—“WE CAN’T MEASURE IQ ABOVE…”—
While a grain of truth, that’s not quite right.
We can use 160 as a test measure, or 160 on distribution (S.D.). We tend to conflate them.
Like testing any of the arts, testing intelligence can be accomplished through triangulation to produce ordinality whenever cardinality fails.
I know that Chomsky is smarter than I am because I am very conscious of his thought process when speaking and I cannot do that without side-tracking. (And believe me I can take you through a very long train of thought that will devastate even the smartest of people. But he is much better at it.)
I know some people can tolerate reading certain categories of text more so than I (anything that demands empathy is off my radar. I get exhausted. Just the data please. ).
I know that some people have superior ability to maintain categorical states (math and chess for example). I get … something between bored and tired. The only way I can play chess is to abstractly control the board, and leave traps for my opponent. I am not a cunning player.
I have never met anyone anywhere close to me in certain other abilities.
In other words, it is just increasingly expensive to test as we pass 140/150 because all gains after that appear to diverge from g (where all abilities scale in parallel) into where individual abilities scale and others don’t.
So above 140/150 we no longer get meaningful measures because g is a decreasingly meaningful aggregate. That does not mean that we cannot test the various abilities that we coalesce into g.
Chris Langan has a very IQ (g) but he makes a profound mistake in equating symmetry with intention. Einstein did not have that impressive an IQ but was extremely diligent and made few mistakes other than ‘the constant’.
Chomsky made a brilliant contribution by applying Turing’s insights to language. But his errors outside of his field are the product of having confidence in his institutions rather than analyzing the demonstrated behavior of humans throughout history.
Hayek was terribly smart and covered vast intellectual terrain before he understood that then only answer empirical to the question of politics was the common law of tort – and not economics, or politics. Popper and Mises had insights but were half wrong because they could not escape the framing of their cultures. Marx could work like few other men in history, but he was wrong on first principles and after reading Menger died knowing he was wrong, and his life wasted – he just couldn’t’ say so since Engels was supporting him.
This is a very common problem because it is the harmonic (market consequence) between the various cognitive abilities we possess that produces a ‘market for correspondence’ or what is more easily envisioned as “an accurate model of the world and our projections of that model into models outside our direct experience.”
In other words, demonstrated intelligence is the result of a competing market of mental agencies any of which can go wrong, and any of which can excel.
Just like everything else in evolution.
Cheers