- Dr Bruce Long
I say a lot about IQ/G factor as a primary determinant of success and happiness, and for the most part I still stand by what I have said.
HOWEVER.
Let me put this as simply as possible:
1. Just as people who attain wealth have a motive to portray themselves as somehow superior to those who do not, and tend to perpetuate that false narrative, those who have been lucky enough to have an environment and upbringing (including wealth) which has allowed them to attain academic success will tend, on a psychological basis, to do deploy a similar narrative about themselves and those who have not been so lucky. In other words, people whose luck contributes to their success tend to deny the fact of that aetiology, over-emphasise their innate talent, and often - especially if they have the wrong genetically and environmentally determined personality type - tend to denigrate those who have not been so lucky.
2. I cannot emphasise the role of personality type enough in relation to (1) for two important reasons. (a) People are NOT all the same. Any psychologist worth their salt studying psychopaths and narcissists can tell you that. (b) APD and NPD traits will cause people to elect to do (1) type moves as a normal life strategy.
3. Recently there is mounting evidence that neuroplasticity and new neurone development continue for our entire lifetimes. This is significant in and of itself, but it should also remind us that the brain is the most complicated natural system that we know of—by a very wide margin—and that makes lots of room for people who do (1) type things to make sweeping assertions about the influence and immutability of G factor or IQ.
For the most part, however, the data currently says that G factor is the main determinant of happiness and success.
YET: (1)-(3)—plus several of the criticisms made by cultural psychologists about intelligence psychometrics —are easily enough on their own to make urgent a thorough investigation of possible systemic, idoelogical, and psychological bias at the level of theory, experimentation, and the historical premises of latent variable conceptualisation and operationalisation. Especially given related failings in those domains discovered in both psychology and psychiatry since 2000.
The 2010 discovery of the replication crisis in psychology found only 30% of experimental results were replicable and reproducible. That's abysmal, and enough to call the discipline fake science. More recently studies about the consistency of use of psychometric assessment tools by psychiatrists put the consistency of assessments based upon their use at no better than a coin toss. That's probably even worse.
Therefore, when proto-Nazis like Francis Crick (and the former British Queen mother) insist on pumping the evidence and narrative about race-IQ links, there are a number of things we should be looking at very diligently, systematically, and closely if we want to call ourselves scientists.
