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Christopher Renner's avatar

I'd add a third caveat, from page 4:

"63% of the included sample is female compared to 54% at intake, suggesting males were more likely to drop out."

That's almost 2 females for every male in their sample. Anyone ever notice anything about the politics of high-IQ females?

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Jupplandia's avatar

It’s bleakly amusing that anyone takes these studies seriously. Academia runs at about 90-94% left leaning now. Any academic study of IQ in relation to political affiliation will be intending to find a correlation between high IQ and leftism. The former editor of the Lancet some time ago concluded that about 50% of scientific studies are pure horseshit, such is the level of bias and ideological distortion (as well as financial incentive) applying to these studies in order to reach predetermined conclusions. You can bet that bullshit percentage is much higher for any directly political question that will provide ammunition for leftist sneers and vanity. Not only that, but leftist attitudes to IQ testing are riddled with cognitive dissonance and obvious contradictions. When IQ testing indicates racial disparities, such testing is described as racist and clearly influenced by inherent white biases. Yet if IQ testing can be used to pretend that leftists are innately more intelligent than rightists, well then there are no biases affecting the results and the results must be unimpeachably accurate.

These studies are garbage data spitting out the results that are fed into them and intended by the authors of the study from the start. Even their conception of what defines rightism will have been framed in such a way as to lead to the conclusion they want, to be a leftists interpretation of what right wing attitudes are, rather than to be an objective and factual reflection of what right wing attitudes actually are. And the same will be applied in reverse, with a huge positive bias in the way in which leftist attitudes are defined.

Leftism does not parallel IQ and any attempt to conflate higher intelligence with leftism is laughable. Having been in academia and seen the utterly unthinking nature of many of the people thriving in that field, who NEVER question their own political prejudices, it’s my considered opinion based on experience that in many cases modern education probably lowers IQ (and empathy too).

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