Part of the problem, particularly with Western culture, is the desire to assign everything a rank, without much clue as to whether or not the metric used is credible at all. Your GPA, SAT/ACT/GRE scores, IQ, credit rating, college major, average income and choice of university all form an impression on people who want a nice box to put you in, whether you like it or not. Sure, some intelligence is probably required to achieve high rankings in some of those areas, but it isn't indicative by itself of who you are or what you're capable of. To the perceptive crowd on Hacker News, this probably seems obvious, but to most of society, these facts and figures define who you are and what you should do with your life.
The best hope for humanity, in this regard, is to judge people on what they contribute or accomplish. This will probably never become a viable paradigm for most people, because it isn't inherently concrete; it's much harder to look at someone's entire life and judge their merit relative to someone else, rather than noting that a 3.5 GPA is higher than a 3.2 GPA. In fact, once you look at the big picture, it starts to become rather noticeable that judging people at all is, most of the time, a fruitless task.
Great article, thank you. It's the first well reasoned anti-g argument I've seen. I'm going to want to gather more information before I make a decision but I'm glad to have read something that challenges my opinions enough that a decision has to be made.
My hypothesis is that the best predictor for belief in the validity of IQ, is IQ. I'm not sure if that would support or contradict your statement. I'm sure it could be used to argue either way.
I can provide you with a potential counterexample. Acedemics were never important to my family growing up. School was viewed as a waste of time. I wasted a good portion of my life doing manual labor jobs.
One day, I read a book on IQ and took the IQ tests in the back of the book. The description next to my score said something like "With this IQ, you can be anything you want to be". Regardless of the accuracy of the test or the description, I was inspired and have since gone on to do some great things.
That doesn't make the metric any more accurate though. It just means it gave you a result that inspired you. That's good for you, but why the hell aren't schools inspiring kids like this, instead of grinding them into the mindset required to "be successful", which usually boils down to rote memorization and lots of busy work?
The best hope for humanity, in this regard, is to judge people on what they contribute or accomplish. This will probably never become a viable paradigm for most people, because it isn't inherently concrete; it's much harder to look at someone's entire life and judge their merit relative to someone else, rather than noting that a 3.5 GPA is higher than a 3.2 GPA. In fact, once you look at the big picture, it starts to become rather noticeable that judging people at all is, most of the time, a fruitless task.