The author doesn't make the case for why these types of reasoning skills are important, or why IQ is important for that matter. This isn't the first time that I've encountered brain teasers, and I know that I dislike them because I generally suck at them. The author characterizes this as being a "cognitive miser" (I also hate it when people make up terms), or not putting forth the effort to thoroughly think through the problem and just going with the easy answer. I can accept that this is what's happening, but what the hell does it mean?

Should we be hiring people who are good at brain teasers? Does that kind of thinking indicate the ability to ship products, come up with novel solutions or understand things in a way that leads to significant increases to the bottom line? In my experience, everybody is some kind of stupid. Even puzzle masters occasionally lose their keys or say embarrassing things at parties. Intelligence and the lack there of is so fractured and interconnected that it doesn't seem like any kind of test is going to be able to measure it accurately, or even nail down what 'it' is.

Some of the smartest people I know were good at questions like this, or maybe I just think they're smart because they're so good at these questions. Big companies love to use them during interviews and there's probably a reason for that. It's definitely a skill I would like to improve myself, but I still don't fully understand the value. Life isn't a series of puzzles, it's a series of problems punctuated by sheer randomness. Being able to take this or any kind of test can't be highly correlated with "success" by most measures, and certainly not in the ways that matter to most organizations.