re: #167 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))

IQ tests measure how well a person performs on an IQ test. Those results might be related to their relative intelligence, but not directly enough to draw definitive conclusions.

IQ is a valid and good measure of cognitive skills.

Intelligence is meaningful. This principle comes closest to being universally accepted by scientific psychologists. Every clinical psychology program in the country trains students in IQ testing, tens of thousands of IQ tests are given in schools every year, and papers in mainstream scientific journals routinely include information about intelligence, even when IQ is not the main object of study. On a more basic level, who doesn’t notice that some people have larger vocabularies than others, can solve harder math problems or organize more complex projects? IQ tests reliably assess these individual differences. Moreover, people who do well on one kind of ability test also tend to do well on others, a phenomenon that is referred to as g, as in general intelligence.

vox.com

Frankly, all this mumbo-jumbo about how IQ is not real, useless etc. is the left-wing equivalent of the right-wing ideologically-motivated science denial (though admittedly the latter usually has greater consequences; but the mechanism is usually the same - “it may lead to uncomfortable things, better deny it”).