some people are smarter than others in specific ways, just as some people are better athletes than others.

But there are a lot of unanswered questions about what "smarter" really means, how broad the definition should be, how much it's defined by covert and contingent expectations, whether "smart" behaviours are innate or acculturated, who defines them, and how/why.

> How it's influenced by parenting and class/cultural factors, including class-specific parenting practices

According to adoption studies, there's barely any influence at all. We can measure a little when the kids are young (the better the measurements, the less we can measure). It gradually disappears as they get older.

IQ is controversial because it is a vague and one-dimensional metric, which all sorts of idiots are both delusional about and obsessed with.

It's popular because it correlates with incredible number of other measurements. Some pertaining to life's successes and failures. No other measurement is like that.

Nationality at birth, parental income, skin color, height, highest degree completed, etc. are also highly correlated.

But yes, I recognize the "like a scratch-off lottery ticket which might reveal that you should be a Big Winner In Life" psychological appeal of IQ tests. Especially for people who are not actually experiencing any of that Big Winner in Life stuff, or have other issues. Especially those needing humanity to be a Well-Ordered Set ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well-order ) with a convenient and easily-rationalized "who get to look down upon whom" metric.

Yes. There are few measurements that also correlate with various outcomes. But I don't think anything is as broad as IQ which is just the speed at which you can do logic puzzles. Isn't it interesting? That something so silly correlates so strongly with so many things? The metrics you mention are kind of obvious in comparison and about as interesting as the hypothesis that "it's better to be heathy and rich than sick and poor".

As for comparing humans with each other I agree it's totally stupid. Personally I blame religions and their simplistic concept of good and evil for this eagerness of comparing humans and putting them on a spectrum.

> As for comparing humans with each other I agree it's totally stupid. Personally I blame religions and their...

Read up a bit on the hierarchy systems found in various non-human primate societies. Religious status is just another convenient and easily-rationalized ordering metric.

I don't think those hierarchies work by puting all apes (or monkeys) in a society on a number line.

Does china strike you as particularly religious? You dont even need IQ tests. Students naturally fall on a distribution if tested. And those students generally test in the same range their whole life.

They are religious:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_China

Measurement of IQ seems to be lacking due to it missing the goal of estimating capacity to learn independent of external factors (I.e. either very *shallow* types of diversity [sex, race, etc], or more meaningful types of diversity [language, sensory abscences, etc]).

It's problematic because sometimes IQ tests will require a mix/match of: - Literacy - English language understanding - Extensive Vocabulary - Sight / Hearing

Of course literacy worked around with filling in pictures, but that just shifts us to the requirement of certain sensory input. Requiring English can be worked around by translating to any language, but doesn't address literacy requirements. One big issue I have is seeing vocabulary involved in these tests, which is outright not testing intelligence, but rather experience with a language.

For example, try testing ChatGPT for it's IQ. You'll see very clearly that an IQ test is not made for a system which doesn't have visual capabilities. Perhaps it would be able to from the domain of given the chance - but we don't know because the test is flawed. That is precisely the thing an IQ test should be able to measure - capacity to learn, regardless of the sensory input fed to the system.

Intelligence turns out to be mostly one-dimensional -- in other words, most of the difference between people can be described by a single number. More complicated models with more numbers exist -- they do work slightly better but at the expense of being much more complicated.

(This is literally textbook science and not something "all sorts of idiots are [...] delusional about".)

You can practice IQ tests and get better at them. Did you become more intelligent because your IQ score got better?

I think you can improve your result a little bit, but not much.

This goes against what we have seen with the Flynn effect in multiple East Asian countries.

I don't think that the cause of the Flynn effect is practicing IQ tests a lot.

The point is that you can improve IQ scores a lot by education, some of which helps you do better on IQ tests. Whether it is by practicing IQ tests specifically is not relevant.

Those effects are not large:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/brainstorm/201806/ho...

1 point per year of education is the lower estimate.

15 points over two decades is an entire standard deviation improvement for the whole population. One-on-one tutoring has been shown to make a two standard deviation difference. That's the difference between median intelligence and genius. If that isn't large, what is? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem

Your study is about the effect of an extra year of badly done education on people who drop out of school, which is worth 1 IQ point. That same study shows that the value of mediocre education on people who don't drop out of school is 5 IQ points.

That improvement might come from all sources. Health and nutrition improvements can have very high impact. Deworming, using safer water. Contribution of education to this 15 points might be just few points.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem

It's not about IQ, also, was it ever replicated?

> Contribution of education to this 15 points might be just few points.

It certainly isn't genetics. You're not going to cause a population-wide one sigma increase within a single generation using any genetic mechanism.

> It's not about IQ, also, was it ever replicated?

Yes, this has been replicated repeatedly. As far as IQ, if you apply for a private school that uses IQ tests for admission, you will find that all of them explicitly forbid test coaching because it is well known that it works. Even a video will cause large gains. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...

I'm no fan of educating people simply to score higher IQs.

But the effect of education could be very large: e.g., give an illiterate person an IQ test, educate them and repeat. The change will be ~100 points.

To be correct you can improve IQ up to a point (depending on the individual) with education.

No. It can't be 100. IQ tests don't require literacy. They don't even require language. You could administer IQ test to analphabet who doesn't speak you language and if he cooperates he could get result faily close to their best capacity that could be achieved.

I increased by about 20 points after realizing how to apply some of my knowledge of algorithms. That shouldn't happen (measuring knowledge, not IQ). It's quite a meaningless test - probably best understood when trying to apply it to ML systems like Gato or PaLM.

Did you don't multiple test before and after? 20 points might be just variability for a single test of poor quality.

Raven matrices is the standard.

I notice knowledge of binary operations and computer frame by frame anination helps a bit with some but still a small fraction of questions.

What algorithms did you notice being useful for solving IQ tests?