I keep seeing references to practical intelligence as something separate from the kind of intelligence IQ tests measure. The argument seems to be that some people are street smart but not book smart and vice versa, and that IQ tests miss this entirely. But I also know that g is supposed to be this broad general factor that predicts performance across almost every domain. So is practical intelligence a real separate construct with its own predictive validity or is it just g in disguise?
This debate has been pretty well settled in the psychometrics literature even though it keeps resurfacing in popular discussions. Robert Sternberg was the main proponent of practical intelligence as a distinct construct and spent decades arguing that tacit knowledge and street smarts were independent of g. The problem is that when researchers tested his measures of practical intelligence rigorously and controlled for general cognitive ability, the unique predictive variance largely disappeared. The correlation between practical intelligence measures and g tends to be substantial, and the incremental validity over g alone is weak. What looks like street smarts in everyday life is usually a combination of g, domain specific experience, and personality traits like conscientiousness. Those are real and important but they are not a separate intelligence factor sitting alongside g in the psychometric hierarchy.
Being good at navigating real world problems is genuinely valuable. The question is whether it reflects a distinct cognitive ability or just g plus experience plus personality. The evidence points pretty strongly toward the latter.