There's a lot more heat than light in these debates, to my mind. And no contradiction between g being fixed and studying algebra or French or whatever making you more likely to achieve great things, because it may do that even if it doesn't change g. We may be able to have a nice neat definition of intelligence that's correlated with things and is reasonably stable - people could argue about how stable and under what range of assumed conditions - but what, as far as I'm aware, nobody has ever been able to show is that in the right hand tail, say beyond 2 standard deviations above the mean, there's any further effect of IQ on success (I mean, no known correlation between an individual's IQ above that level and the probability that the individual will make a breakthrough of any kind - it wouldn't surprise me if e.g. the correlation with income still held). Terman tried to do it and got negative results. IIRR, others have found similarly negative results and there's no reputable positive result in the literature (if I'm wrong about that, I'd be interested to get a reference). We do not know what Einstein's IQ was, and there's a lot of "Einstein's IQ must have been stupendous because he was a genius and geniuses have stupendous IQs" in the popular imagination, which gets us no further forward at all.
To my mind the most useful way for parents of the children we talk about here to think is probably "My child's IQ is never likely to be the factor that limits their achievement. So what else matters, and how do I remove the obstacles that might otherwise limit my child?". I think that's what we're doing when we, for example, provide emotional nurturing, enough challenge to help our children learn to tackle hard problems, enough opportunities to give them a good chance of encountering the things they most want to learn about, etc.
Yes.
