>>13070031I don't think IQ is bullshit. How do we know a measure is useful? If we can make useful predictions with it. IQ does predict performance on many cognitive tasks (see Spearman's hypothesis), those tasks are useful, so IQ is useful. It predicts many lifetime outcomes.
So why is IQ bullshit? Neither does it have to mean that it's causal to be useful. For example, t-shirts correlate with ice cream. That is correlation, not causation. Obviously, people eat more ice cream in Summer, and when it's warm people are more likely to wear t-shirts, so t-shirts correlate with ice cream. If you sold ice cream, had no other metric, than the rate of people wearing t-shirts would be useful to you.
If you think that sounds nonsense, you might think it sounds like nonsense for reasons similar as to why you think IQ is bullshit. But that's due to your faulty understanding, not due to the lack of usefulness of IQ.
Take the verbal sub-portion of many IQ tests. It's not the one that correlates most highly with the full scale IQ (FSIQ), the g-factor, but it's reasonably useful. It usually tests vocabulary and such. You might say:
> Okay, but what if someone chose to just read comic books all their life? Reading comic books shouldn't make you dumber.No, but intelligent people usually would be quickly bored by reading comic books all their life. So, while you wouldn't turn a smart person into a dumb person by making them read comic books their whole life, there is a correlation between people with IQ and someone who is more inclined to read challenging literature, which will then usually broaden their vocabulary. So there you have your correlation again, even if it might not be causal. That's not the point of IQ - if it correlates with something useful, the measure is useful.
What does your body mass correlate with? Is it important we use pounds or kilos? No, we are just interested in knowing how it correlates with your body weight and whether that chair's going to collapse.
