Well, IQ is their measure. They should be able to defend it properly.
And frankly, if there is any doubt that IQ maps to intelligence, then its abuse over the last half-century has done immesurable harm to individuals and given considerable fuel to racists.
An IQ test is a tool. Just like any other tool the way you use it matters.
IQ tests turned out to be pretty useful when investigating the effects of Lead in paint/gas/industry/other. See Herbert Needleman's research from the early 80's.
The test itself isn't really good or bad (bearing in mind most modern iq tests are heavily scrutinized for bias in race/class/income/location/etc) it's just a tool.
> IQ tests turned out to be pretty useful when investigating the effects of Lead in paint/gas/industry/other. See Herbert Needleman's research from the early 80's.
Taleb argues precisely that IQ is only a good measure of unintelligence, not intelligence, and that this prevent IQ from being meaningful. He showed that if you IQ test 10K people, 2K are dead (0 IQ) and then test their performance on something, you'll still end up with correlations that'll get you published in prestigious journals, and peddle nonsense conclusions. https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1115193783145123840
(the point being that in that scenario, 0 IQ perfectly correlated with 0 performance, can make the population correlation look significant even when "alive" IQ is completely uncorrelated with performance, which, in that example, it is)
The problem with Taleb's argument is that, as the linked article shows, IQ tests are as good measure of intelligence as of unintelligence. There is no inflection point after which IQ stops correlating with wealth. The slope is constant across all scales.
Taleb's argumentation relies on fictional scenarios whose conclusion do not match what he would have gotten looking at raw data instead.
Caloric intake in children correlates to height very well below the median(+), and then it stops. You can't grow arbitarily tall by eating more food, but if you underfeed a child enough, it will end up shorter than its more-fed siblings.
" In contrast, in developing countries, nutrition deficits lead to a lower heritability. The fact that the mean height of the U.S. population has almost plateaued in the past decade suggests that the nutrient environment has almost maximized the genetic potential of height, at least in this country. Improved nutrition elsewhere may have similar benefits in terms of stature."
(+) I use median here to mean some unspeicified percentile, as you did.
No, it wouldn't. I can hit you on the head with a hammer, and you'll function poorly in every conceivable performance test (low dimensionality), but success is high-dimensional.
If you want to measure wealth it would be easier to ask their income.
But you brought up the same point as the parent. 0 IQ correlates perfectly with death. Really low IQs correlate perfectly with mental disabilities. High IQs correlate (almost) perfectly with socio-economic status.
That's not at all how the effect of Lead exposure works. The research has found that Lead exposure causes a consistent loss of IQ points, with no evidence that the effect is limited to the low end of the IQ scale. Naturally, none of the analyses which determined this included the IQs of dead subjects.
