without it blowing up almost immediately.
One side wants a dispassionate conversation about science.
The other wants an emotional conversation about history.
In seconds, they come to blows over what they are talking about.
Last I heard, IQ measured something, but whether it was what we call "intelligence" or merely a number which aggregates and averages some features of it I was never able to find out.
It might be easier to have such conversations if the claim of what IQ measures was defined in a way that wasn't circular, or indeed, if the project of reducing intelligence to a single figure was abandoned for being as silly as asking what the average of an egg, a rocket and a fircone is.
eg a person can have a good memory and not be creative, or a person can have brilliant reasoning powers but cannot do mental arithmetic. It is part of the brilliance of evolution that it uses the same tools to make a wide spectrum of critters of every kind, even within a species.
The interesting thing for me is to find out what an individual or a group of individuals is good at: a spaniel isn't as fast as a greyhound, but it can roust out birds better. If you count speed as the measure of excellence in dogs, the greyhound wins. If you count bird-rousting, the spaniel wins.
The problem is deciding to adopt a single system of measurement for different skills. How do you know which features of a person's brain provide the greatest advantage in the wide variety of environments we inhabit? It's entirely subjective.
Put me in the outback of Australia and see me lose the contest to remember the songs required to navigate through it.
IQ would a nice tool if it could simply discover a person's talents and stopped with the nonsense simplified scoring system.
http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/27/15695060/sam-harris-charles-murray-race-iq-forbidden-knowledge-podcast-bell-curve
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