<p>Again, this may have skew. Working class will likely perform worse on those tests than college educated. </p>
<p>I'd be more interested in seeing the data normalized with equal numbers of people in specific educational groups. Make it a good sample and then we'll see. Otherwise, you can't control for the inevitable difference in educational levels' performance on verbal IQ tests.</p>
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However, when the sample size is large enough, and the GSS is. Interesting data can be gleaned.
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</p>
<p>There's more to building a good sample than just numbers. I can sample 1000s of people and still have a bad representation of the population...</p>
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[quote]
Again, this may have skew. Working class will likely perform worse on those tests than college educated.</p>
<p>I'd be more interested in seeing the data normalized with equal numbers of people in specific educational groups. Make it a good sample and then we'll see. Otherwise, you can't control for the inevitable difference in educational levels' performance on verbal IQ tests.
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College education is roughly split between democrat/republican (at the undergraduate level)...</p>
<p>Advanced degrees heavily bias toward democrats though. If anything, this bias is in favor of the democrats.</p>
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There's more to building a good sample than just numbers. I can sample 1000s of people and still have a bad representation of the population...
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Sorry for that implication. I'm assuming that the GSS people do know what they are doing.</p>
<p>I can't for the life of me get it to work right now, and I'm not going to bother with it tonight (I have some Stata work to get to).</p>
<p>I'll take a look someday...maybe.</p>
<p>I still don't know how they controlled for education across parties, so I'm going to remain cautious. It would be interesting, though, if you're right.</p>
<p>Yeah, I haven't played around with the data set at all basically. It's quite powerful though. I rarely see people mention it (or even know what it is).</p>
<p>Mr. Payne (I got your PM, btw), you're the one who started this whole discussion. When I said a lot of conservatives are stupid, I meant that in two ways. First, I was referring to the Bible Belt (the South) where people think Hussein was bin Laden and thus, our killing him was necessary and that Bush is actually doing a good job and we need to support our troops by keeping them in Iraq to keep getting picked off by insurgents...that, to me, is stupid. The people who think Bush is a Christian because he supports a war, any war, that only gives us more dead bodies is stupid. It's not even so much a lie the media tells us at this point; it's just something they believe. And they're stupid for believing it. Stupid.</p>
<p>The other reason is that a lot of this country is rural. States with large metropolitan areas tend to be in the position to accept differing backgrounds and opinions and ideas and views than states where their is little change in the past thirty years. This isn't stupidity as much as it is ignorance, though, to most people it IS stupidity. People, especially minorities, who think "traditional" values in America are ideal. Please. Traditional in this country isn't the 1950s post-WW2 domestic model; you don't have to be a conservative to believe that had it's strong and weak points. Traditional is women and minorities taking a backseat to land-owning white men.</p>
<p>My point had nothing to do with IQ. You're the one who made it about that.</p>
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I actually don't have a problem with saying Liberals are smarter than conservatives, because that is likely true. Democrats are not smarter than Republicans though, the General Social Survey has shown that for years. Because the dumb people in the Democratic party (and they are dumb) bring the average down. A lot.
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</p>
<p>That's true. The Republicans haven't been dominated politics for as long as they have by being stupid and ignorant. Their base on the other hand...</p>
<p>See, that's where you are wrong. The Republican party has a higher mean precisely because it has more of average intelligence than the Democratic party. While both parties have roughly 20-25% in this 115+ range, the spacing in the below that is different. However, the sub 100 range likely makes up 40-45% of the Democratic party, where as it makes up a mere 20-25% for Republicans.</p>
<p>BTW, I discerned this from the GSS, no one likes reporting stuff like this, because it's very un-PC.</p>
<p>This argument is pat. Believing all the lies we've been fed these years, drinking the kool-aid...that's stupid. High IQ, low IQ, medium IQ...whatever. It doesn't matter.</p>
<p>Once you can prove that this survey is not based solely from the small fraction of our nation that has a low enough I.Q. to take a survey in which intellegence is contributed to political beliefs, I think that these numbers should be disregarded.</p>