It's beyond contest that the g factor is real in part because it's a statistical inevitability in any series of related tests, be they for intelligence or product/market fit in automobiles. It's an exploratory statistic, a hint at underlying causality; it is not a dispositive revelation about the structure of human thought.
replySure: there's a battery of general cognitive tests, and if you smush data sets together a dominant factor will emerge. And?
This is exactly my point. It's tautological to argue that IQ isn't correlated with intelligence. It is, definitionally. You seem to acknowledge this so perhaps I don't understand your original comment.
replyI just don't think there's anything meaningful about that. Group of related tests is related. Ok, now what?
reply(I misread your original comment --- no, it's not tautological. It's tautological to say that IQ isn't correlated with IQ test results. "g" has nothing to do with "intelligence" as a construct.)
replyIf IQ tests measure one's ability to do most other cognitively demanding tasks then it's measuring more than the test itself. Whatever you want to call that thing is irrelevant. In sociology and psychology we call that the g factor. The vast majority of people call that intelligence.
replyThat's the tautological argument! Note that I'm not even really engaging with the validity of IQ tests, just the surface logic that you're using. You literally just argued, in effect, that IQ tests measure intelligence because people call them intelligence tests!
replyThat's a semantic point you're making, and I'm not contesting it. To repeat myself, you can call the correlation anything you like. I'm merely explaining that the correlation exists and is incredibly material.
replyWe agree the correlation exists. The incredible materiality of it is what's in dispute. The obvious problem with these arguments is that people point to the correlation and say "see, I'm right about the materiality!".
replyWe have strong data to show that people who score higher on IQ tests also earn more, have higher net wealth, have lower rates of unemployment, higher graduation rates, lower suicide rates, lower rates of addiction, lower rates of crime, lower rates of divorce, lower rates of fatherlessness, lower rates of household abuse, higher rates of home ownership, longer life spans, have better general health on almost every metric, and a host of other positive QoL indicators. I don't see how you could argue that is not material.
replyWe were talking about psychometric G. I don't know what it is you're trying to talk about now.
replyI continue to talk about IQ, IQ tests, and g factor.
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