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Notes -
Rambling based on a shower thought here:
Does an IQ taboo (established for political reasons associated with another taboo around HBD, or any other reason) contribute to more of a reliance in many people on the heuristics of social class, physical features, clothes, sociolect and prosody, credentials/profession, or even ideological conformity - and thus more of an opaque and effectively hierarchical society? A society where appearances become more important than the underlying reality, and where presumptions are not challenged? Where the average individual, who insofar as they've been taught anything about mental horsepower, has come to believe that it's about the development and growth mindset - any child can join any profession if they work hard and choose through free will to develop smartness; and knowledge - the person in higher education studying e.g. psychology becomes smart and competent through their acquiring of knowledge and routines and joining into a professional group? The flipsides of these coins being that someone who didn't go to college/university has stupidly chosen not to become smart and grow their brain and thus can blame themselves and should not be given much time of day? And if appearances are what matters, someone with perfect grooming and high class speech and all the shibboleths should be assumed to be smart rather than looking under the hood?
I've had this suspicion building for a while while going about my business in a very "blue" environment where social class is on some level assumed to not exist anymore and is never discussed, but in actuality might be used heuristically quite heavily to decide who gets to make the judgements and be listened to. Where snap judgements seem to be made (and then very hesitantly changed, if ever) about a person's intelligence and worth as a human being, without this actually being discussed or studied. I get the feeling a lot of people have their own poorly informed and biased understandings of what mental horsepower is and who's got more of it and why.
This arrangement seems to favor the people who are living and breathing inside of and shaping and reinforcing the dominant culture and hierarchy, while subtly closing out dissenting voices from outsiders: they have not got the surface appearances of people we listen to, regardless of what greater powers of judgement they might have under the hood.
I'm having a hard time understanding what the alternative would be? Mean IQ during grades 1-4 tattooed to the forehead in childhood? And how does HBD play into that? Standard deviation on IQ is so large, you can never replace the other heuristics with it, on an individual level you absolutely shouldn't even include it into the list of heuristics in the first place.
In the end, you sometimes have to make an assessment about which strangers are worth listening to. Guessing IQ from hearing them speak (especially speak freely) works well in my experience. Even "correct"/"incorrect" vocabulary and sociolect cannot hide their true power level for long. And sure, the halo effect exists, but clothes, grooming and physical features were always the stereotypical weak point of hardcore nerds, so making assessments on those never worked all that well, especially in spaces like tech.
Why would you need any of this? All you need is tracking (disliked by many for reasons @FtttG touches on) and the kids will put together the pecking order. We figured it out anyway in my school but it was tiny, 300 people total.
Post high school is a bit of a problem I guess. But if you had IQ tests and there was no awkwardness around you can figure it out. Thing is, I'm not sure we'd want to. It matters less in more selective schools and I don't know that people who run institutions want to be publicizing which programs actually capture the least mental horsepower.
Yes, the high-IQ sperg archetype is the clearest exception, which helps OP's point.
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