—“The neuroscience here is way above my pay grade, but I assume that as the neurocognitive basis of IQ is understood, the understanding of what we know as g will be elaborated.”— Charles Murray @charlesmurray

  1. Correct but the opposite, via-negativa: The neuroscience is trivial. The causes of defect in intelligence are almost limitless. It’s not so much that we need to understand intelligence (g), it’s that we need to understand why defects in intelligence are so common.
  2. AFAIK, (g) is the most accurate measure in psychology, and stereotypes are the most accurate measure in social sciences. The problem with testing is casting (g) separately from personality traits (which it is), and therefore not ALSO testing for trait-conscientiousness.
  3. If we test intelligence, and the Big5 traits together we see that success (wealth) is determined MORE by trait conscientiousness than by intelligence, and that intelligence increases income only because it grants access to problems of greater complexity. Intelligence REDUCES ERROR in complexity.
  4. As such ADAPTABILITY (success) consists of applying trait conscientiousness and trait intelligence to exploit opportunities at one’s optimum of complexity. This means ‘the bell curve’ of overlapping bell curves from low IQ/conscientiousness to high IQ/conscientiousness.
  5. There are plenty of people who are high in both intelligence,high in conscientiousness, and high in agreeableness and therefore low in competitiveness. So once we stack the priority of these traits in the context of a given economy and rule of law, sortition is obvious.
  6. Furthermore, once we combine all 5/6 traits we see that personalities cluster around three archetypes: female mother(teach),ascendant male(experiment), and established or dominant male(defend).
  7. We combine IQ with Big5 we find that the only problem is isolating IQ from the other personality traits. If combined, we find that Conscientiousness almost exclusively determines success, and IQ determines complexity of occupation and degree of error detection.
  8. There are 80+ factors but they scale together, with the most dominant being sexual differences in brain organization (F:lateral-general vs M:longitudinal-special), and acquired skills(gc) vs pure ability(gf) – (g) measures how they scale together.
  9. We’ve tried every variation with extraordinary experimentation and continuous rotation and adaption to change in vocabulary and knowledge (psychometricians). The result is always the same: everything scales together with (gf) declining with age, and (gc) not (or compensating).
  10. The test(s) yield(s) an almost infinite set of numbers. But aside from verbal and spatial-temporal, and the obvious gender bias in that dimension – they all scale together. Thats why they report on the one number (g) and it’s distribution (verbal-spatial).
  11. Again, the evidence suggests that by combining intelligence and big5 we would get even higher prediction because, Conscientiousness, Disagreeableness, and Aggressiveness (dominance) or lack of it, explain what IQ does not: how we COMPETE when USING intelligence.
  12. IQ is the most studied, most empirical, most accurate, and most consistent subject in psychology. The 60’s and 70’s were the scientific dark ages as the pseudoscience of marxism and sophistry of postmodernism had their largest affect on soft sciences.
  13. You can only disagree if you’re trying to redefine intelligence as other than access to complexity in time. It determines whether we are Helpless, Dim, Uncompetitive, Ordinary, Cunning, Smart, Competitive, Innovative, or Revolutionary. So demonstrated intelligence depends upon complex context.

The world is simple – if and only if you use enough dimensions of measurement.