I could continue the semantic argument (“would it be a CQ test or a cancer test?”), but instead I’ll just skip to the real reason I use the term “IQ”, which is because it’s shorter than “intelligence”, and I don’t consider “the ability to achieve good results on IQ tests” to be an interesting or important enough concept to deserve exclusive rights to the term.
There are a couple of potential issues with your usage:
The ability to achieve good results on IQ tests is correlated with various figures of interest. See the references that Carl Shulman gives here. As such, IQ does have a functional and useful technical meaning and assigning it a new meaning can be confusing.
Different people may have different notions of “the underlying trait that IQ tests are supposed to be measuring.” In particular, there’s a serious possibility of perhaps unknowingly taking one’s own mental architecture (including aesthetic preferences) to define the direction (if not magnitude) in mind-space of this trait on account of generalizing from one example.
The use of “intelligence” stands to suffer from (2) though not (1). I’ve found it most fruitful to maintain a positivistic attitude toward intelligence as a concept unless I’m in conversation with somebody who I know attaches the same connotations to the term that I do.
(My other comment not withstanding; I agree that what IQ tests measure is of limited interest and usefulness; the issue is just that it’s not so clear how to do better.)
(1) I said “almost”.
(2) Is “cancer” the ability to get positive results on cancer tests?
No. If humans adopted a naming convention for the purposes of suiting your analogy then “CQ” could be.
I could continue the semantic argument (“would it be a CQ test or a cancer test?”), but instead I’ll just skip to the real reason I use the term “IQ”, which is because it’s shorter than “intelligence”, and I don’t consider “the ability to achieve good results on IQ tests” to be an interesting or important enough concept to deserve exclusive rights to the term.
There are a couple of potential issues with your usage:
The ability to achieve good results on IQ tests is correlated with various figures of interest. See the references that Carl Shulman gives here. As such, IQ does have a functional and useful technical meaning and assigning it a new meaning can be confusing.
Different people may have different notions of “the underlying trait that IQ tests are supposed to be measuring.” In particular, there’s a serious possibility of perhaps unknowingly taking one’s own mental architecture (including aesthetic preferences) to define the direction (if not magnitude) in mind-space of this trait on account of generalizing from one example.
The use of “intelligence” stands to suffer from (2) though not (1). I’ve found it most fruitful to maintain a positivistic attitude toward intelligence as a concept unless I’m in conversation with somebody who I know attaches the same connotations to the term that I do.
(My other comment not withstanding; I agree that what IQ tests measure is of limited interest and usefulness; the issue is just that it’s not so clear how to do better.)
And for even more brevity you could leave out the word ‘tautological’ and elaborations thereof. As a bonus you wouldn’t need to read corrections! :)