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?
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.
Isn't this what IQ tests literally do, given that they transform raw scores to a normal distribution for comparability?
Then again, the same psychologist told me that the discrepancy between my scores was so large that a true FSIQ cannot be used. In a sense, he told me that based on that test, I didn't actually have an IQ that could be accurate measured based on that given test. Apparently, it’s not normal to have almost two SD between some scores...
Being a smart idiot isn't easy work, but someone has to do it.