Not sure what that is supposed to tell us. Bush takes tests better?
One of the smartest people I know is also one of the dumbest. When it comes to school related stuff the guy is near genius. He also has absolutely zero common sense. It is quite remarkable to see really. In his day-to-day conduct of life he is a disaster. Sit him in a room and tell him to design a widget and he’s your guy. Never in a million years would I want him in any position of power however (be it some management position to POTUS).
Well the last eight years of conservative rule has seen the government get all up in your face and into your business more than any time I can ever think of. So much for that notion.
And what Merijeek said.
ETA: Oh, and does “freedom to conduct their lives” include things like same-sex marriage and abortion rights for you? Or it is only some things people should be able to conduct their lives as they see fit in?
However, accepting “new ideas” can very easily be the basis of credulity–see my earlier point on what is accepted by what Ensign Edison refers to as “woo.” This whole thread is simply a re-hash of the typical nonsense in which the partisans of each side try to “explain” why their side is superior to their opponents, cognitively, morally, or whatever.
How is that not trolling? You seriously want to propose that your highly unscientific anecdote of accosting someone, who no doubt has highly settled views on a hugely contentious and polarising issue, is somehow a good basis for determining some sweeping conclusion about liberal cognition or empirical ignorance?
The answer to check the website is perfectly legitimate; I could tell you exactly what Obama’s platform is, but I too wouldn’t be inclined to indulge someone who is obviously approaching the issue in bad faith.
Some of those attacks on Bush are unfair, though I’ve never personally held Gore or Kerry out as intellectuals - I do think they’ve better and more reflective leaders and thinkers.
But let’s be honest here whatever Bush’s GPA, he is not a great example of credulity. He came into office marketed as a rugged individual, with relatively few ideological commitments except supply side economics, and a blank slate on foreign policy. But then he simply absorbed the worst excesses of his party, and governed to the extreme right.
His GPA therefore exists in contrasting confirmation to the problem - a fundamental incuriousness, intolerance of meaningless dissent, and Manichean thinking. I would also argue MBA’s are a degree where you can get away with his grades without moving beyond rigid dichotomous thinking. They involve some technical skill certainly, but its far from a guarantee of intellectual rigour.
I guess then it is a debate over what is better/worse. Credulity or dogmatism.
Each certainly have their downfall. However, I think credulity can be mitigated when you have lots and lots of people looking at an issue. Presumably they will not all be hoodwinked and someone can say, “Whoa…that’s not right!”
On the flip side I see dogmatism as harder to overcome. Even if some conservative says, “Whoa…that’s not right!” I think they will have a harder time bringing their compatriots around rather than bulling ahead on whatever it is. Indeed the person who yells “whoa” may get nailed to something for their effort and thus there is an active pressure to just conform and not accept contradictory datapoints.
It’s pretty simple, actually. Conservatives as a whole are less educated and more focused on their own thoughts and needs than other people’s than liberals. The conservative mindset is that change is bad, the way things were done in the past is the best way to do things, and so forth, which is not at all in line with learning new information and adjusting to current situations. Conservatives embrace ignorance as a platform.
Those are not, strictly speaking, measures of innate intelligence, and Bush’s observable words and behavior do not suggest a great hidden intellect, but even if you want to offer 40 year old test scores as evidence that he once had an average intelligence, I can easily counter that his current cognitive deficiencies are not congenital (the rest of his family isn’t dumb), but are a result of permament damage from drug and alcohol abuse.
Ozzy Osbourne wasn’t always the way he is now, and I don’t believe W was either. That’s just what chemicals can do to you.
There is science backing up the categories of conservative cognition bias I outline above. Try not to take it personally; it’s not an attack on you personally, and we all share these factors to some degree or another.
The research is not suggesting that every conservative is some quivering monster of prejudice and ignorance, far from it.
Funny, all of your posts that I’ve seen have been supporting the extreme right wing. Are you not telling the truth about your political positions for purposes of trying to advance your arguments deceptively, or are you one of the deluded people who try to claim that Ron Paul libertarianism is somehow more liberal than liberals?
The OP asked about credulity and several posters have made strong efforts to tie conservatives to credulity. Now we are going to simply ignore those arguments and flip it around to claim they are simply dogmatic instead of credulous?
There is a lot of credulous belief on the Right. There is also a lot of credulous belief on the Left. There is also firm dogmatism associated with the different parts of the political spectrum. The best that can be said regarding the various traits (positive and negative) is that they tend to express themselves in ways that can frequently be plotted along political lines. “Liberals” probably do have more openness to new ideas, hence the old aphorism, have an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out. “Conservatives” probably are less likely to accept new ideas, hence the aphorism that one cannot teach an old dog new tricks.
Trying to set up one side or the other as having a serious inherent failing does little more than demonstrate that the speaker is partisan.
There is, indeeed, science supporting cognition bias in each direction. Take it personally or not, but trying to establish moral values associated with types of reasoning is folly.(And I suspect that you would not find a lot of posters on this board accusing me of strong conservatism, in any event.)
Read back through this thread and note the various posters, (generally on the Left since the Righties might still be at church and have not yet wandered by to make their sneering comments), attempting to “demonstrate” that folks on the Right are foolish, gullible, dogmatic, uneducated, (perhaps uneducable), morally deficient, etc.
Err…I was responding to your point that an open mind was a possible failing of liberals by making them more credulous. Seems to me you flipped it, not me.
Maybe so. Personally I try to figure the best way to conduct my life. If something does not make sense I toss it in favor of something else. Which is to say if I found the conservative mindset compelling I’d be conservative. I allow that I can be wrong and I constantly seek new ideas and arguments to continually refine my world view (one reason I am on these Boards). If that makes me partisan by hoping to convince others of a “better way” then so be it. It could also well be that they teach me a better way. Works in both directions I think.
I think you must be confusing EE with someone else. Ensign has always been exceptionally left of center, especially on social issues. I think he might even be left of ME, and that’s really saying something.
Well, I don’t accept their sneering attitude or excessive generalisations.
I triggered my post purely in response to your seemingly categorical dismal of cognition-based explanations for conservative insensitivity to disconfirmatory information. The literature is manifestly clear that these category identifiers play a role in predicting conservative political morality, and they functionally explain why Obama has been such a prolific target for effective in-group viral misinformation campaigns, and why it’s nigh impossible to fight them with dispassionate debunking.
Dan Rather’s allegations against Bush were undone in all of five seconds effort from a conservative blog, and he got fired and nobody ever spoke about it again, whereas conservative misinformation persists beyond all rational explanation.
I would also argue it explains why Fox News viewers have more erroneous beliefs about candidate and party platforms than other outlets. Even if you control for the advocacy/entertainment aspect of Fox, there should be higher levels of error correction…
My point was that each side appears to have equal portions of credulous people, so choosing dogmatism over credulity (when I would also assert that neither side has a monopoly on dogmatism), would not appear, to me, to be a genuine issue. I took your statement that we needed to choose credulity or dogmatism to be assigning dogmatism to the Right while accepting a reversal of the OP that credulity goes to the Left. My opinion is simply that we all share in various levels of traits and that the only distinction is the direction those failings may express.
Choosing the liberal or conservative mindset does not show a moral failing. One’s world view will be shaped by one’s expectations when contrasted against one’s experiences, probably going back to one’s first three years of life. Anyone who strongly believes in one direction or another will feel compelled to try to persuade others to support those positions.
I have no criticism of that approach to life. My argument in this thread is that looking for ways to claim that the “other side” has inherent moral or cognitive failings (as opposed to simply holding a different world view that may provide better or worse guidelines to improving our lot in the world) is an exercise in self-congratulatory hubris.
Oppose the “other side” philosophically? Have at it with all the gusto you can muster.
Pretend that the “other side” is innately stupid, corrupt, credulous, or whatever? That is a sure way to miss learning from them on those issues in which they have (even if accidentally) gotten closer to truth or reality than one’s own side.
However, I have not categorically dismissed those explanations. I have merely pointed out that the cognition-based explanations can indicate errors in both directions.
Rather got fired for accepting and reporting a deliberate fraud–a specific taboo in his field of endeavor–not for disseminating bad information. (And the idea that no one spoke about it again is, at best, an odd claim.)
It is possible that the Fox audience errors have a direct psychological basis. It is also possible that there are far more issues that have led to those errors than a simple statement of cognitive development. We really do not have a valid test on that issue as there is no similarly Left leaning major news outlet. I doubt that it is true that all conservatives watch Fox or that all conservatives who watch Fox believe all the errors. (The numbers show a higher percentage of people believing nonsense, not a 100% acceptance.) In addition, the errors reported tend to be in conjunction with a single set of arguable facts. Once we move away from the lies regarding the rationalizations to get us into Iraq, does the Fox audience demonstrate the same level of acceptance of error regarding all other areas of information? I have not yet seen that. Has any study been done regarding the followers of DailyKOS or the MoveOn web sites? Do we know that in (some area of) conflicting information those audiences are more critically aware than the Fox viewers who have swallowed Bush’s lies? I have seen no such study.
Population of Texas: 23,507,783 * .23 = 5,406,790/100 = 54,067 liberals you need to find who still believe the Palin baby rumor. Better get crackin’ on that–there are still 49 states to go!
Really, how stupid do you have to be to still be buying this one? What happens when Texans hear ads about Jeremiah Wright? Do they have special teams to come in and clean up the head shrapnel?