IQ is an old measure. It's not surprising that you could develop a better measure.

But is IQ useful? Last I checked, it correlated well to things like years of completed education, unemployment rate, lifetime earnings, etc.

Part of the problem with our government policies is that they don't account for the fact that 1/2 the people are dumbasses, by definition. Or, as George Carlin said, "Imagine how smart the average person is. Now realize that half the people are stupider than him."

So we spend billions of dollars to . . . more precisely measure the mass of the Higgs boson? Oh, that's worth it.

But wait! There's important spin-off technologies, like . . . high speed trains.

Only one problem - we don't need any freaking high speed trains!

Now, if you could promise to figure out how to power cars with the Higgs boson, or create a Higgs boson bomb, that might draw some interest. But to spend billions of dollars to add a few decimal places to the mass of the Higgs? Physicists will soon have to accept that some of the knowledge they seek is too expensive to acquire.

. . . you'd better link cars to erectile dysfunction. Otherwise, we're driving.