Citing a Wikipedia article covered in claims they have no cites for is fucking HILARIOUS!
In my mind LeMay your level of critical thinking is seriously deficient.
Why wouldn’t liberal atheists be smarter? You think it takes a whole lot of brains to read a thousand year old book filled with magic and say it’s true?
Every time a debate about the intelligence between liberals and conservatives pop up, the conservatives complain about getting the shaft. What’s so intelligent about wanting everything to stay the way things are? How do you progress in science, math, art, and other industries if you cannot think outside the box and just want to sit on your butt and say everything’s great, everything should be the way it always is.
It isn’t that conservatives want things to stay the way they are, it’s that they want things to change in a sensible, logical and beneficial manner. This is an approach vastly more intelligent than the toss-the-baby-out-with-the-bathwater, do-something-even-if-it’s-wrong approach so beloved by liberals and which has resulted in many of the problems that exist in this country today.
Depends on the conservative - many are reluctant to consider change.
Not to mention the definition of conservative is techincally one who wishes to maintain the status quo - that “want things to change in a sensible, logical and beneficial manner” is progressive.
What examples can you give where conservatives backed a sensible change to the status quo when liberals pushed for radical change?
Everything that I can think of, be it abolition, welfare, medicare/medicaid, minimum wage, anti-trust laws, and civil rights are progressive and idealogically liberal ideas that were necessary and have been proven correct through time; ideas that were attacked by the conservatives of their day as radical, extreme, and socialistic.
And whether you want to call it global warming or climate change, I feel confident that liberals will once again be proven right on this issue as well: we need to do something massive and immediate, or else the planet’s in real danger. Instead we hear idiots like DeMint claiming snowstorms means global warming is false, school board members reaching into their time machines and trying to teach creationism in schools, and obstructing any reform at all in health care.
It’s not “different intelligence” backing those propositions. It’s stupidity.
FWIW, P.Z. Meyers, who is an outspoken atheist, a liberal, and an evolutionary biologist, says this study (the one in the OP) is is bullshit, and its author is a scientifically incompetent loon, who has advocated, amongst other things, carpet bombing the Middle East with nuclear weapons.
The general intelligence factor or ‘g’ as measured on tests has strong predictive value for a number of socio-economic outcomes. These include, academics, income, health, and at the low end, crime and welfare dependency.
Certainly, the army continues to use psychometric tests as they predict how well people will be able to pick up new skills. People who score below a certain level are screened out as they will be too difficult to train.
For a nice summary, see ‘Why g matters: the complexity of ordinary life’ by psychologist Linda Gottfredson.
Also, neuroscientists are uncovering the neurobiological basis for intelligence. UCLA neuroscientist Paul Thompson & Yale Psychologist Jeremy Grey discuss some of these here. They include grey matter volume, cortical thickness and myelination quality (which insulates the neurons).
http://www.yale.edu/scan/GT_2004_NRN.pdf
More recently Thompson has shown that myelination is substantially heritable.
Actually, it is both just like gender or adolescence - it has a cultural aspect and a biological component.
Information Processing: Genetic clustering: 40 years of progress
I’d have to say that the whole conservative hate that seems so common among liberals these days, especially those that consider conservatives stupid simply because they have differing opinions, should fall somewhere next to Sexism and Racism. A man saying that women are inferior is morally wrong (true). A white man saying that blacks are inferior is morally wrong (true). But a liberal saying that conservatives are more likely to be stupid is perfectly fine? Excuse me?
If that comment right there was about African Americans, or Asians, or women, everyone would be in uproar. But since it’s about conservatives, everything’s fine.
Regards, Babale.
No, but describing the text in question as “a thousand year old book filled with magic” is (how do I put this politely?)… an unnuanced stance that lacks a certain level of scholarly rigor.
Not saying that I agree with the above people. I’m not Conservative. Independent here, liberal on some issues and conservative on others. But just because you disagree with someone does NOT make them stupid.
OK, I couldn’t get access to the article, but there are a few things that need to be mentioned. As said before, a correlation doesn’t say anything about causality. It might be the theory* that intelligence influences certain attitudes and beliefs, but all a correlation can tell us is that they are related and ‘move’ together. I also haven’t heard anything about the size of the effects, if the sample is large enough very small correlations (and correlations are usually quite small in psychology, as far as I’ve heard) can still be significant, without having a lot of substantial meaning.**
I personally am not really surprised if these are the findings - might also depend on where he sampled, the US or the UK - I would imagine that education can make people reconsider religion (when talking about evolution, how long the earth has been here, how we understand natural phenomena, etc.). These people would probably be also better at testing (related to education) and thus do better at IQ tests. Anyhow, nothing I know for sure, but definately plausible.
On a personal note, I am not religious and in american terms not even a liberal but a socialist (and not like Obama); and these results 9if the study is of quality) only confirm what I in general would’ve expected.
- I’m assuming here the article uses correlational techniques, as said before I coulndt read it.
** Again, I’m not sure this is the case, but should be looked in to.
Get back to us when “conservative” is an inborn trait and not a matter of choice, then you can make this argument.
Morally, black people can’t help what they are, thus blaming them for something like that is immoral. Accusing them of being stupid when they are biologically identical to whites is asinine, thus stupid.
However, a conservative is that way by virtue of what he believes and how he acts. It is certainly ok to judge people by their beliefs and actions.
Any book that posits a magical being creating things out of nothing and violating every known law of the universe is a fairy tale to me. The onus is on those believing in it to prove it, and so far they’ve failed miserably
True, and I apologize if I gave that impression. I only think it’s stupid of them to not listen to actual science when they base their beliefs. I’m not judging them because they disagree with me, I’m judging them because they lack a fundamental understanding of how proof, evidence, and science works.
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What’s being said is that stupid people are more likely to be conservative. It’s a statement about stupid people, not conservatives.
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Being politically conservative is not a genetic trait. The comparison is asinine. Judging a person to be stupid because of that individual’s own, unforced opinions is perfectly fair and reasonable, and is not an assumption based on anything but that person’s won expressed thinking. If you can’t call thinking stupid, then what can you call stupid?
Incidentally, anyone crying about liberals hating conservatives is not paying attention to anything in the news these days. There’s no comparison to the organized, mass hatred that liberals are getting from the right.
Well, he was off on the age. It’s actually 2000 years old.
His brilliance was in spite of a lot of things. He also believed hard as a rock in Alchemy (in fact he considered himself an alchemist first, a natural philosopher second), Atlantis, was into a number of “mystical” secret societies (well, “secret” societies), studied the whens and hows of the Apocalypse, was embroiled in petty politics not to mention his ongoing feud with Leibniz…
Thankfully, the guy seemed like an endless font of curiosity and energy and didn’t stop there. Still, one wonders what he could have achieved with a little bit more rigour.
Then prove it.
Whatever my feeling about the argument, I wanted to point out that both of you are using fallacious reasoning here. Specifically, Dio repeated J.S. Mill’s jibe “that not all conservatives are stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives”. Yet, both of you have flipped your ever-logical p’s and q’s in what I believe is a case of commutation of conditionals.
Exactly right.
Not at all. It seems pretty clear to me that his post is using belief in God to define conservative stupidity, even though he includes the caveat that this does not apply to all conservatives. When he says stupid people are more inclined toward tribalism, etc., what he’s really saying is that stupid people are more inclined toward belief in God.
I happen to be of the opinion that belief in God happens to be an indicator of intelligence. It is an attempt to make sense of that which appears to make no sense. (I’m speaking historically here.) A stupid person would look at the world the way it is and just accept it that way. An intelligent person would look at the world the way it is and be curious and try to find explanations for it, and that’s what believers have always done.
Frankly, it makes little more sense to me to believe that evolution alone accounts for life as we know it than to believe it was created by God in whatever way he created it (I don’t think most believers, even Christians, truly believe God created man instantly and out of whole cloth). No one has ever been to explain to my satisfaction how matter and the universe came into being in the first place or how, even if one were to accept the hypothesis that some protein or another over some vast period of time managed to be able to replicate itself and eventually morph into what we now know as living creatures, separate and highly sophisticated reproductive systems, requiring the participation of of both sexes and long, complicated gestation periods, ever managed to develop without killing off the creatures to begin with. And yet all this is taken on faith by atheists and those who believe that evolution only is the explanation for life.
So in essense you have two competing types of faith, neither of which can be proven absolutely at this time, even though physical evidence shows that evolution plays at least a modifying or adaptive role in creating psysiological change as time goes by. (And then again there’s the notion that God created evolution, so even evolution doesn’t necessarily disprove the existence of God but only certain Biblical versions of past events.)
So again, we’re back to the observation that any one group of people or beliefs is really not that much different than any other. Human beings throughout history, all over the globe and in virtually all cultures, have come to believe in God in one way or the other. So unless you want to posit that virtually all of humanity save for today’s liberal atheists has been stupid, it’s a difficult argument to make that people who believe in God do so primarily out of nothing but sheer stupidity.