A lot of people I talk to dismiss IQ tests by saying the questions are trivial and have nothing to do with real intelligence. Like who cares if you can rotate shapes in your head or remember a sequence of numbers. What does that have to do with how smart someone actually is in the real world? Is there a good answer to this criticism or is it actually a valid point?
The trivial content criticism misunderstands what the tests are doing. The specific content does not matter much, what matters is that the tasks require general reasoning, working memory, and processing speed under controlled conditions. A matrix puzzle with abstract shapes has no real world content by design, because the goal is to isolate the underlying cognitive process without giving an advantage to people with specific domain knowledge. The fact that these seemingly arbitrary tasks predict job performance, academic achievement, health outcomes, and life expectancy as well as they do is actually the most powerful argument for their validity. The content looks trivial but the cognitive demands are not.
If the content were truly trivial the tests would not predict anything. They predict a remarkable range of outcomes across decades of research. That is the only rebuttal you need.