Black woman single cos the black men are in jail - would you marry outside your race?

[Lemur]

Well, what use is your bedroom scale if it can't measure someone who's 500 pounds?

Point of order: I know exactly what my bedroom scale is measuring (mass*gravity). Can't say that with confidence about an IQ test; indeed, that's a big part of why I'm raising so many questions and objections.

Artists are 8 times as likely to by synaesthetic as the normal population or something like that. Which helps with description and metaphor.

There must be some truth to that; a person who I know who get a full-ride scholarship to the Art Institute of Chicago told me that almost half of her class was dyslexic. Clearly there's some relationship between re-wired perceptions and visual creativity.

Cutting right to the essence of a problem sounds more like a function of memory through practice than intelligence.

While the examples you give a good and valid, they aren't what I was driving at. To draw a broad (bordering on meaningless) generalization: Some folks are a bit thick, and they don't see anything complicated as such; brighter people are able to see just how complex a problem can be; and the scary smart people are able to see how simple the root of that complexity is. With some thinkers there is a definite quality of incisiveness which I admire.

I don't see why intelligence would be measured by achievement, as you said it requires luck and skill and willpower to achieve it. Surely if someone fails to achieve be mere chance that doesn't mean they are now less intelligent?

You're quite right, of course. In my clumsy way, I was seeking a real-world correlation with (not causation of) intelligence, something with a bit more meat on its bones than these tests.