# RWs are not stupid; it's much worse than that **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [May 23, 2012, 5:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rws-are-not-stupid-its-much-worse-than-that/622856 "2012-05-23T17:55:43Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Grumman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/43a26b/32.png) [@Grumman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Grumman)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2012, 3:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rws-are-not-stupid-its-much-worse-than-that/622856/41 "2012-05-24T03:47:42Z")
You lost me the moment you quoted someone who would ever refer to Conservapedia - a wiki edited by non-Right Wing trolls. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2012, 5:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rws-are-not-stupid-its-much-worse-than-that/622856/42 "2012-05-24T05:22:05Z")
> [@Grumman](#): > > You lost me the moment you quoted someone who would ever refer to Conservapedia - a wiki edited by non-Right Wing trolls. :dubious: Not “edited.” ---
**Author:** ![PBear42](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ecccb3/32.png) [@PBear42](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PBear42)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2012, 6:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rws-are-not-stupid-its-much-worse-than-that/622856/43 "2012-05-24T06:53:26Z")
> [@](#): > > **Chris Mooney** (from the OP): So it is not that Schlafly, or other conservatives as sophisticated as he, can’t make an argument. Rather, the problem is that when Schlafly makes an argument, it’s hard to believe it has anything to do with real intellectual give and take. He’s not arguing out of an openness to changing his mind. He’s arguing to reaffirm what he already thinks (his “faith”), to defend the authorities he trusts, and to bolster the beliefs of his compatriots, his tribe, his team. This is as true of the left as it is of the right. FWIW, I’m on the left. ---
**Author:** ![Latro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/a87d85/32.png) [@Latro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Latro)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2012, 9:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rws-are-not-stupid-its-much-worse-than-that/622856/44 "2012-05-24T09:52:29Z")
As an outsider what I observe is that although indeed both sides pick and choose their ‘facts’ from the big pool, there is one critical difference between conservative and ‘liberal’. The liberal believes his truth to be self-evident and that he can convince the people by showing the facts. The conservative is far more willing to just simply **lie** to the people. If the typification upthread is correct, that conservatives are opposed to equality, the reason or even need to lie becomes self apparent. If you want to get supporters, from those that in fact you despise and have no intention to actually represent, you will need to lie to them. ---
**Author:** ![New\_Deal\_Democrat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/9d8465/32.png) [@New\_Deal\_Democrat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/New_Deal_Democrat)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2012, 11:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rws-are-not-stupid-its-much-worse-than-that/622856/45 "2012-05-24T11:34:14Z")
Liberals also deny the importance of facts that conflict with what they want to believe. Through the constraints of political correctness they try to suppress mention of those facts. I am not letting conservatives off the hook. I am just saying that if someone wants to believe something strongly that person is prone to look for confirmation of the belief, and prone to disregard what challenges the belief. ---
**Author:** ![Ludovic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/7ab992/32.png) [@Ludovic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ludovic)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2012, 11:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rws-are-not-stupid-its-much-worse-than-that/622856/46 "2012-05-24T11:40:19Z")
> [@New\_Deal\_Democrat](#): > > Liberals also deny the importance of facts that conflict with what they want to believe. Through the constraints of political correctness they try to suppress mention of those facts. That’s true of the politically correct on the extreme left. On the right, you can’t shake a stick without hitting a big time reality denier. ---
**Author:** ![Latro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/a87d85/32.png) [@Latro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Latro)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2012, 12:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rws-are-not-stupid-its-much-worse-than-that/622856/47 "2012-05-24T12:30:41Z")
> [@Latro](#): > > If the typification upthread is correct, that conservatives are opposed to equality, the reason or even need to lie becomes self apparent. If you want to get supporters, from those that in fact you despise and have no intention to actually represent, you will need to lie to them. Just to expand a little on that. I can see 3 types of conservatives; -Those that play the game (being/becomming the elite; aquire wealth and power). -Those being played. -Those that are employed by the players to keep them in power. ---
**Author:** ![Swords\_to\_Plowshares](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/b38774/32.png) [@Swords\_to\_Plowshares](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Swords_to_Plowshares)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2012, 12:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rws-are-not-stupid-its-much-worse-than-that/622856/48 "2012-05-24T12:34:46Z")
Conservapedia is almost entirely the work of one man, Andy Schafly. It shouldn’t be extrapolated to make any point about conservatives as a whole. ---
**Author:** ![New\_Deal\_Democrat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/9d8465/32.png) [@New\_Deal\_Democrat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/New_Deal_Democrat)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2012, 12:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rws-are-not-stupid-its-much-worse-than-that/622856/49 "2012-05-24T12:34:51Z")
> [@Ludovic](#): > > That’s true of the politically correct on the extreme left. On the right, you can’t shake a stick without hitting a big time reality denier. When Lawrence Summers suggested that women on the average have less mathematical aptitude than men he had to step down as president of Harvard. It is safe to agree with An Inconvenient Truth. It can be dangerous to agree in public with The Bell Curve. ---
**Author:** ![gamerunknown](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/6bbea6/32.png) [@gamerunknown](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gamerunknown)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2012, 12:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rws-are-not-stupid-its-much-worse-than-that/622856/50 "2012-05-24T12:52:23Z")
> [@New Deal Democrat](#): > > It can be dangerous to agree in public with The Bell Curve. Probably because of the mendacity of the original researchers and the thorough debunking given to such a concept by Gould and Lewontin. Not so much to do with being a _bien pensant_ as being intellectually honest. [Other researchers](http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/30032598?uid=3738032&uid=2&uid=4&sid=47699032112927) have investigated gender differences in mathematics honestly without being castigated. ---
**Author:** ![New\_Deal\_Democrat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/9d8465/32.png) [@New\_Deal\_Democrat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/New_Deal_Democrat)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2012, 1:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rws-are-not-stupid-its-much-worse-than-that/622856/51 "2012-05-24T13:06:12Z")
> [@New\_Deal\_Democrat](#): > > When Lawrence Summers suggested that women on the average have less mathematical aptitude than men he had to step down as president of Harvard. It is safe to agree with An Inconvenient Truth. It can be dangerous to agree in public with The Bell Curve. > [@gamerunknown](#): > > Probably because of the mendacity of the original researchers and the thorough debunking given to such a concept by Gould and Lewontin. Not so much to do with being a _bien pensant_ as being intellectually honest. [Other researchers](http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/30032598?uid=3738032&uid=2&uid=4&sid=47699032112927) have investigated gender differences in mathematics honestly without being castigated. If those who disagree with books like “The Bell Curve” were confident in their arguments they would not try to supplement their arguments with threats against the careers of those who disagree with them. ---
**Author:** ![FinnAgain](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/finnagain/32/12500_2.png) [@FinnAgain](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FinnAgain)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2012, 1:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rws-are-not-stupid-its-much-worse-than-that/622856/52 "2012-05-24T13:12:49Z")
If those who were say that the phlogiston theory of combustion was wrong were confident in their argument, they wouldn’t try to mandate that science teachers teach oxidation. ---
**Author:** ![Bricker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/977dab/32.png) [@Bricker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bricker)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2012, 1:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rws-are-not-stupid-its-much-worse-than-that/622856/53 "2012-05-24T13:30:50Z")
> [@BigT](#): > > Prove it wrong, then. Show us somewhere where your opinion on a political issue has changed due to the revelation of new facts. I can take that challenge. In fact, I’d love to toss that exact challenge back to the OP. ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2012, 1:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rws-are-not-stupid-its-much-worse-than-that/622856/54 "2012-05-24T13:39:59Z")
> [@New\_Deal\_Democrat](#): > > If those who disagree with books like “The Bell Curve” were confident in their arguments they would not try to supplement their arguments with threats against the careers of those who disagree with them. Tell that to the climate change deniers. In any case, treats do not show who is correct, and when I check on the issue the issue most indeed do know why is that “The bell curve” remains a discredited book. > **[The Bell Curve revisited.](https://slate.com/culture/2005/10/the-bell-curve-revisited.html)** > > Imagine that the labels "morally courageous" and "intellectually honest" didn't refer to inner personal qualities but instead were prizes in a... > [@](#): > > Far from having held up as a “careful” work of scholarship, The Bell Curve has inspired a lot of suspicion on the part of the properly accredited. In his own book on human intelligence, The Mismeasure of Man, Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould pointed out that Herrnstein and Murray had buried key data in remote appendices. Upon closer inspection, that data appeared to demolish one of their core claims, that low IQ correlates highly with anti-social behaviors, more highly even than low socioeconomic status. (Apparently they didn’t plot “the scatter of variation” around their own “regression curves” and didn’t “square their correlation coefficients”; to statistics what the layup and jump shot are to basketball.) Do I know if Gould was right? Of course not. But I do know that in response to The Bell Curve, the widely esteemed Harvard sociologist Christopher Jencks organized a yearlong faculty workshop on IQ and meritocracy at the University of Chicago. The dozens of resulting papers were presented by the Brookings Institute in a book, The Black-White Test Score Gap, whose conclusion was summarized by Jencks in the forward: “Despite endless speculation, no one has found genetic evidence indicating that blacks have less intellectual ability than whites. Thus while it is clear that eliminating the test score gap would require enormous effort by both blacks and whites and would probably take more than one generation, we believe it can be done.” > > Do I know if Jencks was right? No, but I find particularly interesting one early chapter in the Brookings collection, “Race, Genetics, and IQ,” by Richard Nisbett, a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Michigan. In his essay, Nisbett reviews all the studies that might weaken Murray and Herrnstein’s beloved thesis that blacks, taken as a group, are less intelligent than whites, taken as a group. He reviewed studies of skin color, blood group indicators, reported white ancestry, mixed-race children, adoption studies, and, most intriguingly, a study of the children of American soldiers and German mothers in post-war Germany. (The cohort of the children of black soldiers had the same IQ as the cohort of the children of white soldiers, indicating that the relatively depressed IQs of American-born blacks are an artifact of an environmental factor—the intractability of white American racism, maybe?) Like any prudent scientist, Nisbett admits when his evidence is vague, incomplete, or contradictory. But on one score he was unequivocal: **“By conventional academic standards, Herrnstein and Murray’s review of the evidence on the heritability of the IQ difference between blacks and whites is shockingly incomplete and biased.”** ---
**Author:** ![New\_Deal\_Democrat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/9d8465/32.png) [@New\_Deal\_Democrat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/New_Deal_Democrat)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2012, 1:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rws-are-not-stupid-its-much-worse-than-that/622856/55 "2012-05-24T13:50:25Z")
> [@GIGObuster](#): > > Tell that to the climate change deniers. > > In any case, treats do not show who is correct, and when I check on the issue the issue most indeed do know why is that “The bell curve” remains a discredited book. > > [The Bell Curve revisited.](http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2005/10/moral_courage.html) Here again if evidence against books like The Bell Curve was compelling it would not be dangerous in many environments to agree publicly. The failure of No Child Left Behind to achieve its goals gives more evidence that innate ability is more important than the learning environment. ---
**Author:** ![BlinkingDuck](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/eada6e/32.png) [@BlinkingDuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BlinkingDuck)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2012, 1:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rws-are-not-stupid-its-much-worse-than-that/622856/56 "2012-05-24T13:56:40Z")
> [@Bricker](#): > > I can take that challenge. > > In fact, I’d love to toss that exact challenge back to the OP. I’ll step up…and there is even proof on the Dope. I was under the opinion that in the 70’s, scientists were very concerned with global cooling and that the same solutions they presented were similar to the solutions to global warming. I was told on the Dope, with links, that this was not true. The global cooling concern was a media/fringe affair and that mainstream science was not thinking this way. I have reversed my opinion on that topic. ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2012, 2:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rws-are-not-stupid-its-much-worse-than-that/622856/57 "2012-05-24T14:12:49Z")
> [@New\_Deal\_Democrat](#): > > Here again if evidence against books like The Bell Curve was compelling it would not be dangerous in many environments to agree publicly. > > The failure of No Child Left Behind to achieve its goals gives more evidence that innate ability is more important than the learning environment. Forgetting that there is evidence that the environment is still there, just by personal experience in the field, I can tell you that having both parents dedicated to the education of their kids is one of the main differences; besides, you are only skipping and not dealing with what the researchers said about the book. ---
**Author:** ![gamerunknown](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/6bbea6/32.png) [@gamerunknown](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gamerunknown)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2012, 2:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rws-are-not-stupid-its-much-worse-than-that/622856/58 "2012-05-24T14:17:06Z")
> [@New Deal Democrat](#): > > Here again if evidence against books like The Bell Curve was compelling it would not be dangerous in many environments to agree publicly. It damages a person’s credibility to believe the queen is an alien lizard or to be a member of the Flat Earth Society regardless of political affiliation (the former, not as much of a problem among the left and vice versa for the latter). It’s not so much the agenda as the ignorance of substantial evidence. NASA doesn’t have an affirmative action program where they hire geocentrists just for balance. ---
**Author:** ![FinnAgain](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/finnagain/32/12500_2.png) [@FinnAgain](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FinnAgain)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2012, 2:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rws-are-not-stupid-its-much-worse-than-that/622856/59 "2012-05-24T14:26:10Z")
If evidence against books like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was so compelling, being a gigantic anti-Semite would not be dangerous in many environments. Admirable wishes, admirable wishes. Maybe one day we’ll make the world safe for anti-black racists too, and the Bell Curve can be shouted from the rooftops of firebombed black churches. ---
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2012, 2:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rws-are-not-stupid-its-much-worse-than-that/622856/60 "2012-05-24T14:29:02Z")
Back to the OP - the issue isn’t whether RWers are right or wrong on whatever list of issues. I assume they are wrong. It is whether, as alleged, there is some sort of actual difference in how their minds work that explains why they are willing to believe nonsense pseudo-science that supports their beliefs. So far, I’ve seen no actual evidence cited, and I must say on a simple hearing it sounds like partisan pseudo-science of the most egregious sort. Certainly RWers are willing to swallow all sorts of silly pseudo-science for partisan reasons, but this article looks like an example of the fact that those on the other side are on occasion, as well. 😃 [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rws-are-not-stupid-its-much-worse-than-that/622856.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rws-are-not-stupid-its-much-worse-than-that/622856.md?page=4)