> Your arguments boil down to simply gaslighting smart people that their life experience is somehow completely inaccurate, unrepresentative, or misinterpreted.

> Your arguments boil down to simply gaslighting smart people that their life experience is somehow completely inaccurate, unrepresentative, or misinterpreted. So what if I am? Smart people aren’t owed any special place in the theory of cognition. High IQ does not need to be at the center of anything. You shouldn’t be treated as special, because you aren’t (or more accurately, what makes you special is not your intelligence, and certainly not your IQ). Magnus Carlsen intelligence is not what makes Magnus Carslon special, what makes him special is an extraordinary skill in a very specialized sport. He has spent decades perfecting this skill. Yes, he might have some preconditions which he inherited that makes it particularly easy for him to acquire these skills, skills like the ability to remember a large opening repertoire, to visualize a large number of available positions in a short time, to search among these positions and select which ones are more likely to lead to a favorable positions, etc. Cognitive scientists study these preconditions, and most assume there is a level of inheritance to many if not all of them. However most (but not all) cognitive scientists don’t group all of these skills together and call it intelligence, they simply study what they see. Also if you search on google scholar you may find somebody looking for the heritability factor of a particular visualization skill, however most of the field simply doesn’t care, because it doesn’t matter in most theories of behavior. Whatever you call intelligence is bound to be arbitrarily picked from a much larger set of cognitive skills. Now Spearman believed these all correlated in what he called general intelligence, but psychometricians have been trying to prove him right for now a hundred years. The scientific community at large remains unconvinced (although there was a period where his theory was more popular and more accepted). I think the simpler explanation is true that if there is a correlation, it is superficial, and more likely arises because practicing one skill has implication in others, just like practicing for a 100 m dash, makes you better at long jump, not because there exists this platonic ideal of general intelligence that you are born with and makes you superior to other humans. EDIT: I also want to prove you wrong in your believe that IQ isn’t studied because IQ research is shunned, it is studied plenty, has been for over a century, it is just that the research—like a b-plot in a bad movie—didn’t go anywhere. Entering the search term: “IQ Cognitive Psychology” yields over 700 000 results, the top one being a study from 2019 that has been cited 60 times so far. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211368119300658 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22113... IQ studies still get plenty of attention, in my opinion they get too much attention. I’m sure Sabrina Hofstetter feels the same way about string theory.