There is "something" that seems to correlate strongly with wealth, education, test scores across every subject/dimension, seems highly heritable from parents to offspring, and fits with both SAT and IQ test results.

It can't possibly be intelligence (would be inconvenient if it were) but there's something there. Maybe we can call it "shminshmellishence".

> > It's been shown to be strongly correlated with success in general

> Has it? I was under the impression we could hardly define, much less measure that.

IQ has a strong positive correlation with life outcomes. Economic and otherwise. Whether IQ is a good measure of "intelligence" remains debated but there's no question that high scores in that measure correlate with high scores in life outcome measures: Life expectancy, economic success, relationship success, etc. Every single thing you can measure about a person's life trends upwards with IQ.

Some (maybe much) of the effect can be attributed to privilege and other covariants, so we don't know if IQ is causal for life outcomes but we have strong evidence that it's correlated.

one study of many: https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=74943

I think we have many very decent measures of intellect. It’s true that none of them are perfect but I think it’s basically propaganda to say we can’t define or measure it at all.