I am the last one to deny that the g factor is one of the most important concepts in humanities. However, some psychometrists were so enthusiastic when the median of cognitively less and more demanding professions and their subsequent correlation with the g factor showed that there are minimum requirements for different occupations (Schmidt, Hunter 2004).
Nobody can deny there are factors such as personality traits (ambitiousness, hard-working mentality, mental resilience), socioeconomic barriers, emotional “intelligence”, detrimental life events (divorce, health issues), educational barriers, poor personal and career choices that may be the cause.
The other counterargument is that “g factor” mental abilities differ, but the g factor itself is something so proven that we may be sure that other factors than wrong psychometric are the underlying cause (not everyone with an IQ of 128 is a lawyer, but lawyers have average median IQ 128). And I would agree. But there may be still a share of people that have high IQs because the concept is not so extremely important (wrong to some degree). It is extremely important but may mismeasure some people.
But since all the science is based on nothing but statistics (the neuro correlations are sporadic), there is insufficient evidence. Imagine having a perfect knowledge of the brain (knowing what every neuron does), then we could have conclusions.
Since we will understand more about what intelligence is thanks to superhuman AI, then we will see whether the people were not so intelligent despite their score, or whether the aforementioned factors are the only role.
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