Note the title. Because that’s about what “g” is worth: a handful of piss.
The trouble is the disconnect between the word “intelligence,” which is loaded with extremely positive connotations, and the abstract “g,” which measures something, we know not quite what.
It is a philosophical error, plain and simple, to hook “g” to “i” without going through “h”–which stands for “hold your horses until we know what the fuck we’re talking about.”
The fact that IQ tests can be designed to get the same scores with the same people is a necessary but not sufficient condition for their having meaning, and for what they are said to measure, “g,” itself having meaning.
Let me flesh this out with some examples. I’ve lived in Japan for 8 years total. Japanese and Chinese people score significantly higher on IQ tests, leading to the racially charged conclusion that Asians are smartest, Europeans still pretty smart, and those Africans–well they’re just stupid. (Sadly, even apparently respectable scientists on the Yahoo ev-psy forum hold this view, pointing out that tests given to children in such and such an African country indicated they had an average IQ in the 70s–a statistic that should invalidate the whole test under the “red face” criterium.)
But Japanese people, owing to their childhood hothousing, are monster test takers. They regularly get high scores on the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) and GMAT (Graduate Management Aptitude Test, which has a huge chunk of English on it), despite the fact that the Japanese are hopelessly inept at foreign languages–among the worst in the world. So, you have people getting these high scores who can’t speak or listen worth a damn. It leads me to conclude that “test-taking” is an important skill or skill set needed to do well on these tests, and that this skill also gives them their boost on IQ tests. By the same token, Africans experience no test-taking hothousing and therefore do less well.
But going back to Japan, I aver that their “g” superiority is due to cultural factors: the massive brain training known as “learning kanji”; the test hothousing mentioned above; and the overall literacy and advancement of the culture. On the other hand, I have NEVER gotten the impression, at all, that Japanese people are fundamentally smarter than the average American (white, black, or any other color). Rather, and due to the very same cultural reasons, I believe, it is a culture bordering on the cognitively defective:
*Extremely poor ability to learn languages. Despite years of training in public (starting in JH and ending in college) and private schools, very few people show prowess. Worse yet, most people don’t even bother taking an intellectual approach to a language, such as by actually reading.
*Poor reasoning ability. I’ve yet to meet a Japanese person who could really argue. The idea seems to be that you can invent any logical principles you like, on the fly, and hey–there’s the answer: I’m right and you’re wrong! I think this comes from having no tradition of philosophy, as the West has had (Confucianism is not reason-based philosophy). I can’t emphasize this enough: Japanese people are not good thinkers.
*Narrowmindedness and parochialism. If you’ve lived here, you know.
(On the side of virtues, Japanese people are extremely disciplined, have superb visual and spatial reasoning skills [art, design, etc.], excellent creativity, social cohesiveness, and many other qualities that make the country a success. I certainly wouldn’t call them stupid, either. But, although I’ve met many Japanese people who were talented, many that were cool, I’ve met only a few I would consider truly turned-on intellectually.)
So, IQ tests say that a particular, easy-to-identify and extremely homogeneous ethnic group, the Japanese, is on average more “intelligent” than the rest of the planet. I’ve lived with that group and just haven’t seen it. That’s one reason I doubt that g means much.
Also, the tests themselves. IMO, they are not good tests of high verbal ability, which, to me, is an important component of intelligence. One problem with measuring verbal ability is that it requires interpretation: You have to hear someone speak or read what Person has written and judge it. (Even the SAT’s method of seeing what vocab words a person knows, etc., can only be described as a pretty piss-poor method.)
So, based on the above, I think “g” has only one use: to measure whether a person has a certain minimum reasoning and test-taking ability. That’s perhaps not a worthless metric, but in terms of its relationship to what we ambiguously call “intelligence,” it’s 100% steaming horseshit.