4 ms·

This is just a distortion, and shows you haven't actually engaged with the scientific criticism of IQ tests: > General intelligence was discovered empirically,

This is just a distortion, and shows you haven't actually engaged with the scientific criticism of IQ tests: > General intelligence was discovered empirically, not hypothesized and then searched-for. General intelligence has been hypothesized - and assumed to exist - by almost all peoples since prehistory. The g factor is what you are referring to, and that was discovered "empirically." What was not at all empirical was the decision to call the g factor a measure of general intelligence. That is a hypothesis which seems flatly wrong, and I have yet to see an argument for its validity that isn't circular or specious. My point is that written cognitive tests don't measure intelligence, they measure something much more shallow. The fact that written cognitive tests have a correlating g factor does not mean that the g factor itself is any less shallow.

llamaimperative 2y ago
From the first line of the Wiki article: "The g factor (also known as general intelligence,...)" I was referring to g, not to the concept of general intelligence, which very obviously has pretty much always existed. Apologies for the ambiguity. In any case, I don't think it really matters how precisely or reliably we can actually measure g directly, which is really what your sticking point is. Every important decision we need to make around the idea of general intelligence has to do with 1) whether it exists, 2) how well it correlates to positive outcomes in life under specific social and economic regimes, and 3) how heritable it is. All of these seem pretty darn obvious from various experiments not relying on measuring g directly. Why do you think it matters whether we can measure g? What decisions are there to be made with that information?