Of course, IQ only weakly correlates to the intelligence that people actually refer to colloquially. It doesn't test for most behaviors that people do consider intelligent, and it tests a bunch of stuff completely unrelated to intelligence (e.g. cultural trivia).
I once was administered an in-person WAIS-IV IQ test, which has been called the "Gold Standard of IQ Tests," from a licensed clinical psychologist for the purposes of diagnosing a medical syndrome.
On the verbal reasoning portion, I distinctively remember being asked two questions that sat wrong with me (paraphrasing):
1. "Who was Sacagawea?"
2. "Who was Catherine the Great?"
There were also vague questions in the word definition/comparison section.
I distinctively remember one of the questions being (paraphrasing):
"Compare and contrast the two words 'Practical' and 'Pragmatic.' What do the two words have in common and what are their differences?"
My issue, especially with the latter question, is what type of answer is acceptable?
I could say something like, "'Practical' and 'Pragmatic' both describe being concerned with reality or feasibility vs. theory."
But what about the differences? What if I said something like, "Well, there is no such things a 'Pragmatic' joke."
Would I have been correct, wrong, a smart ass, or at the mercy of the psychologist's opinion? Would I be marked wrong because it wasn't what the test authors' intended answer despite me being technically correct?
> IQ is only a narrow specific type of intelligence biased to western education indeed
I see this claim a lot, but what is even meant by "western education" here? IQ tests show similar results in most countries that have /any/ form of formal compulsory education. It's clear that education or lack of education can affect IQ scores, but not so much that IQ tests are biased by the specification type of education.
The best research I've seen on the matter concludes that education biases the results because in order to receive and participate in an IQ test you need to have some base level of language understanding of the terminology used in the IQ test itself, which implies that you've received some minimal amount of education. The most common IQ test used in the United States, the Stanford-Binet (SB5) generally recommends not administering it to people under the age of 8 years old for this reason, and there are specialized tests for children that show reduced bias for education when used on non-educated populaces.
Or, in summary, it seems standard IQ tests bias for /any/ education, not specifically "western" education. In other words, there's no cultural bias as claimed.
It certainly seemed like a pop quiz the last time I took it. I just can't imagine it's useful outside ranking people arbitrarily for the purposes of shrinking a hiring pool or some similar need.
> IQ only weakly correlates to the intelligence […] it tests a bunch of stuff completely unrelated to intelligence (e.g. cultural trivia).
These are unfortunate myths. See the following on IQ testing, relationship of various tests to general intelligence, and the absence of cultural bias in testing:
"Bias does not simply mean that a measure gives different scores to different groups. This is one of the most common misunderstandings about “bias”. What it really means is that members of different groups obtain different scores conditional on the same underlying level of ability."
"Furthermore, empirical evidence suggests a substantial relationship
between the SAT and g. In a study of 339 undergraduates, Brodnick
and Ree (1995) used covariance structure modeling to examine the
relationship between psychometric g, socioeconomic variables, and
achievement-test scores. They found substantial general-factor loadings on both the math (.698) and the verbal (.804) SAT subtests."
