Yes, some tests correlate well, but that's because they're essentially testing the same thing. And yes, intelligence tests have existed for a good long while - many of the older ones have been conclusively proven to be a load of rubbish, as they concluded wonderful things like 'black people are thick', on account of having massive inbuilt cultural bias.

As for what intelligence is, that's a whole different issue altogether, and the criteria seem rather arbitrary. It's all a matter of how the brain functions, certainly - but why discount people who have an outstanding mechanical ability, a talent for writing music, perfectly-accurate recall, a gift for languages, above average empathy, or one of a million other evolutionarily-useful aptitudes? At what point did we decide that 'you have a good brain because you're pretty good at one fairly esoteric aspect of puzzle solving' was the start and end of the story, and by doing so, conclude that only the people who were proficient at the aptitudes being tested could be labelled as 'intelligent'? Is this not somewhat circular and self-fulfilling? It all seems rather contrived and artificial.
( Happy Phantom has been to Hastings, Brighton, and Eastbourne too, Tue 23 Nov 2010, 8:57, 1 reply)

^this
It's not surprising that tests correlate with each other, because they use each other for calibration - an intelligence test is deemed to be valid precisely *if* it correlates with the others! Suppose I made a new test which placed more emphasis on, say, musical ability or joke-telling. Then many people would perform better on that test than on a standard IQ test, and others would perform worse. Who is to say which one is 'right'?
General intelligence is a myth, a reification of an arbitrary measurement.

I'd also like to call SGB out on the 'that's not a 'real' IQ test' argument. That's a bit like saying 'If you really want to measure someone's shoe size, you have to do hundreds of measurements to get the precise shape of their foot'. True, that gives you a much better measurement of someone's feet, but it's not shoe size any more. IQ is what IQ tests measure. And the fact that different IQ tests give different (if correlated) results just illustrates the point!
( flatfrog Staring vacantly into space, Tue 23 Nov 2010, 10:09, closed)