I know there are gonna be a lot of people in this thread repeating the old canard that IQ tests just "test for 'educated white person'" or whatever, and I think I better stop scrolling down or I will get sucked into a huge debate, and I've been trying to stop wasting so much time on Reddit.

So... I guess I'll just throw this out there, and then take my leave:

You're right, IQ tests are not trivia tests (and they are over-emphasized by racist idiots). There has been a ton of work on IQ tests that I think most people are not aware of -- and a large portion of it has been in developing ways to minimize the impact of culture and prior education. There are many variations designed to eliminate cultural bias and prior knowledge advantage -- the IQ tests given in poor Middle Eastern villages are not exactly the same as administered to American university students, for example -- and by and large they do this pretty well. E.g., when the answers are examined, there are no single questions that show a clear racial or cultural difference in terms of how many people "get it": the differences between people from Culture A and from Culture B are spread out among all the questions, indicating that the difference is not due to bias.

This isn't too surprising, since the tests do attempt to offer challenges that require little or no prior familiarity with other concepts. Some tests even eliminate words, writing, numbers, etc., and look at things like "can you spot a pattern in these sticks?"

IQ tests also correlate very well with almost everything we think of as a sign or result of intelligence, up and including on the national level (in fact, even moreso in aggregate). This is a good reason to believe that IQ is measuring something real; if "intelligence" is too loaded a term, call it "problem-solving ability".

People are really hard on IQ tests. I think this is in part because it is very comforting to dismiss them and their uncomfortable implications for both the individual and society at large, and in part because they do need to be judged skeptically due to the sensitive and serious topic they address. But I think the general opinion on them is both lagging behind development (stuck in the era of "how middle/upper class are you?"), and not supported by current evidence.

Of course, a lot of people write anti-IQ-test essays, and a lot of people write pro-IQ-test essays; it's certainly a contentious issue in some ways, and I don't mean to say "the tests are perfect now!" There is good evidence that they're not as biased and fluffy as commonly believed, though.