re: #428 Talking Point Detective

Again, having a personal non-expert opinion is fine.

Just two points to keep in mind: don’t expect this personal opinion to be taken with full seriousness when a) you’ve already shown that you make mistakes in basic things related to the issue; b) your opinion clashes with the consensus opinion of the experts (I gave the link to the paper describing this consensus above). This is really no different than any other debate, e.g. about AGW. Everybody has an opinion, but scientific consensus takes the priority.

PS: as for predicting, it is an absolutely legitimate way of putting this:

In summary, intelligence test scores predict a wide range of social outcomes with varying degrees of success.
Correlations are highest for school achievement, where they account for about a quarter of the variance. They are somewhat lower for job performance, and very low for negatively valued outcomes such as criminality. In general, intelligence tests measure only some of the many personal characteristics that are relevant to life in contemporary America. Those characteristics are never the only influence on outcomes, though in the case of school performance they may well be the strongest.

Am. Psych., Feb. 1996, p. 83.