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komponisto comments on Helpless Individuals - Less Wrong
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As you know, P(A|B) != P(B|A). It's not that most high-IQ folks are capable of writing interesting music, but rather that almost no non-high-IQ folks are. (It may be useful to recall what I mean by IQ, which isn't necessarily what people immediately think of when they hear the term, but is what I believe they should think of.)
This should make sense when you consider that music is ultimately generated from the composer's stream-of-consciousness; and the higher one's IQ, the more interesting one's stream-of-consciousness tends to be. (This is almost tautological given my conception of IQ.)
To a large degree, this impression probably exists due to communication difficulties, in particular a vocabulary far too impoverished to adequately reflect the complexity of aesthetic value.
Many (not all, but a nontrivial subset) of the people you're talking about, I would venture, will have conceded more than necessary when they agree that they're using criteria other than "subjective aesthetic response" to judge the value of a work.
(EDIT: I am led to suspect this because you contrasted "subjective aesthetic response" not with, say, the number of people who say they like it, but rather with "technical intricacy".)
The "of course" here was meant to suggest not that your question was vacuous, but rather that you were perhaps a bit overly timid in inferring my answer previously. :-)
Looking forward to it.
The only thing that is a tautalogical result of having a high IQ is the ability to achieve good results on IQ tests.
I agree with respect to music, high IQ and stream of consciousness and all practical expectations. Just not the redefinition of IQ. Make up a new name for what IQ tests should measure - or just use 'intelligence'.
(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.)