What exactly are they meant to replicate other than other IQ tests? They don't make a statement about anything that is falsifiable, other than that if you give somebody who scores high on a test carefully designed and tested to match the results of previously given IQ tests when given to the same people, they'll tend to match the results that those people will get on other tests that were calibrated in the exact same way.

If you're trying to say they replicate over the lifetime of the same person, I've had a 15 point swing between tests, out of the few I've taken. What did stay constant for me from age 10 to age 40 was my Myers-Briggs test (my dad was a metrics obsessive), and that's obvious horseshit. Consistency doesn't mean you're measuring what you claim to be measuring.

edit: if it matters, scores were between 137 and 152, so exactly an entire standard deviation. That's like the difference between sub-Saharan and European that racists are always crowing about, but in the same person. IQ doesn't even personally replicate for me.

>What exactly are they meant to replicate other than other IQ tests?

if a variety of different IQ tests sort the same people the same way, even though every question on the tests is different from the other tests, you have shown that the test is showing something about the subjects, not something about the tests. and that is replicable, and falsifiable.

if you follow the same people over time and provide them with new tests, and they continue to sort in the same relative fashion, you have increased confidence that you are measuring something relatively fixed, not variable. For statistical significance (look it up) you don't draw conclusions on the basis of one person (or one Dad) but on population samples tested under standard conditions.

this is like all study results published here, a thousand nerds who've never studied intelligence come up with a hundred objections to what was tested, assuming with arrogance that the people who specialized and did the work aren't considering what comes off the top of this nerd's head. Better qualified nerds did this work.

>Myers-Briggs...'s obvious horseshit

Myers Briggs is not complete horseshit, correlates closely to, but not as good a fit as, the generally accepted Big Five Factor system, the gold standard of personality tests: you should educate yourself a bit more. Myers-Briggs essentially tries to phrase everything in a postive way, where the Big Five separates and includes Neuroticism which is a more negative (for the person) trait. All these traits should be considered adaptive till proven otherwise, so resist the urge to judge.

You can prepare for IQ tests, just as you can for any other test, and you can get better at some of the problems in these tests the more you practice them, just as you get better at Sudoku puzzles the more you do them.

Related: that brain is plastic and can adapt to challenges in different ways. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/london-taxi-memor...