Tuesday, February 07, 2012

Self Refuting Columns: Guardianista's Congratulate Selves On Intellectual Superiority.

The two most commented stories on the Grauniad website at the moment are:

The right's stupidity spreads, enabled by a too-polite left- George Monbiot

When the Daily Mail calls rightwingers stupid, the result is dumbogeddon- Charlie Brooker

These are both referring to a "study" by a Canadian academic that has already been described as “A contender for the worst use of statistics in an original paper ever” by a serious academic.

Studies "proving" the superior intelligence of liberals have a staple among well, liberals, for a few years. Some of them have turned out to be hoaxes, some to be based on such laughably poor methodology that they are actually worse than the mere hoaxes.

Tim Worstall points out that the study itself doesn't even prove what it purports to. Later today or tomorrow I'll use some genuine numbers (mostly American) to look at the actual question of who is smarter*.

* The answer will be "Neither really" but I'll expand upon that.

2 comments:

James Higham said...

Nothing better to do, have we?

A K Haart said...

It's a pity the idea of intelligence was ever invented because it just ends up being misused.

I like this comment on Tim's blog.

"The Guardian writers are so clever they don’t even need to run their paper at a profit."