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".)