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Janice Heimner's avatar

I predict that wordcels favor some left-wing economic policies in pro-equity societies, but that intelligent people with nonverbal tilt typically favor more free market beliefs regardless of society.

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Realist's avatar

Thanks for the interesting article. As always, I am leery of using vocabulary as a proxy for intelligence. More inclusive research using a standard IQ test would be more telling than using only the verbal proficiency part.

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Emil O. W. Kirkegaard's avatar

It is not feasible online.

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D. W. Daws's avatar

The limits of science online.

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aoxy87's avatar

The fact that the idea of Christianity as a state religion is so widely rejected by those with mid to high IQs is encouraging.

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Max De Fabio's avatar

This would explain why university professors and college grads were more conservative in the 60s and 70s when colleges were more selective and college students had an avg iq of 115 which, as you show, is when the trend of leftism and intelligence starts to reverse.

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Darwin survival's avatar

What do you think of these studies that find a linear association?

And what about the study that found that conservatives who follow their instincts are more likely to get the CRT test wrong?

Your study is dubious compared to what is reproduced.

And even if you were right about the non-linearity of the relationship between IQ and policies at 120 IQ, you're anything but a midwit....

This may also be due to the fact that beyond 125 -130 it is difficult to measure IQ properly.

Study 1 )Patterns and sources of the association between intelligence, party

identification, and political orientations

What do you think of these studies that find a linear association?

Study 2) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S019188691730226X

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Christopher René's avatar

The first study uses the wordsum test (10 vocab items) which Emil addresses as being inadequate, and it doesn't mention linearity.

The second study uses an inferior conservatism scale based on party identification and only with 9 points and measures mean IQ by that scale, not what trends you see as you go along the cognitive ability spectrum.

Yeah I don't see how ability on the CRT test, which basically measures cognitive laziness on a word problem test has to do with conservatives following their instincts, which has to do with evolved responses to specific common social situations or types of individuals.

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Darwin survival's avatar

The CRT test is precisely correlated with IQ And the Conservatives score worse than the Liberals. Which validates that being right-wing is negatively correlated with intelligence.

Atheists score better than believers because they are more intelligent on average.

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Christopher René's avatar

Reread the article and my reply. There is a difference between conservatism being negatively correlated with IQ and the question of what trends happens when one looks at average conservatism levels as one moves along the IQ spectrum. It doesn't seem to be a linear effect.

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True European's avatar

I wonder how many Americans will begin to realise that after decades of it being exploited by both sides of the political divide the abortion issue is now officially pardon the language dead and buried.

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Darwin survival's avatar

I don't think this is a representative sample.

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Anne Frütel's avatar

Thank you. As you wrote it would be good to see the right tail with n=500 or 1000 only for the right tail. Things get a bit thin up there.

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Emil O. W. Kirkegaard's avatar

I don't see a realistic way to sample the right-tail without extreme selection bias. The typical method is to sample Mensa members, but that's a very bad idea. https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2022/08/the-mensa-fallacy/

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Anne Frütel's avatar

Hm, interesting. I would not even trust that Mensa people score high on IQ, I have seen their magazine. So, huge overall samples? Should not be impossible. Would also be interesting to have these huge samples for Germany and Austria and see if the most right tail shapes differently in comparison to other countries. I would expect that as a long term consequence of systematically killing and driving out their high intelligence. We have probably not compensated that by high level immigration. And, well, looking at these countries, it is not exactly counterintuitive.

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Emil O. W. Kirkegaard's avatar

Too expensive to sample so many people. It would cost ~10k USD to get a really big sample. Typical survey data sellers do not offer high quality data for other countries than US/UK. I tried buying data for Germany and Denmark before, but the quality is so low that one ends up discarding ~70% of subjects and have to argue with them about price reductions.

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Anne Frütel's avatar

Damn. But not surprising. Having landed again and again with US studies on topics regarding mainly education, I can think how bad things actually are over there. But we, over here, don't even have the people who are into measuring these things, which is a worse situation.

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Brettbaker's avatar

As I put it elsewhere, Elite Human Capital= "Neoliberalism, without the Negro Problem".

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