Is it not possible that society has an interest in broad employment, especially among people disadvantaged by such tests?
Very possible. I would take the Steve Sailer approach here, of acknowledging underlying differences and making the best of the situation. Let's step away from race and just talk about tracking in schools- by the time someone is 12, we have a pretty good guess what their eventual social strata / broad kind of career will be.
In countries like Germany, they respond to this with different high schools- someone who will be a technician can go to a technical school, and someone who will be an engineer can go to an academic school. Both get work suited for their intellectual ability and interests, and so the first isn't drowning and the second isn't bored. (Relevant here is the finding that getting rid of shop classes increases the high school dropout rate in America- turns out that for an easily identifiable group of students, the primary benefit they get out of high school is a place to practice basic handyman skills!)
In the US, we get lunacy like "whether or not someone takes the first optional math class is a very strong predictor of whether or not they go to college. Let's make that class mandatory for graduating high school!" which makes everyone involved worse off, as the students not pointed at college now find it more difficult to graduate high school.
For example: "It's been known for generations that physical strength has a positive impact statistically on outcomes in basically every sort of violent encounter, so as a default, in a world where couples and families could be attacked, people should assume a necessity for bigger, more muscular men as romantic partners."
I'm not sure this would see significant disagreement here on LW. The main response I would give is yes, but the preference is miscalibrated. Ceteris paribus, a stronger partner is likely to be better (assuming they aren't prone to domestic violence), but my reflective preferences would give a weight to athleticism that's orders of magnitude lower than the weight my attraction heuristics give athleticism. This mismatch seems to be because those heuristics were tuned in an era when the chance of being the victim (or beneficiary!) of violent crime was orders of magnitude higher than they currently are.
Idang Alibi of Abuja, Nigeria writes on the James Watson affair:
An intriguing opening. Is Idang Alibi about to take a position on the real heart of the uproar?
Darn, it's just a lecture on personal and national responsibility. Of course, for African nationals, taking responsibility for their country's problems is the most productive attitude regardless. But it doesn't engage with the controversies that got Watson fired.
Later in the article came this:
This intrigued me for two reasons: First, I'm always on the lookout for yet another case of theology making a falsifiable experimental prediction. And second, the prediction follows obviously if God is just, but what does skin colour have to do with it at all?
A great deal has already been said about the Watson affair, and I suspect that in most respects I have little to contribute that has not been said before.
But why is it that the rest of the world seems to think that individual genetic differences are okay, whereas racial genetic differences in intelligence are not? Am I the only one who's every bit as horrified by the proposition that there's any way whatsoever to be screwed before you even start, whether it's genes or lead-based paint or Down's Syndrome? What difference does skin colour make? At all?
This is only half a rhetorical question. Race adds extra controversy to anything; in that sense, it's obvious what difference skin colour makes politically. However, just because this attitude is common, should not cause us to overlook its insanity. Some kind of different psychological processing is taking place around individually-unfair intelligence distributions, and group-unfair intelligence distributions.
So, in defiance of this psychological difference, and in defiance of politics, let me point out that a group injustice has no existence apart from injustice to individuals. It's individuals who have brains to experience suffering. It's individuals who deserve, and often don't get, a fair chance at life. If God has not given intelligence in equal measure to all his children, God stands convicted of a crime against humanity, period. Skin colour has nothing to do with it, nothing at all.
And I don't think there's any serious scholar of intelligence who disputes that God has been definitively shown to be most terribly unfair. Never mind the airtight case that intelligence has a hereditary genetic component among individuals; if you think that being born with Down's Syndrome doesn't impact life outcomes, then you are on crack. What about lead-based paint? Does it not count, because parents theoretically could have prevented it but didn't? In the beginning no one knew that it was damaging. How is it just for such a tiny mistake to have such huge, irrevocable consequences? And regardless, would not a just God damn us for only our own choices? Kids don't choose to live in apartments with lead-based paint.
So much for God being "just", unless you count the people whom God has just screwed over. Maybe that's part of the fuel in the burning controversy - that people do realize, on some level, the implications for religion. They can rationalize away the implications of a child born with no legs, but not a child born with no possibility of ever understanding calculus. But then this doesn't help explain the original observation, which is that people, for some odd reason, think that adding race makes it worse somehow.
And why is my own perspective, apparently, unusual? Perhaps because I also think that intelligence deficits will be fixable given sufficiently advanced technology, biotech or nanotech. When truly huge horrors are believed unfixable, the mind's eye tends to just skip over the hideous unfairness - for much the same reason you don't deliberately rest your hand on a hot stoveburner; it hurts.