Not hard to find peer-reviewed cites that claim that IQ is linked to liberalism.
If the participants of this message board are overwhelmingly liberal, it’s entirely likely that the comments of conservatives would be moderated more frequently without the any bias on the part of the moderators who write the warnings and notes. Moderators have stated that they don’t read all the threads and that they rely on user reports. If I disagree with someone’s politics, I’d be more likely to report their transgressions. I imagine that’s so for other people.
Oh, wow :smack: thank you for that bit of insight. I mean it is so obvious, we all know that conservatives are honest, hardworking, salt-of-the-earth folk, while liberals are all lazy, layabout leeches bent on destroying America. The scales have fallen from my eyes, praise be.
Personally, I would not want you to leave here.
I respect your opinion even when it diverges from mine.
Much as I said to Bricker. This place wouldn’t be the same without you.
Rationality is supposed to win here over emotionality. I genuinely wish people here could converse more civilly. Because words are all we have here.
But, I am at a loss as to how to affect such a change.
But always remember, this ‘here’ is a shared illusion.
We make the rules jointly as a group or as a mob.
Should we care for each other?
Or not?
I choose ‘care for each other’, and I, Gagundathar the Inexplicable, will do so.
As I always have.
I don’t have a vast knowledge of message boards but it does seem that most tend to have at least a majority of like-minded people.
As someone who is generally left in my political views, but on one issue disagree with most of my liberal brothers and sisters, I can tell you that it gets old being told that I really hate women, am an idiot for thinking that unborn children have rights, etc. That makes me less likely to post or answer polls on boards where that sort of comment is common.
I really think the explanation is mostly that people tend to join and stay on message boards where their views are, if not accepted, at least not demonized by most other posters.
I don’t think this message board is to the left as much as those boards are to the right. Do they they treat posters that lean left worse or better than we treat those on the right?
I don’t know. I found blogs and such saying things like “it’s well known that libertarians score the highest on IQ tests” but no abstracts or such in the first pages of results. Some of the references appeared to be based on Kanazawa’s article.
Both politics and IQ are contentious subjects. Any article combining the two is of dubious value IMO, and will be disputed regardless of merit or conclusions.
I should mention that the second cite I gave didn’t connect liberalism and IQ. It claimed low childhood IQ is correlated becoming a racist and the acceptance of right-wing ideology.
And this is a point no one seems to notice. The conservatives here are just as unwelcoming to liberals as we are to them. It’s just that there are more of us and we can thus feed off each other. On an individual level, the hostility pretty much matches up.
Look at every conservative in this thread. Not a single one is not trying to make everyone else feel guilty. Not a single one isn’t reacting in anger. It’s only a few liberals that are choosing to act in a more compassionate way. (And that’s most likely because of probability, not liberal superiority.)
Like it or not, American politics has become very polarized and very hostile. It’s pretty much inevitable that one side will beat out the other on in any given community. No one really wants a bipartisan community. Well, no one but those places that ban political conversations.
And you’re definitely barking up the wrong tree if you think this board will ever stop celebrating hostility. The best you can do is try to redirect that hostility towards more worthy targets. I think we’re all agreed that the Tea Party ideology is bad, right? Let’s go with them!
What happens is that a thread comes along that’ something like “what position held by your ‘side’ to you least agree with” and lots and lots of SDMB liberals say that they support Nuclear power much more than typical for the American left.
Assuming the premise (a hardly scientific one) some very good answers were given on the first page (see Tamerlane’s for example), but the impact of this factoid is being underappreciated.
This board attracts a crowd that considers itself intellectually curious. If it does not have an above average number of individuals with post-graduate degrees and even more so, those with academic leanings, I would be shocked. Please note: such does not imply anything about IQ or any other raw intelligence measure. Intellectual curiosity is a habit of mind that correlates with above college level education and an academic career, but, in my estimation at least, less so with IQ. College level education is not as much a marker for that curiosity for its own sake in today’s America. College level education is what those who come from the middle class and higher (some with very high IQs) achieve as the price of admission to the job pool. For many (again, including very high IQ individuals) college is just that means to the end, nothing more; for the intellectually curious (including many with pretty average IQs) it is a first course. (Personally I more admire the merely smart who are intellectually curious, than the brilliant who are not, but YMMV.)
Academics (and I suspect those with academic leanings) tend to lean left much more than the general population. Oversample that group, as I am sure we do, and there you go.
You wouldn’t happen to have a non-Kanazawa cite? This is a guy who recently preached that