I'm Conservative and I have a normal IQ...!

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130 IQ is not average. Average IQ in the US is about 98. To say Liberals are "less informed" is your opinion, not verified by facts. One verified fact is that people who watch no news source at all are more informed about what is going on in the news than Fox news viewers, not that Fox news is the only source of views for Conservatives. To say that Liberals are less intelligent because they have different views you are contradicting your own previous statement. Your statement above is full of assumptions. Intelligence has nothing to do with knowledge.

How could I possibly resist.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22847629

It's human poop rather than dog. It's to treat Clostridium difficile infection rather than strictly nutritional. It's nasogastric tube rather than eating. But I say, same church, different pew.

/\ Still gross.

Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist, gives an evolutionary explanation to the higher IQ of liberals that is found in most studies: he says that liberalism didn't exist in traditional societies and is thus an evolutionarily novel trend; hence it must be related to higher intelligence, since the capacity to evolve and adapt reflects higher intelligence. He describes liberalism as "the genuine concern for the welfare of genetically unrelated others and the willingness to contribute larger proportions of private resources for the welfare of such others". In his study, liberals were more intelligent than conservatives and more intelligent people agreed that federal income taxes should be raised and blacks should be helped by the government. He also says vegetarians, atheists, people who value sexual exclusivity and people who take some types of drugs, among other groups, are also more intelligent for the same reasons, and gives evidence about this.

Conservatives are too tight, Liberals are too loose.
Hence we need both.

Oh... and both sides like to throw stones at each other.

Some people take pleasure in throwing stones. Other people realize that in order to be understood, sometimes you have to communicate in the only language understood by those you are trying to communicate with. It is not difficult to tell which is which if one is honest with oneself.

And there's your problem!

It is mind-boggling stupid to disregard the best way we have of getting knowledge simply because some studies are badly designed. Criticise the methods, criticise the statistics, point out that other, equally-good or better studies have found different things. Don't say "yeah but science doesn't work".

What evidence? All of that sounds highly contrived and ethically suspect. Sounds like social darwinism all over again and we've already been down this road. A person's capacity for intelligence has to do with human physiology and stimuli during development. Did he have a control group? Who did he poll? His conclusions don't sound very scientific to me if he just said "well, smarter people tend to say this". I've met a whole bunch of people too, and considering that we don't know how rigorous his methods were I can just as easily counter that the majority of intelligent people I've met have actually been libertarians. That doesn't establish anything.

And this is the delusion that we tolerate in ourselves and others, an unnecessary crutch that hampers mature discourse. We no longer need to toss feces like apes. Tossing feces at someone and saying "well, he does it" doesn't validate tossing feces. All that the other party understands is that you have the low brow of neanderthalensis. In order to be understood we must maintain standards of discourse, politicians especially should be penalized during debates and ridiculed publicly for resorting to ad homs and red herrings.

So the basis for higher intelligence:

a. you think the government can make better decisions with your money than you
b. you think black people need to be treated like babies

Sounds like a determination for 'infantilism' (i.e., whether you think like a child or not).

I wonder if straw manning is correlated with political views.

My problem? You're the one whining about it.


Depends on who's doing the study (or paying for it) and what their existing beliefs are.
The little ad hominem attack about stupidity didnt go unnoticed either but it's only a case of the pot calling the kettle black.


Now a straw man attack.
I never said or even implied that science doesnt work.

I don't really believe IQ is a true measure of intelligence, but I think its used a rough guide. liberals are always talking about how smarter they are. Now, its funny how liberals believe 9-11 was an "inside job", but if you say anything about our president having ties to Muslims terrorists or Muslim brotherhood (which has far more basis in reality) they think you are an "illiterate" tea party member who is some "racist" , etc. So its all relative isn't it.

That is not an ad hominem. An ad hominem (Latin for "to the person") would be "that can't be right because you think it and you are a conservative". Ad hominem is when you claim that someone is wrong because of some irrelevant information about who they are, not because their statement is wrong.

Of course, you can criticise the funding body or the scientists themselves. That is perfectly legitimate, particularly if there is something else slightly fishy about the study.

However, to say you "don't put much stock in studies" ("studies" and "science" are all but synonymous, so I was not straw manning you) is handwaving away the way we reliably find things out. It implies that you don't care about new information. You don't need to believe every study, but at least consider them, and have good reasons for disregarding. This is seriously very hard and most of us have neither the skill nor the time (I don't read studies from outside of ecology/zoology very often at all), but don't just roll your eyes at them - that's how people get entrenched in their views even when they are clearly incorrect (e.g. the anti-gun crowd). Normally if someone is citing it they're not going to have read it, they're going to have read a summary praising it. A quick Google can often find a summary pointing out the flaws. Having said that, it is really satisfying when you can say "actually the author's own statistics show that the results are not statistically significant" because you spotted it yourself

I apologise if I did not accurately represent your position. It is fine not to believe everything you see in a scientific paper, but have a good reason to disregard it rather than doing so a priori.

I rest my case.


You do realise what forum this is, don't you?

That takes all the fun out of it. Where's all the indignation and accusations of incivility and trollery?


Yeah sure, I'll just have to remember that. :