And of course, no argument is complete with an anecdotal Feynman story.

Two grad students at CalTech were having a discussion about what Feynman's IQ must be. They bandied 180... maybe even to 200. When coincidentally Feynman walks right past them.

One of the students pipes up and meekly asks Feynman, "Professor Feynman, what is your IQ?"

Feynman turns around and responds, "120". The grad students have a look of disbelief. To which Feynman adds, "but its all in Physics".

Actually the analogy you made is very appropriate. If you do control for season and altitude, and snow cover is not correlated with temperature still, you have a problem.

But sticking with just the article. The point he makes is that its the educational attainment that people pay for, not the IQ score. Now you're saying, "But educational attainment is a product of IQ score". Possibly, but in controlling that factor you can attempt to tease out the extent at which it really is the educational attainment rather than simply the IQ.

A better way to put is that if IQ was in itself the key to life success then it wouldn't matter if you went to college or not. Rather, what the data seems to show is that those with high IQs seem to at least have the wisdom to know that educational attainment will be the key their life success. Quite possibly being tracked into by virtue of a higher IQ.

BUT the data should show that regardless of credential, higher IQ yields more success. But it doesn't show that.

Now there are a lot of factors that potentially come into play. And that was my original point. One can't look at SAT scores and then say, "those with high SAT scores do better in life", when there are so many comingling factors that complicate the equation, and are ridiculously difficult to control for in the real world.