Of course it is[1]. Every single method used to screen a candidate is essentially testing for general mental ability. Being admitted to an Ivy League school is basically an IQ test. Interviews are basically IQ tests. Employers want to hire smart people. The fact that his is even a debate is crazy.

[1] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1998-10661-006

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rixed 3 days ago | parent [-]

Your definition of an IQ test seems to be so vague as to be meaningless.

Last time I passed a job interview, on several rounds of interview not one was about general intelligence, or general knowledge, or general anything. It was about my ability to solve the kind of problems they were solving and I had some experience solving. Last time I failed a job interview it was because of a bad culture fit.

I have not looked at the numbers, but I would suspect Ivy league admissions to be more correlated with wealth / geography than possibly anything else, but you probably square that with a belief that intelligence is hereditary as wealth is.

IQ tests measure the ability to solve quickly some abstract problems in an exam-like situation. There is certainly a use case for that, but thinking it captures the whole of "cognitive ability" is like thinking that duolingo captures the whole of litterary.

By the way, anytime one can't understand why $DEBATED_TOPIC is debatable should be an indication that one should switch to a slower though process.

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bofadeez 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

In practice, intelligence tests don’t depend on the specific questions asked. If you let a group of people generate their own questions, pool them together, sample randomly, and then rank scores, the same individuals would tend to rise to the top. 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).

	▲	rixed 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yes I'm aware of that, and I had this in mind when I wrote that "IQ tests measure the ability to solve quickly some abstract problems in an exam-like situation." Maybe that was not carefuly worded enough. I am of the opinion that, although there is some generality in IQ tests, they measure only one specific aspect of cognitive ability defined by: abstract + quick. My intuition is that cognitive abilities encompass much more than that. Anyone who have ever argued at length with that smart but obtuse engineer who can't tell the forest for the tree will know what I'm refering to. To me, a better test for "cognitive abilities" would also measure how someone is able of nuance, of humor, of seeing things from different perspectives, of introspection, etc, not just solving puzzles that can be described in a couple of sentences. And I'm not talking about "emotional intelligence" here. To me, E-I is just the other side of that same flawed model that smells too much like modern day phrenology.

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Avshalom 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

>Your definition of an IQ test seems to be so vague as to be meaningless.

This is actually like one of the primary tricks of the IQ perverts. They'll take literally any test, run the results through a transformation function to get it into their bell curve, and start making claims about how IQ correlate with This-Or-That based on it.

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bofadeez 3 days ago | parent [-]

If you dismiss IQ research, you might as well disregard all of psychology. The psychologists who developed intelligence tests were pioneers in using the statistical methods (e.g. factor analysis) that now underpin the entire field. IQ is defined more precisely than almost any other psychological construct. Discarding it leaves you with poorly defined concepts and no clear way to handle them. [1]

[1] https://youtu.be/D7Kn5p7TP_Y?t=47m50s

	▲	Avshalom 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Oh for fuck's sake. So: the people that developed intelligence tests were not psychologists; lies, damned lies and statistics; "pioneering" the idea of using math doesn't mean that people using math today are doing the same thing; whatever the definition of IQ might be is irrelevant because "IQ tests" are not rigorously defined; however precisely IQ is defined is also irrelevant because it's supposedly just a proxy for "g"; psychology is not psychometry and so discarding IQ does nothing to the field of psychology.