University of Cambridge Cognitive Ability Test

I still do not understand why we are wasting scientific resources trying to stack rank humans on arbitrarily defined concepts like cognitive ability or intelligence.

After over a century of psychometric research in cognitive abilities and intelligence, what do we have to show for it? Whose life has actually improved for the better? Have the benefits from such research, if any, outweighed the amount of harm that has already been caused?

On scientific front, it's very useful. Its use outside of academia is has however been very problematic.

There are studies that empirically measure drop change cognitive ability from lead poising, oxygen deprivation, sleep deprecation, post-burnout, environment distraction, noise pollution, temperature, aging, drug and alcohol use during puberty, smoking, school teaching style, etc. etc.

Notable is that these are either population metrics or compare each individual with themselves. This is what IQ and other similar tests were meant for. Comparing one person with another is nonsensical and a flawed use of these metrics.

This is where where IQ has fallen and become a rather bad metric. People are familiar with the problems scewing results. IQ test performance and education level is highly correlated, which is supposed to be compensated for in the final score. But poor education quality in certain regions make the statistics easily used to argue quite unsavory ideas.

You can create a proxy for IQ by simply asking a group of people to invent their own questions, summing them together, randomly sampling from those questions, and then rank ordering the outcome. High IQ people will score in the top percentile for any set of questions. That's the whole point.

Do you have a citation for this? It sounds pretty unlikely to me.

I'm pretty sure if I asked a group of people to invent their own questions I'd get a load of general knowledge questions about music, sports, and popular culture.