IQ showed there were tons of poor people with high IQ and thus it was worth providing higher schooling to poor people, that is a big one. Without IQ research people would just argue all poor people are dumb, but you can't do that now since we have proof that they aren't, they are just uneducated.
Another group it helped massively was women, without IQ tests do you really think women would get into higher education that quickly? IQ tests proved women weren't dumber than men, something people have long believed.
If you think its bad that women and poor people today are allowed to get higher education, then sure IQ just had bad consequences, but I feel most think those are good things.
I do not believe that this was true without evidence.
> do you really think women would get into higher education that quickly?
Yes. I believe WWII played a much larger role in this, i.e., men being off to war and many women filling traditional men's roles sufficed as proof that women were capable of many of the same tasks men were.
That's a few million, if not billion people who's lives have been improved by having IQ tests that were used to force environmental regulation worldwide.
Why would it not be? It's not like intelligence was some sort of unknown intrinsic discovery that psychologist happened to uncover. Intelligence was defined and the tests were created to support the definition.
I've done quite a lot of personal, hobby-research on this subject, and I remain convinced that IQ deserves to be met with a lot of skepticism and controversy. I do believe the tests measure something insofar that all tests measure something, but I am not certain that either intelligence, or at least intelligence alone, is the only thing being measured on those tests.
Not to mention, with over one hundred years of intelligence research, what good has actually come from the field? Historically, there was plenty of racism, eugenics, and the furthering of certain political agendas that have come from intelligence research. Again, whose life has actually been improved from this research? Has IQ positively contributed to the field of education? Has the research helped increase human quality of life and happiness? Of course, leave it to psychology -- its most "robust and replicated finding" is, essentially, useless.