> Anyone who wants to learn about IQ should Google it

This is bad advice because Google returns poor results for most medical questions, including ones about controversial topics like IQ.

IQ was adopted as a pet cause by hard right wing political theorists, for example one of the authors of the Bell Curve.

When I was in grad school for psych, nobody serious studied it. Occasionally one person was still working on it, and everybody in the department whispered about them being a kook. This was at an elite psych department, it may have been different in smaller departments.

Often times if you see someone posting information about IQ it's either (1) they're selling IQ tests, (2) they're selling services that administer IQ tests, or (3) they align with a political faction that politicizes IQ.

If you want to learn about IQ, the best thing is probably to find a recent review article published by a top tier journal that does not specialize in IQ research.

My take the last time I looked into it was that it helps locate people who have learning disabilities, but it's not great at predicting individual outcomes.

The measure most people intuitively think of is correlation of IQ with success, keeping SES constant and throwing out the lowest range of IQ. That is, you want to know the incremental benefit of having a higher IQ given that you're not suffering from a learning disability. And you also don't want to accidentally measure the obvious impact that having more money gives you more opportunities.

When you make these adjustments it quickly becomes clear that IQ is much messier than people in this thread are claiming. For example, heritability varies by SES. And heritability is generally not what people think it is naively.