> (thanks for taking the time)

You're quite welcome. The initial response was because of how weary I am of seeing similar arguments used disingenuously. It seems like you've put more thought than average behind your words.

> Now, whether [IQ] is a good measure of intelligence is being questioned, and one of the reason is that it has cultural biases and is strongly biased towards academia.

This is not a critique of "IQ", which is a name for "number that says how intelligent a person is". The only actual idea encoded in the concept "IQ" that persists to the modern day is "it makes logical sense to expect to be able to state such a number, and furthermore that a meaningful idea can be encapsulated by one such number". This isn't controversial among actual researchers in the field. Historically, there was also an idea that number could be conceptualized as a ratio (hence "intelligence quotient") of a purported "mental age" to a child's actual age (since initially there was only interest in assessing the intelligence of children). Of course, that breaks down for all sorts of reasons (notably, the fact that people don't continue improving at problem-solving throughout their lives - certainly not well into adulthood, and certainly not linearly) - but the concept was subsequently refined to address that (nowadays, the number is simply a measure of some raw capability which is normalized to fit a bell curve with mean=100 and SD=15 or so to the general population).

Cultural biases and biases towards academia are a potential issue with specific tests used to measure IQ. However, it isn't clear that the demands of those who seek to eliminate those supposed biases could actually ever be met in principle. It's also been reported that attempts to use less "biased" tests (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven%27s_Progressive_Matrices) don't actually make whatever problematic disparities in observed results go away - in fact, they might widen.

Aside from which - if a culture demonstrably doesn't value the traits that we naturally associate with intelligence or expect people to demonstrate the associated skills as a part of daily life, why wouldn't it be correct to say that such a culture makes its adherents less intelligent? Why would it be "biased" to observe such a culture actually having such an entirely predictable effect on people?

> Problem-solving is a real capability, but doesn't IQ mostly attempt to measure pattern recognition? And isn't problem-solving only a part of intelligence?

There's some measure of streetlight effect here, sure; but problem-solving is a pretty darned big component of intelligence IMO. And if your objection to IQ tests is "people can study for the test and get a score that overstates their actual capabilities" then of course it's important to include some metric of problem-solving. (Another big component that you can't "study", but might be able to train over a long period of time, is working memory. For example, one classic IQ test component has the subject listen to a sequence of base-ten digits, then attempt to recite them in reverse order. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_span#Digit-span .)

Modern tests such as WAIS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wechsler_Adult_Intelligence_Sc...) are kept updated, and include a battery of evaluations on a variety of strongly g-loaded tasks. And yes, they do admit the notion that correlations between these tasks are not perfect - but they have also settled on a consensus that a single number can reasonably encompass the results in general.