Not quite. Popular culture "can only deal with" things that can be put on a simple number line, because they collectively like to be able to say definitively "

Not quite. Popular culture "can only deal with" things that can be put on a simple number line, because they collectively like to be able to say definitively "this person is smarter than that other person", when the reality is (of course) far more complicated than that. As far as I know, the scientific community agrees that IQ is not a strong predictor of true "intelligence"...