Clearing Up A Whine Stain

Exactly what is this "speed of cognitive processing", how it was identified as existing, how is it known that whatever method they purport to measure it by is measuring "it" and not something else, well, the questions just keep occurring to me as I think about it.   One of those is if, as they do so often in psychology and the associated pseud . . . um sciences of that kind, if the "thing" is entirely a product of their self-interested imaginations. 

How, since they don't seem to be able to correlate it to education and IQ, do they know that "speed of cognitive processing" is related to the quality of thinking?  And if it isn't related to that, what does it mean?   The abstract says:

Controlling for childhood IQ score,[sorry, I had to suppress a chortle] we found that education was positively associated with IQ at ages 79 (Sample 1) and 70 (Sample 2), and more strongly for participants with lower initial IQ scores. Education, however, showed no significant association with processing speed, measured at ages 83 and 70.

I'm kind of puzzled by the ranges of ages in this thing, it looks kind of higglety pigglety to me.  And they seem to assume that people stay the same for that range of ages.  I wonder, at those ages, did they "control" for undiagnosed dementia? 

Sorry, thinking about the troll leads me to think of that. 

I don't see that they've even managed to define what it is in any reliable sense or if what they're measuring is what they've defined. 

How you can call that science is another series of questions, how science can sustain its reputation for reliable information when this kind of claim seems to constitute so much of what "is" science leads to more.   Scientists have been way, way, way too lenient in allowing unfounded inferences of things that couldn't be observed in under the tent.   They should have strictly controlled those for purely physical phenomena.  When they let natural selection slide in because they liked that it refuted Genesis and was flattering to the upper class, that was the beginning of all hell breaking loose.   And, well, nutrition science, as Rupert Sheldrake said, it's not our most successful branch of the stuff.