This may not apply to the author of the linked blog post, but it's long been a pet peeve of mine how casually people dismiss intelligence testing after seeing one or two examples of poorly designed questions. The rarely considered reality is that IQ tests vary widely in quality.

Some reasons are obvious: The test might be intentionally designed to measure something other than IQ (success in college, performance on a job, money spent on College Board® prep courses). The test might be designed to test within a particular IQ range, whether high or low. The test might be designed only to be taken by people fluent in a particular language, or who received an education from a particular school. And so on.

But the biggest and least obvious reason why bad IQ tests are everywhere is that good IQ tests are not only difficult to make, but expensive to make. Good tests are not made by geniuses in armchairs thinking up riddles. Test design is an empirical science, and the final judges of any question's value are the statistical relationships that show up in the answers when the test is given.

Empirical evidence sterilizes tests from the biases of their authors, and does so much more effectively than waiting for complaints from morally outraged observers. Questions that penalize takers of different cultural backgrounds are bad questions not because they're socially repugnant, but because they're noisy--you can demonstrate that people who otherwise score highly get the question wrong more often than they should. Questions like those addressed in the blog post, where some really smart people are attracted to a "wrong" answer, will have negative inter-question correlations among the brightest subjects, which is a giant blinking neon sign in any analysis.

This sanitizing effect is so strong that the tests which show the most desirable psychometric properties, such as Raven's Progressive Matrices, often evoke the opposite complaint: they're so minimal and homogenous in form that it's hard to accept they're a better measure of IQ than scattershot tests of imperfect analogies and odd-one-out puzzles. If you're curious, RPM goes a little something like this: http://iqtest.dk/main.swf

IQ testing is a complicated science, and discrediting it because there's one or two (or fifty) dumb questions on the SATs is like giving up on journalism after reading an issue of USA Today.