> How truly "empirical" is said research or any research in psychometrics? My understanding is that IQ researchers invented a lot of the statistical techniques

> How truly "empirical" is said research or any research in psychometrics? My understanding is that IQ researchers invented a lot of the statistical techniques used across the social sciences today, and I think faired the "reproducibility crisis" fairly well. It's about as empirical as the social sciences get. > I've seen many of the claim correlations of IQ with "success" like career trajectories, divorce rates, better health and longevity, etc.. However, I've yet to see any strong correlations. Does IQ have a correlation stronger than 0.5 with anything? 0.5 correlation is pretty big in the social sciences. I mean, think about: there are probably hundreds or thousands of factors that influence your life outcome. Much of the differences we see tends to come down to what researchers call "non-shared environment", which is just a fancy term for all the random stuff that happens in your life. For a single factor to have such a large effect is pretty amazing. > IIRC, I am pretty sure parental income, or lack thereof, is a better predictor of "success" than IQ. A lot of which can be explained by the parents' IQ. IQ doesn't explain everything, not by a long shot. It just explains more than any other single factor, and should generally be something researchers should control for whenever they attempt to measure some other phenomenon.