I took an IQ test to explain what's wrong with them

I recently shifted my opinion on IQ tests a bit after watching a recent Veritasium video. He goes into the background/history/controversy of the test as well as some of the concrete impacts of the test and places where it's used. For example did you know the US military has an IQ minimum cutoff? And furthermore they have a second 'soft' cutoff, where only 20% of the military can have an IQ under a certain value. In the past they tried removing this second restriction, but had to reinstate it after seeing increases in casualties/indicators of reduced efficiency! So are IQ tests everything? No. But do they have no merit? Also no. It's somewhere in between. Would highly recommend a watch ▶ this video

▶ this video Veritasium had a good primer on IQ scores and what they actually mean for your life TLDW: IQ score seems to really only correlates to being too dumb to be conscripted and effective in war. Going on Derek's work there, even if other countries do somehow manage to genetically engineer their children for higher IQ scores, and even if they manage to get all the environmental hazards (lead paint, nutrition, quality sleep, etc) out of the way for those children, and even if they don't then do some other draconian nonsense to those kids in the ~19 years until they become productive, then, even then, there seems to be absolutely no guarantee that those kids will go on to do any dominating of other countries in social, political, or military contexts. Outside of being too dumb to be trusted with a firearm, IQ seems to have no real bearing on measurable life outcomes. As the current science stands, from my understanding of it, it would be incredibly foolish to pursue genetic engineering/breeding as a method of international relations.

The Veritasium youtube channel has a few interesting videos related to this topic: This one is on IQ: ▶ this video Pay attention to the stats on how IQ correlates to success (near the end). This one is about becoming an expert: link This one is about someone who just worked harder than everyone else: link

If the US was an organism, what role would an under-educated X% play? You say it’s a “cost” but equal education obviously isn’t a priority in our country and I can’t help but wonder who benefits from such a high percentage of illiteracy (this is semi-rhetorical). I genuinely don’t think we’re tracking the cost appropriately nor implementing solutions with enough urgency; 10-15 years down the road this empire of ours is going to be far out-classed intellectually by countries that actually implement policy for the equitable benefit of everyone. If I’m off base I’d appreciate an education on this topic as it’s quite gross to think about our elite institutions being proponents of eugenics in the past[1] and how that likely spilled over into the world-building we did after WWII (Kissinger etc). Or put another way, how do we map “AI is going to save everyone” rhetoric to how history has actually gone, and what incentive do existing power structures have to change? [1] ▶ this video

Has it even been shown that the average human can generalize beyond their training data? Isn't this the central thrust of the controversy around IQ tests? For example, some argue that access to relevant training data is a greater determinant of performance on IQ tests than genetics[1]. [1] ▶ this video

Veritasium did an episode on IQ a couple of month back where they cover the IQ-income correlation.[1] One of the people he talked with said something that I find interesting: "a lot of people who have very high intelligence scores don't have the same interest in accumulating money." [1] I Took an IQ Test to Find Out What it Actually Measures ( ▶ this video )