"So, you are a licensed child psychologist? A pediatrician? A published researcher? A teacher? A college professor? Do you even have any kids?"
I think now of an interview I heard recently with Noam Chomsky (no slouch himself) where he said something to the effect of "I don't think my opinion is any more valid than a great number of people in many professions. I happen to have the luxury of spending all day reading, but my ability to think and reason is fundamentally the same as everyone else's..."
Whether I am those things or not doesn't really matter seems to me (although if I were not a parent I would probably be worrying about other things).
"First, its a fact these kids learn faster and retain greater detail. Second, its a fact that these kids have a higher level of sensitivity to others and to most situations. Third, knowing their high abilities will motivate them and their parents to seek out much more challenging schools and choose more demanding professions. Fourth, the documentation is needed where advocacy is required to ensure these kids get what they deserve."
Talk about assertions without evidence to back them up! There is no way that these generalizations can be true. This is one of the great dangers of developing and deploying labels.
What's important for children are choices and opportunities -- not using simple measures of limited cognitive abilities to constrain life or career paths.
Also, simply because a test or tests are correlated with deficits in function linked to specific conditions does not necessarily imply that higher scores in the tests are associated with abnormally high cognitive function. Simply because the lack of something (think insulin) is harmful doesn't mean that its excess is necessarily beneficial.
Yes, there are outliers and savants. Yes, they probably score highly on most tests that they could be given. But, again, this is not strong evidence that the tests measure any kind of cognitive ability -- simply that they may be correlated with something that is NECESSARY for high cognitive function. What is SUFFICIENT -- who knows -- and I'm sure there are plenty of examples of people who are very intelligent and successful who do poorly on IQ tests. They probably just don't take them and advertise them so much...
As for the high correlation between IQ and the ability to learn and reason... this begs the question if the measures of learning and reasoning used are similar to those used for "IQ." Yes, this can establish a correlation. No, this does not provide evidence that IQ is a good measure of cognition.
