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All well and good so long as we remember that "Merit" as measured by IQ is just the ability to do well in school and learn complicated things. It is not some end, just a talent like hand-eye coordination.
As to the rest, the absolute best any non-elite can ever hope for from the universe or a test is blind fairness. Anyone who thinks we can weight things one way or the other to offset "privilege" is just building a privilege generator.
Would be awkward for everyone if IQ positively correlates with other positive traits not immediately connected to taking tests.
https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/study-links-childrens-eye-hand-coordination-with-their-academic-performance.html
Brain do work gooder faster, affect many thing.
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA525579.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_Alpha
Most positive traits correlate somewhat. So do most negative ones.
The problem with intelligence is that it makes you retarded. Smart people can convince themselves of anything, and thus lose connection with reality in proportion to how smart they are.
Take Scott's most recent post on child rearing for an obvious example. He's the smartest person I've ever met personally, and he's a tard.
Can I ask how you met Scott?
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Just "learn complicated things"?
I'm afraid the "just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting! We live in a dazzlingly complex world, it's been several centuries since even the most talented person could have understood every facet of modern civilization and technology. Even Neumann and Tau would die of old age before becoming true polymaths.
IQ is strongly correlated to a ton of good things, moderately correlated to a tonne more of other good things, and then weakly correlated with the metric fuck-ton of everything left. Income, physical and mental health, job performance! Even beauty is weakly correlated (so much for the Halo effect as a true fallacy). There are few things that can be tested as cheaply and easily while offering as much signal for the downstream traits we care about.
A quadrillion IQ brain floating in the void isn't worth very much, but we were never talking about intelligence in isolation. If grip strength was the defining factor for success in life, I'd be working on my handshake right now.
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Indeed, this is the major problem I have with the OPs comment. We're not looking for intelligence and using "performance of competence" as a proxy. We're looking for competence. It could be that intelligence is a better proxy for competence than our current tests, and almost certainly is true that an intelligence test is a better measure of intelligence than our current tests of competence are for competence (because competence is just harder to measure). But intelligence itself isn't usually what we're looking for.
I don't think I disagree. Competence is the most important thing, but it is also devilishly hard to pin down. That only gets harder when you need someone to demonstrate their competence before they get the job.
(And then you see person specifications asking for 5 years of experience in some React-knockoff that's only been out 2 years)
Unfortunately, there is often a massive, unavoidable delay between training for a job and getting a job. We want to know if someone will be a good surgeon before they hold a scalpel. How would you check if a 17 year old pre-med student will make for a good neurosurgeon if he won't do any neurosurgery for another 10 years?
That brings me back to the point that intelligence really is our most robust proxy. It's one of the few things in the psychometric literature that has resisted the replication crisis. It is still a proxy, and thus imperfect, but like democracy, it's the worst option except for all the others. If you want to go back to work-experience and trainability, we're going to need a lot more apprenticeships or internships. Those are much harder to scale than standardized tests.
It helps to throw away the entire concept of pre-med and just have entrance exams to study medicine in university that test both relevant biology knowledge (to be self studied from common reference book(s)) and requisite math and physics ability. It's not perfect but it's better than just sailing in with high IQ score or using some utterly bullshit proxy like freeform essay or having the right after school activities.
Incidentally the same also works for engineering: Entrance exam that tests (highschool plus level) math and physics which, not surprisingly, are exactly what's required to manage almost all engineering studies. Too bad they fucked up that tried and true system in favor of very noisy high school matriculation exam scores here some years ago :(
Say what you will about the inadequacies of the British and Indian medical pipeline, but this is a rather uniquely American stupidity. Pre-med offers nothing that just moving the MCAT forward wouldn't, and wastes several years of your youth on a degree that you likely won't use.
I gave an exam straight out of high school, and that was that. I'll say less about everything that followed.
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