The fact that more women than men believe in things I consider 'bottom tier' beliefs - like astrology, crystals, etc. - are confusing, because women have basically the same average scores on IQ tests, right?
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IQ is not the only filter on beliefs, there's also skin-in-the-game, ambition, intellectual curiosity, and harshness of environment.
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So there's something going on with women that doesn't impact their ability to do pattern recognition, but is impacting their ability to hold good beliefs
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i've never heard this used as an argument against the usefulness of IQ as a measure but it's suddenly the most convincing one to me now
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But it's not really an argument against the usefulness of IQ. It tells you that high IQ does not imply correct beliefs, but everybody already knew that. People weren't stupid back when they were all religious/superstitious. Newton's occultism didn't make him dumb.
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I don't think I already knew that. I woulda guessed higher IQ was correlated with more accurate beliefs. That doesn't mean everyone was stupid back when everyone was religious, but I'd guess it meant that people who had higher IQs were less likely to be religious, comparitively?
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higher IQ IS correlated with atheism but it's not a guarantee
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Correlation just means that two variables tend to occur similarly and does in no way imply one causes the other. Hence the cliche “correlation doesn’t mean causation”
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It's only guaranteed if the correlation cofficient is 1. A correlation of .5 is considered large for social science.