[ageedizzle]

> The self-assuaging fantasy that g itself doesn't exist is a classic example of a psychological defensive mechanism of rejection, one rooted in a need to defend a worldview that holds all people as inherently equal, when we're measurably, biologically not.

I think this statement conflates two different senses of the word “equality”. Equality of abilities is different from moral equality. It is perfectly coherent to accept that people aren’t equal in terms of their abilities but are still morally equal. For example, just because Person A is smarter than Person B it does not follow that the interests of Person A matter more than those of Person B, or that the suffering of Person A matters more than the like suffering of Person B, etc. So the view that g is real and people have different IQ scores is consistent with the idea that all people are inherently equal. Because in most contexts the concept of inherent equality is not a biological or psychological concept but a moral concept.

[anonym29]

I don't disagree with moral equality one bit - the golden rule should absolutely apply to everyone and we should all strive to look at each other with compassion, tolerance, empathy, understanding, grace, humility, and goodwill - but there is a loud, vocal subset of people that truly believe in absolute biological equality - not just between people with different IQ's, but even between different biological sexes and all other categories of humans; "tabula rasa" proponents who argue that ALL differences in outcomes along the lines of categorical differences (e.g. sex, race, gender, ethnicity, nationality, religion, culture) are exclusively and irrefutably explained strictly by discrimination and discrimination alone, which is a patently absurd assertion that should be refuted. Discrimination is real and should be confronted vocally, but the idea that it's the only factor explaining differences in outcomes between groups is a harmful myth.

The fact of the matter, relating back to the original discussion, is that sex/race/gender/ethnicity/nationality/religion/culture-blind IQ testing is not only a strong predictor of job performance, it is perhaps one of the best tools we have for eliminating discrimination based on sex/race/gender/ethnicity/nationality/religion/culture in hiring, as it explicitly controls for differences along these lines by exclusively targeting an assessment of g in abstract ways that are explicitly stripped of cultural, religious, racial, and gendered biases.

Pseudonymized hiring that relied exclusively on IQ tests, with zero indications of race/sex/gender (e.g. legal name), stripped of proxies for SES and/or parental SES (e.g. which university was attended, if any) would be significantly less biased than current hiring practices. Throw in job-specific pseudonymized skill evaluations (so, no voice calls, no video calls, just direct assessments to candidates) and you've got a system to dramatically reduce hiring discrimination along protected classes.

[tptacek]

... or you can just discard all the hokum and only use job-specific pseudonymized skill evaluations --- a concept more widely known as "work samples" --- and be using the gold-standard tool for candidate selection, supported by research going all the way back to Deming.