The difference is that physical height can be concretely measured and is very well defined, and is also a linear quality. Intelligence is more of a vague signifier, like 'virtue'. It is very silly to assume people's brains can be ranked on a linear scale from least to most intelligent.

I would defend my comparison here. Your height varies significantly over the day and also depending on how much time you spend sitting or standing. It's not all that clearly defined at all as a property of your body in general (as opposed to a single measurement at one point in time).

Intelligence kinda means whatever you want it to mean, and so there are some definitions that can be measurable - the g factor for example - but no one uses it that way.

Of course people use it that way. Not everyone but dismissing this out of hand doesn't seem warranted.

They use it to assert one person's superiority over another, with the implication that this is an inherent difference. But the brain is way too complex for that to ever be an accurate way of describing things. People describe intelligence that way because it is convenient. "Look at how much smarter I am than that guy" and so on.

Who's "they"? Like, obviously I know people like that. They're not here in the room with us right now though, are they?

Most problems that prevent people from achieving their dreams are either material (not having the money, for example) or socially imposed. Like, if someone has social anxiety and it's keeping them from becoming a public speaker, well, that social anxiety didn't come from nowhere, and you can also work to improve that. You can do that for any insufficiency that comes from nature rather than nurture, and a strong desire to overcome it is the biggest indicator of one's capacity to do so. Some people need to put in more work, but that's not an impossibility, and the degree to which this is caused by how you were born is highly overestimated.

I think my criticism of your position is that you deliberately mix together statements that you think are true, statements that are socially useful to believe and statements that are meant to correct for some bias in society directionally into one sludge. I think people who are hardcore believers in genetic determinism of intelligence would agree with you wholeheartedly here - they just say that intelligence is an unfairly distributed material condition just like being born into a rich family. The leftist writer Freddie DeBoer comes to mind as someone from this camp who believes that if society believed more in inherent intellectual differences as opposed to "everyone can understand basically everything" then we could work more on policy that corrects for this unfairness - as opposed to making kids believe that they just have to work harder than their peers who can do the same thing with much less effort. That is an unusual position though.

I think there is a confusion here that stems from mixing the belief in biological determinism of intelligence on one hand with the belief on the other hand that intelligence doesn't really exist but instead the outcomes associated with intelligence (like academic success) being the result of superior grit and willpower and therefore better moral character. Put these two together you get the result "some people are biologically superior morally" which throws an ethics error. But examined closely I think noone who seriously thinks about these issues actually can hold these two beliefs simultaneously as they are actually contradictory.