>While it's convenient to score people on intelligence, and nice to believe there's a simple scalar ranking, there's a growing body of research showing that it's just not the case.
Did anybody ever really think it was? Or is this just a strawman put up by people who are opposed to IQ rankings on either personal (waah, I didn't score that high) or political (waah, group X doesn't score very high on average) grounds?
The idea of general intelligence makes about as much sense as the idea of general physical fitness. That is, quite a bit. It's useless to ask whether [famous basketballer] is more or less fit than [famous footballer], but we can usefully answer the question of whether [famous footballer] is more or less fit than [random dude].
Similarly, if we're an organisation that wants to select people for physical fitness (like, say, the US marines) we could make up a test and a score (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Marine_Corps_Phys...) which in some way quantify an individual's physical fitness with a numerical score. The tests used are somewhat arbitrary and the precise ordering you get on this scale is different to the ordering you'd get if you used a different though equally sensible set of tests, but this doesn't change the fact that "physical fitness" is a real thing and that this test is a reasonable way of quantifying it. All reasonable measures of general physical fitness will give highly correlated results.
Did anybody ever really think it was? Or is this just a strawman put up by people who are opposed to IQ rankings on either personal (waah, I didn't score that high) or political (waah, group X doesn't score very high on average) grounds?
The idea of general intelligence makes about as much sense as the idea of general physical fitness. That is, quite a bit. It's useless to ask whether [famous basketballer] is more or less fit than [famous footballer], but we can usefully answer the question of whether [famous footballer] is more or less fit than [random dude].
Similarly, if we're an organisation that wants to select people for physical fitness (like, say, the US marines) we could make up a test and a score (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Marine_Corps_Phys...) which in some way quantify an individual's physical fitness with a numerical score. The tests used are somewhat arbitrary and the precise ordering you get on this scale is different to the ordering you'd get if you used a different though equally sensible set of tests, but this doesn't change the fact that "physical fitness" is a real thing and that this test is a reasonable way of quantifying it. All reasonable measures of general physical fitness will give highly correlated results.