Declaration of bias: I am a liberal, I am intelligent, but I’m not a Democrat or Republican.
It’s hard to measure liberalism. For example, half the black people say they are conservative and half say they are liberal. But most outsiders would say most black people are liberal (and it’s common for 100% of black people in an area to vote for Obama). People judge their liberalism against people like themselves, so it’s hard to compare groups.
If you count most black people as liberals, then that intelligence difference between liberals and conservatives might disappear (if it exists, I haven’t checked). For example, it’s a proven fact that Republicans are smarter than Democrats (because of black people with an average IQ of 85 voting Democrat), although just between white people there is no real difference.
You also need to consider that intelligence comes with biases, even though it also improves your thinking. Intelligent people are biased towards things that benefit intelligent people, eg. complexity, even if they hurt other people.
Intelligent people are biased towards letting people do whatever they want, because intelligent people like themselves will do sensible things when given the choice. They aren’t used to stupid people, who do stupid things when allowed to do whatever they want. Intelligent people need freedom, while stupid people need strong inviolable guidelines about acceptable behaviour.
If you count most black people as liberals, then that intelligence difference between liberals and conservatives might disappear (if it exists, I haven’t checked). For example, it’s a proven fact that Republicans are smarter than Democrats (because of black people with an average IQ of 85 voting Democrat)
Could you give a citation for this? I’ve heard other studies claiming the opposite, and I’m not inclined to accept either at face value without knowing what actually went into the studies.
This article has a lot of bell-curve verbal IQ graphs from GSS (General Social Survey) data for the years 2000-2012, using the wordsum score as a measure of intelligence:
It shows Republicans as smarter than Democrats, but Liberals smarter than Conservatives, and White people smarter than Black people, and some other comparisons.
Kind of; the great thing about those distributions is that you can talk about more of the distribution than one summary statistic. There’s a clump of high IQ democrats, a clump of low IQ democrats, and then a clump of medium IQ democrats, whereas the Republicans look like one clump of medium IQ republicans. There are more Democrats from 0 to 5, more Republicans from about 6 to 8, and a tiny few more Democrats from 9 to 10.
This matches with the prediction that there is a significant group of low-vocabulary people who vote predominantly Democratic, the middles voting somewhat more Republican, and the highs about evenly split.
I’d expect the correlation between IQ and WORDSUM to be much weaker when controlling for educational attainment, so some of those graphs will have to be taken with a grain of salt.
What would this statement predict about the WORDSUM distributions by educational level? Is that what that graph shows? (If the graph doesn’t have enough data to answer that question, how else could you answer it?)
So… I think the correlation between IQ and WORDSUM is mostly mediated by education (i.e., in terms of Stuff That Makes Stuff Happen, there’s an arrow from IQ to education and one from education and WORDSUM—there’s also one directly from IQ to WORDSUM but it’s thinner). So I’d expect that the third graph in that article to show an effect more extreme than if you used IQ instead.
I can’t find anything right now on what effect parents’ class (what does that mean? SES?) has on educational attainment for people of the same IQs. Someone else may want to look it up if they’re better at googling than me.
But it doesn’t matter. We already know that wordsum, IQ, and educational attainment are measuring similar things. Wordsum seems like a good proxy for IQ. It gives sensible answers in all the graphs, and it is said to correlate .71 with adult IQ.
Do you have a point, or some sort of theory about what I was saying? Do you disagree with the idea that Republicans are smarter (except at the top end) than Democrats, or that “liberals” are smarter than “conservatives”?
Do you disagree with the idea that Republicans are smarter (except at the top end) than Democrats, or that “liberals” are smarter than “conservatives”?
I don’t.
My point was that using a test that heavily relies on ‘learned’ knowledge such as Wordsum may have exaggerated the effect (compared to what one would see if one used a more culture-neutral test such as Raven’s progressive matrices) when some of the groups have historically been educated more than others for additional reasons besides IQ (even if said reasons correlate with IQ, so long as the correlation isn’t close to 1).
Environmentally in this context just means anything that’s not directly genetic or inherited epigenetic. It doesn’t mean plants and animals or anything like that.
IQ is mostly genetic (in rich egalitarian countries like the USA), but everyone seems to agree that there’s still some environmental factors that smart parents can do to make their children a tiny bit smarter. I don’t know exactly what those factors are though. Probably any kind of practice with thinking and studying would help a tiny bit, but perhaps other things to do with better care such as nutrition. But I know there’s not a lot that parents can do that helps with IQ long-term, especially when society as a whole is already trying to do everything they can to boost IQ environmentally already.
IQ is significantly genetic, but there’s considerably more than a little bit of variance in intelligence between people given the same DNA, and that’s without bringing in the effect of raising people in widely divergent cultures.
Declaration of bias: I am a liberal, I am intelligent, but I’m not a Democrat or Republican.
It’s hard to measure liberalism. For example, half the black people say they are conservative and half say they are liberal. But most outsiders would say most black people are liberal (and it’s common for 100% of black people in an area to vote for Obama). People judge their liberalism against people like themselves, so it’s hard to compare groups.
If you count most black people as liberals, then that intelligence difference between liberals and conservatives might disappear (if it exists, I haven’t checked). For example, it’s a proven fact that Republicans are smarter than Democrats (because of black people with an average IQ of 85 voting Democrat), although just between white people there is no real difference.
You also need to consider that intelligence comes with biases, even though it also improves your thinking. Intelligent people are biased towards things that benefit intelligent people, eg. complexity, even if they hurt other people.
Intelligent people are biased towards letting people do whatever they want, because intelligent people like themselves will do sensible things when given the choice. They aren’t used to stupid people, who do stupid things when allowed to do whatever they want. Intelligent people need freedom, while stupid people need strong inviolable guidelines about acceptable behaviour.
Could you give a citation for this? I’ve heard other studies claiming the opposite, and I’m not inclined to accept either at face value without knowing what actually went into the studies.
This article has a lot of bell-curve verbal IQ graphs from GSS (General Social Survey) data for the years 2000-2012, using the wordsum score as a measure of intelligence:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2012/04/verbal-intelligence-by-demographic/
It shows Republicans as smarter than Democrats, but Liberals smarter than Conservatives, and White people smarter than Black people, and some other comparisons.
Kind of; the great thing about those distributions is that you can talk about more of the distribution than one summary statistic. There’s a clump of high IQ democrats, a clump of low IQ democrats, and then a clump of medium IQ democrats, whereas the Republicans look like one clump of medium IQ republicans. There are more Democrats from 0 to 5, more Republicans from about 6 to 8, and a tiny few more Democrats from 9 to 10.
This matches with the prediction that there is a significant group of low-vocabulary people who vote predominantly Democratic, the middles voting somewhat more Republican, and the highs about evenly split.
I’d expect the correlation between IQ and WORDSUM to be much weaker when controlling for educational attainment, so some of those graphs will have to be taken with a grain of salt.
What would this statement predict about the WORDSUM distributions by educational level? Is that what that graph shows? (If the graph doesn’t have enough data to answer that question, how else could you answer it?)
So… I think the correlation between IQ and WORDSUM is mostly mediated by education (i.e., in terms of Stuff That Makes Stuff Happen, there’s an arrow from IQ to education and one from education and WORDSUM—there’s also one directly from IQ to WORDSUM but it’s thinner). So I’d expect that the third graph in that article to show an effect more extreme than if you used IQ instead.
But educational attainment is directly caused by IQ, so that wouldn’t make any sense.
Not exclusively IQ—parents’ socio-economic status also matters.
Parents’ socio-economic status is directly caused by parents’ IQ, which is passed on genetically (and a tiny bit environmentally) to their children.
What I mean is, someone with IQ 115 from a upper-class family will be more likely to go to college than someone with IQ 115 from a lower-class family.
I can’t find anything right now on what effect parents’ class (what does that mean? SES?) has on educational attainment for people of the same IQs. Someone else may want to look it up if they’re better at googling than me.
But it doesn’t matter. We already know that wordsum, IQ, and educational attainment are measuring similar things. Wordsum seems like a good proxy for IQ. It gives sensible answers in all the graphs, and it is said to correlate .71 with adult IQ.
Do you have a point, or some sort of theory about what I was saying? Do you disagree with the idea that Republicans are smarter (except at the top end) than Democrats, or that “liberals” are smarter than “conservatives”?
I don’t.
My point was that using a test that heavily relies on ‘learned’ knowledge such as Wordsum may have exaggerated the effect (compared to what one would see if one used a more culture-neutral test such as Raven’s progressive matrices) when some of the groups have historically been educated more than others for additional reasons besides IQ (even if said reasons correlate with IQ, so long as the correlation isn’t close to 1).
Explain that claim, please.
Environmentally in this context just means anything that’s not directly genetic or inherited epigenetic. It doesn’t mean plants and animals or anything like that.
IQ is mostly genetic (in rich egalitarian countries like the USA), but everyone seems to agree that there’s still some environmental factors that smart parents can do to make their children a tiny bit smarter. I don’t know exactly what those factors are though. Probably any kind of practice with thinking and studying would help a tiny bit, but perhaps other things to do with better care such as nutrition. But I know there’s not a lot that parents can do that helps with IQ long-term, especially when society as a whole is already trying to do everything they can to boost IQ environmentally already.
IQ is significantly genetic, but there’s considerably more than a little bit of variance in intelligence between people given the same DNA, and that’s without bringing in the effect of raising people in widely divergent cultures.