Is Librulz Klevvurer? The Numbers

As I said yesterday I would look at actual evidence as to the relative intellectual ability of liberals relative to conservatives.

A lot of the quantitatively minded science bloggers have used the General Social Survey to get estimates of the relative intelligence of different groups. The variable generally used is the literacy test known as "Wordsum". As are also reasoning questions on there known as "Alike1... Alike8" I have combined them into a variable "AlikeSum" and then created a variable combining both known as "WordAlike".

I have then run "WordAlike" with a variable "PolyViews" which asks people to identify their political leanings.

The mean score for each group (out of 26) is as follows:

Extremely Liberal: 15.01
Liberal: 15.56
Slightly Liberal: 15.37
Moderate: 13.99
Slightly Conservative: 15.87
Conservative: 15.55
Extremely Conservative: 14.7

Total Liberal: 15.41
Total Conservative: 15.61

There seems to be a slight conservative advantage on reasoning and a slight liberal advantage on verbal ability, but I doubt enough to be significant. If anyone has the time or inclination they could roughly translate them to IQ scores but that seems a pointless exercise.

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.

Rod Liddle Needs To Read A Book.

Rod Liddle denounces Harriet Harman as being thick. This is true enough although I'm not sure why the Spectator consider it to be a worthy cover story. Perhaps next week I can make the front cover with an edgy opinion piece arguing that Ronnie Corbett isn't very tall.

Anyway there is a rather odd sentence in the piece:

The reason we should have disquiet about Harriet is because she is either thick or criminally disingenuous. My guess is thick. Being a bit thick should not disqualify someone from leading their party, I suppose, as both Iain Duncan Smith and Lord Salisbury would concur.

Lord Salisbury thick? This the man whom Churchill described as "that mighty intellect" and is generally regarded as one of our most astute PMs ever.

I was going to write more on this subject but having just googled the subject I see that Jonathan Pearce at Samizdata has noticed the same bizarre sentence, so go and read his post instead.

I suspect that Liddle has seen an aristocratic PM and assumed that he must be some Bertie Wooster type of upper class twit but hasn't thought it necessary to actually know learn anything about Lord Salisbury before developing an opinion.

Interlektules Rool OK!

I blogged a couple of months ago on the tendency of liberals to believe that their favoured political candidates are intellectual giants and their opponents are stupid. Thomas Sowell has an article today on that very subject:

Among the many wonders to be expected from an Obama administration, if Nicholas D. Kristof of the New York Times is to be believed, is ending "the anti-intellectualism that has long been a strain in American life."

He cited Adlai Stevenson, the suave and debonair governor of Illinois, who twice ran for president against Eisenhower in the 1950s, as an example of an intellectual in politics.

Intellectuals, according to Mr. Kristof, are people who are "interested in ideas and comfortable with complexity," people who "read the classics."

.....

Historian Michael Beschloss, among others, has noted that Stevenson "could go quite happily for months or years without picking up a book." But Stevenson had the airs of an intellectual -- the form, rather than the substance.

What is more telling, form was enough to impress the intellectuals, not only then but even now, years after the facts have been revealed, though apparently not to Mr. Kristof.

That is one of many reasons why intellectuals are not taken as seriously by others as they take themselves.

Stevenson is not the only example of an empty headed liberal being hailed as deep thinkers, John Kerry and Joe Biden are more recent examples of this type. A couple of weeks ago on another blog I gave my opinion that the 3 best presidents of 20th century were Coolidge, Truman and Reagan. All three of them were dismissed as amiable dunces, the New York Times backed their opponents each time, yet Reagan's intellect can be seen clearly by looking up any of his self penned speeches on YouTube and his long struggle to advance what were often unpopular ideas and Sowell says of Coolidge and Truman:

President Harry Truman, whom no one thought of as an intellectual, was a voracious reader of heavyweight stuff like Thucydides and read Cicero in the original Latin. When Chief Justice Carl Vinson quoted in Latin, Truman was able to correct him.

Yet intellectuals tended to think of the unpretentious and plain-spoken Truman as little more than a country bumpkin.

Similarly, no one ever thought of President Calvin Coolidge as an intellectual. Yet Coolidge also read the classics in the White House. He read both Latin and Greek, and read Dante in the original Italian, since he spoke several languages. It was said that the taciturn Coolidge could be silent in five different languages.

So whilst intelligence is a valuable commodity in a leader, intellectualism is not and most pundits have a demonstrable inability to distinguish the two. The easiest way to convince people that you're smart is to agree with them so politicians whose beliefs reflect the prejudices of journalists can easily be regarded as latter day Einstein's by the press.

Moonbat Versus The God Botherers

Despite being essentially agnostic I find the fashion to bash religion in all its forms to be rather tedious. Like almost any phenomena, religion has both positive and negative effects and the simplistic God-Squad-bashing which only sees the negative qualities is as ignorant and irrational as anything preached by men in dog collars. Too many supposed secularists don't understand that secularism isn't the same as militant atheism.

George Monbiot is a case in point, in an article on how stoopid Americans aren't sophisticated enough to embrace their intellectual liberal superiors, a theory which I've debunked before, he claims:

One theme is both familiar and clear: religion - in particular fundamentalist religion - makes you stupid. The US is the only rich country in which Christian fundamentalism is vast and growing.

This is nonsense. The most educated regions of the US, based on academic performance and the location of elite universities are the most secular parts so superficially this makes sense. Yet 300 years ago New England and the North East were the most religiously observant parts of what would become the USA, the Puritans of New England were far more devout that the Presbyterians of Appalachia which is why they were so keen on executing witches in the North East. Yet even then New England had higher literacy rates and had established Harvard. So clearly Monbiot's claim is nonsense.

The contemporary example of heavily Mormon Utah ought to dispel the idea that religious observance makes you stupid as it is one of the most educated and economically successful states in the US.

Nature & Nurture.

In the previous post referring to a study showing ethnic differences in 5 year old, I stated my belief that the differences weren't innate. Something in the study reaffirms that belief, but I'll just provide a bit of context before I explain what it is.

One of the strongest argument that racial differences in intelligence are down to genetic factors rather than cultural factors has been the long standing IQ gap between blacks and whites that has been observed in the United States since mass testing was first undertaken by the US Army during World War One. The difference then and now is about one standard deviation or 15 points.

However if this is a consequence of genetic differences in IQ, then blacks and whites in the UK ought to show a similar gap. However the results of what appears to be an IQ type test from the Millenium Cohort Study are:

COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
White: 102.2
Mixed: 101.3
Indian: 98.3
Black Caribbean: 98
Other 95.7
Black African 91.4
Bangladeshi 88.6
Pakistani 87.4

In other words White children score 11 points higher than Black African children and just 4 points ahead of Black Caribbean children. The difference in both cases is much smaller than the US differences.

I'm Just Too Clever For You Hicks To Understand

In an article about Adlai Stevenson, the man who lost to Dwight Eisenhower in both the 1952 and 1956 US presidential elections, CiF writer Ned Temko says:

One thing, above all, sealed Stevenson's sorry electoral fate. It was the image that he was somehow too smart, too eloquent, out of touch with "ordinary" Americans. In different contests at different times ever since, that same rap has helped defeat a train of other Democratic candidates: Eugene McCarthy's anti-war crusade in 1968, George McGovern in 1972, and most recently John Kerry last time around.

Eisenhower was the general responsible for planning the largest and most complex military operation in history was self evidently extremely intelligent. When Stevenson died only a single book was found in his home, he had no record of spectacular academic achievement and he was prone to believing absurd pseudo scientific theories (that nuclear testing might throw the planet off its axis for example). Stevenson was a well connected socialite with a reasonable degree of charm, who happened to believe all the things that liberals believe are signs of being intelligent. Much the same was true of John Kerry in 2004, he had a worse academic record than Bush yet the media were convinced that he was just too smart to connect with the ordinary voter.

Those on the left have a tendency to believe that their political opponents are either stupid or evil and conversely to anoint mediocrities like Kerry or Stevenson as geniuses. Believing that your opponent is evil acts a justification for some of the most appalling personal attacks on their opponents (or their families) as seen with the hysteria about Sarah Palin over the last fortnight. Believing that your opponents are stupid is even more self destructive, as it leads them to consistently be baffled as to how they've been outwitted by the stupid people again. Thankfully in this electoral cycle Democrats are making both these mistakes again.


See also: Clive Crook and Dominic Lawson, via: David Duff and Poor Bastard Marvin