January 13, 2008

• I've never met a truly conservative (in a real sense rather than just a political one) thinker who was very bright. Many have academic smarts, but that is a different thing from situational intelligence, or empathy for that matter. I think it may be a matter of comprehension. You can learn a lot of things and swallow a lot of rote information but truly understanding it takes a further enlightened step. I think that everyone has the potential to grow, and to a great degree it may be that very conservative thinkers are simply inhibited by fear based thinking, reactivity rather than creativity, and resistance to change. My current thinking is that it all boils down to fear, that fear is at the base of all malfunctioning action.
• Coincidentally, I have just been reading this series of essays which discusses personality traits that are more likely to result in a conservative worldview. Your point about fear Hank; I think if we ask where that fear comes from we find ourselves needing to examine deeper impulses and yearnings.
• I'm scouring the Whitehouse website, looking for a counter example.
• "Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives." -- John Stuart Mill I think there are quite a lot of very smart people in the conservative camp, but conservatism is the province of the small-minded in general. Education rather than innate intelligence seems to be the most distinguishing factor between people who develop liberal attitudes and those who do not. The very exposure to a variety of ideas generally forces people to consider a variety of alternatives and possibilities, and stubborn or stupid indeed is the person who will reject any and all new ideas. The American political distinction between "liberal" and "conservative" traditionally simplified the idea down to a consideration of whether one saw government as the solution or the problem. These days, I think that particular binary consideration is a non-starter. The "conservative" Republicans are just as much fans of government excess as the Democrats, they just like to give the money to different interest groups. This has very little, if anything, to do with intelligence.
• That's right, of course - a binary distinction doesn't really begin to capture the differences. In Britain, though, I don't think the binary distinction is quite as simple as government being the solution or the problem. In the days of Mrs T, in any case, the choice was between a party that favoured laissez-faire for the economy and government control of social behaviour, and a party that favoured laissez-faire for social behaviour and government control of the economy. I know people who favoured laissez-faire on both counts who held their noses and voted for Thatcher, and people who favoured government intervention in everything and did the same with Labour. It may not be quite not so clear-cut these days. The other thing you have to take into account is that right-wing people often misrepresent themselves in public as more left-leaning than they really are when it gets to the ballot box (which is why you couldn't find anyone to say a good word for Thatcher back in the old days (sorry to keep harking back) but she kept getting re-elected). I think this is because there is a strong correlation between extraversion and leftism: the left always makes most noise because lefties tend to be more gregarious and outgoing, but there's a largeish body of silent conservatives too shy or intimidated to confess that they're really committed reactionaries. I wouldn't be surprised if half the 'smart' subjects in this research who supplied politically correct answers in interviews were merely demonstrating their mental agility and social deference while secretly favouring hanging, repatriation, and a flat rate of income tax.
• Yes. Yes it does.
• While I don’t have a personal axe to grind with the data in this study per se, in general I do have a problem with sociological studies that attempt to deduce a driver for correlated behavior sets. As the cliché goes, correlation does not equal causation. Personally, I’d be cautious about reasoning of the blog post: 1) because the study controlled for a few items, and those items did not explain the differences in data 2) the answer must be biological in nature If you read the original research paper from Deary et al, they do *not* jump to these same conclusions. Simply, the answer must be the result of something that was not controlled for. While it could be a difference in the biology underlying these individuals, it could also be explained by 1,000,000 other things. We just don’t know. In skimming the original paper, one alternate explanation did come to mind. What if people with higher IQs have more options/security in our society? (Seems like a safe bet.) What if, as a result of these extra options, they feel less threatened by change? Obviously the authors attempted to control for this somewhat by looking at educational attainment as well as “occupational social class”. But in looking deeper into their scoring for occupational class it occurred to me that they simply attached a score to each individual’s occupation. From the paper: “Each participant's current social class (professional-managerial, skilled nonmanual, skilled manual, or semi- or unskilled) was derived from his or her own occupation.” To me, this seems like an overly-vague way of capturing occupational opportunity. They’re assigning judgment to whole fields of work, which seems rather presumptive to me. As an example: The most intelligent youth in a rural setting may not aspire to become investment bankers, lawyers, or academics. The most intelligent members of a farming community may become managers of their co-op, the head operator at a milling plant, or the line chief of a manufacturer. These individuals may still have more opportunity than their less-intelligent peers, thus driving down their innate fear of the new. Nonetheless, this study might classify all of them as ‘unskilled manual labor’ – one of the lower scores in their scale of social class. By using a broad scoring system, the study may have missed the correlation between occupational attainment and a ‘liberal’ mentality. Anyway, point being, there are thousands of alternate hypotheses that explain the data without jumping to conclusions about some sort of ‘innate biological difference’. The authors of the original study were careful to avoid this trap, unlike the author of the blog post.
• Conservatism correlates with fear, not with intelligence. (But fear correlates--inversely--with intelligence, so there you go.)
• At the very least, you are not going to think, hey, he’s a lot like me, he must be stupid. Quite the contrary; I'm suspicious of every friend I make, for just this reason.
• I happen to partly agree, as much as I kinda hate to. Agree in part with many of the cogent arguments above. This is a tough ol' world. Takes diligence to keep up with the issues, and the issues today are complex. Someone with a lower intelligence is going to be easily sucked in by the media and manipulated by emotional, illogical, and semi-factual arguments. Hell, even intelligent people can be deceived by slanted statistics and manipulated graphs, and they're ready to question or be skeptics. Academic standings and high wages don't correlate with smarts: I've friends who've slogged through a Master's degree or make $100,000 a year, but they believe EVERYTHING they see in print or on the net, especially if it corresponds with their previous world-view. And fact after fact presented will not sway them--they have a way of ignoring facts or explaining them away. Environmental issues and global warming; genetic design; stem cell research and cloning; freedom and civil rights, gay rights, women's rights, HUMAN rights; the war in Iraq, and foreign relations; waterboarding and torture; capital punishment; birth control and abortion: on and on. We can't be expert or as informed as we should be on all these things, yet we all have (strong) opinions on all of them and everything else. I believe the people with the strongest opinions know and question the least. It behooves us all to ask why we have the opinions we do, and to look at the cognitive dissonance in our ideas. I believe in the sanctity of life. I hate war, and think what America is doing overseas is evil and wrong. I hate that we use violence and violent sex as entertainment and to sell things. OTOH, I think WWII was right. Not all the circumstances and reasons America was in the war, and not all that was done, but I believe that Hitler needed to be stopped. I believe he needed to die. I believe in capital punishment for multiple murderers, especially for those that have killed a child. I believe that when it happens it is a failure and a blot on our society, but that we, as a society, must remove that killer from our society with sorrow and dismay. It wouldn't bother me one frickin' bit if someone offed that barstard Bush to stop him continuing the evil he's doing in promoting corporate profits the expense of human lives. I wish I could feel repulsed at the way I feel about him, but then I look at images of the dead and dying innocent, and I just can't. I am totally committed to birth control for any female or male of any age, in any relationship. I believe strongly in abortion. I don't like it, and I think it's the worst form of birth control there is, but it should be the woman's right of last resort. We need to get our shit together and stop this crap of abstinence-based sex education in our schools. So pour me a glass of cognitive dissonance, someone, but don't accuse me of not thinking about it.
• FAQ has posted 0 links and 9 comments on MonkeyFilter since November 19, 2005. FAQ, your comment above leads me to strongly encourage you to lurk less.
• Some thoughts that might be a fit with this post Are intelligent people always the most moral?
• Ack, striking awfully close to home. Almost everyone in my workplace skews liberal, which is typical of university employees, I suppose. But new office mate is Republican to the marrow, and lately can't stop raving about Huckabee. We can't talk about very much without offending each other. Which is fine from her end, since "not offending people" isn't high on her priority list. I don't know if that's related to her conservative worldview or not.
• OK, now I've got Private Willis's song from Iolanthe stuck in my head. Thanks. And I meant to comment before that Pleg's assessment of the enomomy vs.social behavio[u]r issue seems like a fair likeness of the U.S. political divide as well, and quite well-said. *pours Pleg nice cuppa tea*
• *misses Fes and f8x*
• What MCT said, re: FAQ. Also, fear correlates--inversely--with intelligence I disagree completely. We all experience our share of fear. It's what we do with our fear, how we react to it and manage it, that matters -- and that, I'd argue, is a determining factor in how intelligent we are.
• Someone with a lower intelligence is going to be easily sucked in by the media and manipulated by emotional, illogical, and semi-factual arguments. I don't really agree - that sounds like the arguments of the Adullamites, who opposed extension of the franchise on the grounds that stupid and uneducated people were not competent to vote in a disinterested and rational manner. You could argue that the franchise is a matter of rights more than competence, but I'd say voting skill is evenly distributed anyway because educated and intelligent people are actually more prone to fall victim to certain kinds of deception and propaganda. Sometimes it's only the peasants who really understand what's going on. The linked piece hints at something like this itself when it notes that the brighter kids were much less cynical and more trusting of the beneficence of the political process.
• I give up. I can only find privileged, well-educated upper-middle-class conservatives there. Whoulda thunk it? Actually, the people who did this survey, they presumably consider themselves intelligent, right? And they are "liberals"? Is it a coincidence that their study supports their image of themselves?
• This study is errily reminiscent of Rushton's work on intelligence and race, and has the same flaws. First of all, how do you define and measure intelligence fairly and objectively? How do you eliminate all other contributing factors? How do you keep your own subjective opinions (I want this to be true) from poisoning the interpretation of the data?
• Pleg, I agree that sometimes the peasants do, at least the uneducated, or rather the self-educated. Anyone of lower intelligence probably doesn't care about the issues, and if they do care, has problems understanding. I know! How about we give a political intelligence test to EVERYBODY before they can vote. If you pass, it doesn't matter what your IQ, income, or education level is. If you fail, get your arse in there and figure out what the issues are. You have to pass a civics test, too. Ask people what the three branches of government are? Doh! Learn how your government works, doof! Some of the "smartest" people I've met for political savvy have been naturalized citizens. They KNOW because they've had to study and pass a REAL test, not just scrape through high school, and they care, because this is now THEIR country. That might just cut this crap of spouting opinions without knowing what you're talking about.
• echoes mothninja re Fes and f8x
• f8xy made a brief return recently, didn't he? But yeah, where the heck is Fes?
• Sounds good, BlueHorse, so long as the two of us (and other enlightened folk) get to draw up the questions for the test!
• Fes told me a few months ago he wouldn't be back, but he's said that before and ended up lurking, so who knows? Maybe he's reading this comment RIGHT NOW! Hi Fes!
• Ironically, it was posts like this that made Fes leave.
• On this topic, yes. But the discussion that ensued in this particular post seems far from the "Boy, look at them dumb necons; what'll they do next, deploy a naval attack on the see-ment pond?" sort of thing that turns off great conservative posters like Fes and f8x. Many posters have pointed out the weak points in the research, and aside from my how-this-personally-related-to-my-office-dynamic story and ubiquitous Gilbert & Sullivan reference, I thought the discussion was pretty balanced and focused on the article rather that the stereotypes it brings up. YMMV, IANAE, NSFW, LOL, etc.
• I know that Fes was tired of being called out on topics like this to "defend his side". He even emailed me on occasion when I took the "non-extreme lefty" position in threads (I'm only slightly left of center, myself) that I was wasting my time, and shouldn't bother getting invoved in threads like that. He just got tired of defending himself from a "one against many" position too many times and eventually left for good. I hope he comes back, too.
• I agree that this thread has been more balanced. I suspect it's because Bush et al have one year left (exactly!) and the left sees some light at the end of the tunnel. They're less angry and frustrated. This same post two years ago would have been a pile-on.
• Is it too late for me to say that I want moneyjane to come back?
• Never, mon ami.
• And beeswacky, spacekitty, mandyman, dizzy, and many others. And petebest could visit more often, too.
• True. I didn't mean that to the exclusion of the others. It's just that I hold moneyjane in a special place in my heart. Fes, too, but for entirely different reasons.
• You know, I usually get upset at the thought of defending myself in the religious threads, so I just don't go to them. And I still love all of you heathen monkeys, even when you post about how dumb anybody who has any faith is. Too bad Fes couldn't see it that way. It's a loss to all of us.
• I hereby state for the record that all conservatives are not as bad as G.W. Bush and his cronies, and all theists are not as bad as Pat RObertson and his cronies. That's politics and religion covered. If I can figure out the analagous person for sex, I'll have all the sensitive topic covered. ;-)
• Kit's plenty anal-agous for sex, as I am given to understand.
• Lara, Again, the comment by rocket regards politics applies. I think many of us are outraged and disgusted with the religion being hammered on by Robertson, et al, as well as the hypocrisies shown by so many of our politicians. Much of the pile-on comes is generated because of the extremest religious attitudes. The best discussions with religious folk that I've had are those in which we agree that both sides are concerned and have a stake in an issue, but view it differently, and are content to agree to disagree and attempt to find a workable compromise. The worst discussions end in the non-religious stating: "Well, you're WRONG." That's bad enough, but then the religious right states: Well, YOU'RE WRONG, and YOU'RE going to HELL! That certainly doesn't promote constructive dialog! I have a firm belief in separating church and state, which doesn't mean that religions should be dissed, or that ethical and moral stances should be abandoned. I have a firm belief in evolution, but I don't object to the mention of creationism in schools. MENTION of, and respect given to those who believe it, but not hours spent in teaching it. That properly belongs in the home and church. Trouble is, creationists won't even consider equal time or ANY time to evolution. Nope, You're ALL going to HELL! End dialog. I, too, miss Fes, and I'm sorry he left. I can understand, because he did have to withstand a large storm, but by golly, the fella made us think and articulate where we're coming from!! Plegs, I don't know about drawing up the questions for a test. For one thing, I'm always amazed at the depth of my ignorance on some things that I thought I knew/understood until push came to shove. Perhaps a better woman than I.My daughter could. She's a PolSci major and frequently points out where I'm lacking.
• I miss Fes. I also don't believe we should avoid politics or religion. They're important topics. We just need to be open minded and respectful. All of us, of whatever persuasion. What was it that caused Fes to leave, specifically? Also, yeah, moneyjane. Miss ya.
• it was posts like this that made Fes leave I doubt it. It's a legitimate post, a provocative assertion worthy of discussion. Even if it's not a YouTube link. GYOB if you want complete control.
• GramMa, I totally understand where you're coming from. Nobody believes more firmly in separation of church and state than I do. And I doubt you'll find anyone more liberal than me. I just still happen to believe in a higher being. I live my life my way, and I'm good with that. But since the religious nuts that are in control have made life hell for anyone with any faith, I choose to just stay away from any religious discussions, since even I see anyone talking religion, and coming down on the God side, as nuts by default these days. I'm just saying that I wish Fes could do the same. It's so hard to not see people on the conservative side as nuts by default for the same reasons. But politics and religion are a tiny sliver of what we talk about, and so not worth leaving over. And I'd never deprive you monkeys of my shining conversation.
• P.S. The thread is ok, but I can see where the title might be a little inflammatory.
• For the record, I don't personally have a problem with the post, and any assertion that Fes would have is pure speculation on my part, so let the knickers be untwisted. Complete control is not my aim. ...and the YouTube nonsense is too old to still be carrying around.
• I did not have sex with that woman.
• Which woman?
• The ATM tech. It was just a dream.
• MonkeyFilter: nuts by default MonkeyFilter: Complete control is not my aim. say the last in a monkey-robot voice--much funner that wayz Lara: Never leave us!
• Cappy, if I wear my moneyjane mask will you come a calling?
• I don't know about a-calling, but I'll definitely -- HEY-O!
• For the record, I don't personally have a problem with the post Just please be aware, rocket, that you have a tendency to make statements that are tinged with provocative, potentially insulting implications. Though I'd rather it didn't, this really hits a nerve for me, especially when it's followed by a denial that any inflammatory implication was intended. In other words, your words have an effect, and it's your responsibility to own your part in the production of that effect. Thanks.
• Gentlemen, please! As far as I'm concerned, you're both potential murderers.
• You know, I can see how you made that inference. I think we've all been around the internet long enough to understand how difficult it is to communicate tone in a typed message. There are as many ways to interpret the intent behind a message as there are people who read it, and it can cause trouble if misinterpreted. Personally, if I'm offended by what someone types online, I try to see if there are less offensive ways to interpret it, and if so, I assume that was the way it was intended. When I first say the title of this post I admit I rolled my eyes and thought "Here we go...", expecting a lefty pile-on. Once I read it and some of the comments, my concerns were abated. It was a good posts and an intelligent discussion. When the talk turned to Fes's departure, I knew from his communication with me that this sort of post exasperated him, as he was inevitably called to the carpet to defend the undefendable. I'm sorry you took that as a slight against you or your post.
• Thanks koko...that means a lot.
• If either one of you murders Koko, then there are no witnesses. Just a thought.
• If either one of you murders Koko, then there are no witnesses. <*peeps thru keyhole*/small> MonkeyFilter: statements that are tinged with provocative, potentially insulting implications.
• Ran across this today and immediately thought of this thread: It is the work of an educated mind to be able to entertain an idea without accepting it. Aristotle
• If you kill Koko, I'll pay a premium for her toenails.
• Consider this a virtual handshake, rocket. And Koko, I like to think I fall somewhere between gentleman and murderer without quite reaching either extreme. But you never know. And GramMa, that Aristotle line is perfect. And MCT, eww, you're gross.
• I've provided for the distribution of my toenails in my will, mct. YOU WON'T GET TOENAIL ONE. *drains whiskey glass, looking smug* *fade to commercial*
• Yes, Kok, but what about the earwax collection?
• EEEWWWWW