>IQ has a lot of flaws, not the least of which is its usage outside of academic research, as a measure of job aptitude and hiring potential

Isn't IQ one of the best predictors of job training success, across both civilian and military, blue collar and white collar?

It's also one of, if not the single most generalizable predictors that we know of right now, even more so than nationality, race, gender, SES (socioeconomic status), parental SES, you name it. It predicts just about everything - from hard biological measures like reaction time and brain mass to lifetime odds of being in a car accident (distinct from causing a car accident - higher IQ people are statistically less likely to be hit by another driver), divorce rates, lifetime income, longevity, the list goes on and on. IQ is not the strongest predictor for every one of these, but every stronger predictor for any one of those fails to predict as many things as IQ does. Parental SES, controlling for IQ, provides no predictive power for your reaction time, for instance, despite predicting educational attainment better than IQ does.

The critique that IQ is an imperfect proxy for g is totally valid.

The self-assuaging fantasy that g itself doesn't exist is a classic example of a psychological defensive mechanism of rejection, one rooted in a need to defend a worldview that holds all people as inherently equal, when we're measurably, biologically not.

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ageedizzle 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> The self-assuaging fantasy that g itself doesn't exist is a classic example of a psychological defensive mechanism of rejection, one rooted in a need to defend a worldview that holds all people as inherently equal, when we're measurably, biologically not.

I think this statement conflates two different senses of the word “equality”. Equality of abilities is different from moral equality. It is perfectly coherent to accept that people aren’t equal in terms of their abilities but are still morally equal. For example, just because Person A is smarter than Person B it does not follow that the interests of Person A matter more than those of Person B, or that the suffering of Person A matters more than the like suffering of Person B, etc. So the view that g is real and people have different IQ scores is consistent with the idea that all people are inherently equal. Because in most contexts the concept of inherent equality is not a biological or psychological concept but a moral concept.

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anonym29 2 days ago | parent [-]

I don't disagree with moral equality one bit - the golden rule should absolutely apply to everyone and we should all strive to look at each other with compassion, tolerance, empathy, understanding, grace, humility, and goodwill - but there is a loud, vocal subset of people that truly believe in absolute biological equality - not just between people with different IQ's, but even between different biological sexes and all other categories of humans; "tabula rasa" proponents who argue that ALL differences in outcomes along the lines of categorical differences (e.g. sex, race, gender, ethnicity, nationality, religion, culture) are exclusively and irrefutably explained strictly by discrimination and discrimination alone, which is a patently absurd assertion that should be refuted. Discrimination is real and should be confronted vocally, but the idea that it's the only factor explaining differences in outcomes between groups is a harmful myth.

The fact of the matter, relating back to the original discussion, is that sex/race/gender/ethnicity/nationality/religion/culture-blind IQ testing is not only a strong predictor of job performance, it is perhaps one of the best tools we have for eliminating discrimination based on sex/race/gender/ethnicity/nationality/religion/culture in hiring, as it explicitly controls for differences along these lines by exclusively targeting an assessment of g in abstract ways that are explicitly stripped of cultural, religious, racial, and gendered biases.

Pseudonymized hiring that relied exclusively on IQ tests, with zero indications of race/sex/gender (e.g. legal name), stripped of proxies for SES and/or parental SES (e.g. which university was attended, if any) would be significantly less biased than current hiring practices. Throw in job-specific pseudonymized skill evaluations (so, no voice calls, no video calls, just direct assessments to candidates) and you've got a system to dramatically reduce hiring discrimination along protected classes.

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tptacek 2 days ago | parent [-]

... or you can just discard all the hokum and only use job-specific pseudonymized skill evaluations --- a concept more widely known as "work samples" --- and be using the gold-standard tool for candidate selection, supported by research going all the way back to Deming.

	▲	2 days ago \| parent [-]
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aDyslecticCrow 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

IQ is meant for population statistics. For that purpose it's a great scientific tool.

> socioeconomic status

No. A real IQ test tries to cancel out educational level from the score by comparing people in buckets of age, education and a few other importance factors.

A systematic deviation of education quality in the same "level" is not possible to cancel out, making IQ indirectly measure socioeconomic status. Hence why the us governments banned IQ on the basis or racism for government hiring.

You cannot measure two prople with 1/4th of a IQ test (logic puzzle is only one part of a full test) and make any useful statistical conclusions. A domain specific interview question or aptitude test a much clearer value to hiring prococess.

	▲	tptacek 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		... no it isn't? IQ tests were explicitly designed as individual diagnostics. They're clinical tools. From where did you get the idea that IQ was meant for population statistics?

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tptacek 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

If IQ was one of the best predictors of job training success, it would be used everywhere. Instead, very few companies use it. There's a persistent myth that IQ isn't more widely used because of legal concerns, but that can't be right, because IQ and general cognitive tests are used by several of the largest companies (with the deepest pockets for discrimination suits) in North America --- and, further, the Griggs v. Duke jurisprudence that roots the myth doesn't have any force outside the US, where... IQ testing is not generally used in employment.

I don't know what the "self-assuaging fantasy" is supposed to mean, but you can read Cosma Shalizi to see how any set of tests structured like IQ tests are necessarily give rise to a "g" fact, even if you randomly generate them. I feel like I don't have to assuage myself too much that math works.