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eternal_neophyte comments on There is no such thing as strength: a parody - Less Wrong Discussion
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How do you define/determine this?
Isn't there an "obvious" causal relationship between brain mass and intelligence?
.Above someone remarked that a female weightlifters might have a much more powerful snatch than male powerlifters, due to several strength tests involving specialised skills auxiliary to "general strength". So it seems that you might indeed be able to "bias" (at least some) strength tests.
How about "solving puzzles makes you smarter, therefore IQ measures something real"?
There no good research that suggests that solving puzzles makes you significantly smarter in the same way that lifting weights makes you significantly smarter.
The fact that women generally have smaller brains than men doesn't mean that they are generally less intelligent in the same way that the fact that women generally have less muscle means that they have less strength.
The standard definition of strength, which the post cleverly avoided ever stating, is "the ability to produce force against external resistance" or some variant thereof. Force is a well-defined physics term, and can be measured pretty directly in a variety of ways.
No. Whales aren't smarter than humans.
If by "obvious" you mean "the sort of thing you might guess from first principles", then both are obvious. But the muscle-strength relationship is obvious in another sense: in actual data, it will leap out at you as a very large factor. For example, 97% of variance in strength between sexes is accounted for by muscle mass, and one of the strongest predictors of performance in powerlifters is muscle mass per unit height.
Does this definition resolve the problem posed by the OP, that competence in one of various different specific activities requiring strength doesn't imply competence in the others? That is, after all, the basis on which IQ tests are attacked - competence on Raven's progressive matrices doesn't imply competence at the Piano. If we would answer their objection by saying that intelligence is the general capacity to solve problems, have we shed any light on what ties these capacities together?
That's what I interpreted James Miller to mean, at least roughly.
Seems to me to be merely a difference of degree. While not "leaping out", brain-mass and intelligence do seem to correlate non-trivially (at least when cranial volume is measured via MRI):
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2668913/
"imply" is a word that suggests you think about whether it makes sense that there a causal relation between the two task. That's not central for IQ. g is a statistical construct that does things that aren't obvious.