You can create a proxy for IQ by simply asking a group of people to invent their own questions, summing them together, randomly sampling from those questions, and then rank ordering the outcome. High IQ people will score in the top percentile for any set of questions. That's the whole point.

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michaelt 3 days ago | parent [-]

Do you have a citation for this? It sounds pretty unlikely to me.

I'm pretty sure if I asked a group of people to invent their own questions I'd get a load of general knowledge questions about music, sports, and popular culture.

	▲	bofadeez 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		This is a talking point from an old university class lecture interpreting factor analytic data on personality and IQ [1]. In practice, intelligence tests don’t depend on the specific questions asked. If you let a group of people generate their own items, pool them together, sample randomly, and then rank scores, the same individuals would tend to rise to the top. The high IQ people would cluster toward the top with a correlation of 0.9. This is because people with higher general cognitive ability perform better across virtually any cognitive task, a phenomenon first documented by Spearman (1904) and repeatedly confirmed in psychometrics research (e.g., Jensen 1998; Deary 2012). [1] https://youtu.be/D7Kn5p7TP_Y?t=47m50s