IQ is meaningful in every context.

Yes, it isn’t the end-all-be-all. Yes, personality characteristics matter a lot.

IQ nevertheless is the single most important psychometric by a huge margin, so important that it’s literally impossible to make a test that isn’t g-loaded to hell and back—and they’ve tried, oh, they’ve tried.

That was the gist of my comment, yes. I suppose I’m failing to see where the disagreement enters between us.

My point is, if IQ is bogus, any and all “studies” using IQ have swamp water for a foundation. Consequently, trying to draw any conclusions from any of this is still building on a swamp, just with a bit of extra rubbish underfoot. Whether one chooses to agree with, or disagree with, or nitpick any of them, it’s no more meaningful than critique of the shapes of clouds.

When the content is already nonsense, it’s only processed into more nonsense. Likewise, one can join the old topic of whether a bee hive is monarchy or republic. That “discussion” was joined by many oh-so-clever people (including Voltaire), at least some of whom had to be serious about it, but obviously it could not pull itself by the hair from the pit of nonsense.

That’s the way of pseudoscience.

Perhaps you were thinking of the earlier Mercalli intensity scale?

Right, my bad, Richter is the logarithmic one.
Hmm. To think of it, logarithmic compression may have been an advantage at the time it was introduced, due to resemblance to the old familiar qualitative scales.

Jim says:

IQ is the best-replicated and most useful finding in psychology

…and is not used in actual science.

I mean, there are areas in psychophysiology that require meaningful estimation of mental performance, in particular changes thereof. For example, comparison of different psychostimulants needs some measurement of their effects. I looked into those once. They didn’t use anything like IQ tests. They used correction tests. Note that this yields two values: speed and error rate. It’s quite transparent what exactly these numbers mean, and what relative changes in them will likely mean for real-world tasks (those friendly fire incidents with meth-head pilots come to mind). A correction test is anything but excessively arcane and abstract.

This application also makes it easy to see how even a meaningful test that outputs a single value would be not very useful at best, and dangerously misleading at worst.

See also the link in my first reply for Taleb’s article beating this spherical horse with some math.

That was the gist of my comment, yes. I suppose I’m failing to see where the disagreement enters between us. If it’s a product of my own error in understanding I’m fully prepared to accept correction on the matter, but I’m not presently seeing it. The reference to Bonhoeffer’s assessment of stupidity is the crux of the whole thing, and I sorta left it hanging without specificity, so that would be my bad if that’s the case.

From Merriam-Webster:
Function: something (such as a quality or measurement) that is related to and changes with (something else)

So, “function,” can of course refer to a quality as well, not merely a measurement, which would put us in concert.

For example, the Moh scale and Richter scale are not “measures”. Any formula including either of those numbers is nonsense. But they are meaningful. They are qualitative, i.e. their values are arbitrary, what matters is the ordering. Finding the value for a given specimen on Moh scale is useful, but it’s not measuring; it’s appraisal.

Conversely, the Harmony Meters used by Church of Xenulogy are devices that measure actual physical processes. The way it’s done, however, the resulting data was not demonstrated to be meaningful, whatever their users may claim.

IQ (and similar tests for nothing defined) are neither measurements, nor meaningful. As such, IQ is not used in actual science. It’s mostly used by quacks to sound So Very Scientific and by big children to measure virtual peepees.

See also the link in my previous post for Taleb’s article with relevant statistics.

Yes dear?

Oh dear…