politics

Never studied for them, they seemed like mostly simple pattern recognition and general logic questions, which I've never really thought you could even study for.

There are a few different tests that are supposed to clinically measure IQ. Most of them are more complex than pattern recognition and most all of them are administered by some sort of clinician, which can also influence outcomes.

But general intellect, as far as I can tell (and maybe my understanding of it is wrong), is what influences your ability to shift to a new field and gain expertise in that. Years alone don't cut it. In my own field, I've seen software engineers who can't program for shit, let alone make any architectural decisions after a decade - and ones that are pretty competent after 2-3 years.

I would say that the ability to gain expertise is generally hard to differentiate with the motivation to gain expertise. What we can empirically prove is that time spent practicing a skill is how we gain expertise in most any skill.

In fact, it's more like ranges of aptitudes. I have great aptitude for STEM, pretty decent aptitude for languages, and absolutely none for arts. No drawing, no singing, etc. No matter how much practice I get and how much practice I got in my childhood.

It could be that you just perceive yourself being at being better at stem because you enjoy practicing the skills required for stem. People generally gain experience faster in skill sets they enjoy or skills they perceive thems to excel at.

There's just skills I won't learn in 10 years of practice, and skills I pick up rapidly, and it's been that way since childhood.

Again, this could be self fulfilling process. If you don't think you will excel at something you may not fully engage in the process, or even self sabotage the process.

think IQ in particular unfairly prioritizes understanding of language and logic, over artful skills and, e.g emotional intelligence (which is measured by EQ I guess).

I think for this to be true your claim would have to be that emotional intellect is devoid of logic or language.....which seems fairly self evidently incorrect.

My main point that I wanted to make was that some people are naturally more gifted, and just faster learners, than others.

Or people are better at learning things they are self motivated to learn about, and that society influences what skills we find valuable or "intellectual".

In short, what we can empirically prove about intellect is usually environmental in nature, and what we can only theorize about heritability cannot be differentiated from other variabilities that may correlate with that theory.