Well yeah, nothing is guaranteed. It’s just a correlation – higher IQ people tend to have more success. More success doesn’t necessarily mean happier. But personally, I would take more success if given the option.

Oh you’re right, I did. Sorry!

As for a test of intelligence – maybe we’ll be able to define what that is at some point in the future. But, granted, until there is a consensus on the meaning of intelligence, there can’t be a test for it.

IQ is, at most, a notion of intelligence. Or it is simply a number. Regardless, it has correlations with other things, and that’s what’s interesting. Asking whether it is or is not “intelligence” is merely semantics.

Only if you’re naïve about IQ and worship it like God. Here is wikipedia’s second paragraph on IQ:

Scores from intelligence tests are estimates of intelligence. Unlike, for example, distance and mass, a concrete measure of intelligence cannot be achieved given the abstract nature of the concept of “intelligence”. IQ scores have been shown to be associated with such factors as nutrition, parental socioeconomic status, morbidity and mortality, parental social status, and perinatal environment. While the heritability of IQ has been investigated for nearly a century, there is still debate about the significance of heritability estimates and the mechanisms of inheritance. Current best estimates for heritability range from 40 to 60% of the variance between individuals in IQ being explained by genetics.

None of that stands out to me as particularly controversial, certainly not pseudoscience. Emphasis on second sentence – it’s not a concrete measure of intelligence.

Unless you’re saying other metrics on people are also somehow eugenics like height, weight, or speed, IQ is not eugenics. Eugenics is the belief that one’s genes affects one’s life, and certain genes will lead to a better life in expectation. (This is in fact a true belief, since there are some genes which are known to cause horrible painful short lives.)

IQ is just a measure of how well you do on an IQ test, which is known to correlate (maybe causally, maybe not) with various things such as income.

How do you know there is no way to test how smart or dumb somebody is? Even if IQ tests aren’t to your standard, you can’t be sure there isn’t another test possible.

They didn’t ask about intelligence, they asked about IQ.

ITT: A lot of people doing the typical StackOverflow thing of asserting the question is bad and answering a different question instead.

No country’s that great but Canada’s doing aight.

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