Intelligent People more likely to be godless liberalsFollow

I thought this was common knowledge.

God. Dietary issues. Climate change. Guarantees rate-downs for me usually.

That's not agnosticism either though. Ari's definition was closest. It's not that agnostics don't care about spirituality, but that they recognize that they don't know the "truth" about it, and are therefore unwilling to make assumptions about it, much less attempt to impose any given viewpoint on others (or allow said imposition).

As to the broader issue, it's really about a self-perpetuating fallacy. While IQ tests *can* test for base intelligence, when overused, what they're really testing is people who care the most about appearing to be intelligent. Hang out with a bunch of Mensa people sometime and you'll see what I mean. That's also going to skew the correlation with liberal or "novel" ideas. People who want to appear intelligent will tend to adopt positions which they associate with being intelligent, regardless of whether that position is actually more intellectually reasonable.

Like say, if the really really smart people are conservative, with a larger group of only "slightly above average" people being liberal, and a slightly higher percentage of dumb people being conservative? That is almost certainly the case. Most of the people I've meet in engineering and science fields are conservative leaning with their politics. It's usually the academic and soft sciences where you see a preponderance of liberal thinking. Of course, since those fields are the ones with the most visibility from the public in terms of idea presentation, they help create the perception that "smart people are liberals".



Not voluntarily at all. I've just encountered a lot of them, due to having pretty consistently been in the "smart group" of kids through school. There are always a few in the work environment who make a big deal out of it as well. Pretty much everyone else laughs at them though. There's a common joke about being smart enough to be in Mensa, but not smart enough to avoid being in Mensa...

hides the Mensa card

While it's true that a lot of the softer sciences tend to have a slightly more conservative viewpoint to them - computer science is a VERY conservative discipline - the purer classic sciences tend to have less of them.

Not because of initial political ideology, but because the mainstream conservative viewpoint mocks their work or says its irrelevant. Climatologists, for example. Maybe some of them were politically conservative ten years ago, or perhaps many of them. But that was before being a "climate change denier skeptic" became a conservative fashion trend. Paleontologists? They're wrong, humans walked with dinosaurs and the earth is only 6 thousand years old. Oceanographers and marine biologists? ***** the whales, the Navy needs to conduct its underwater missile tests.

Edited, Mar 1st 2010 6:32pm by catwho

Many "softer" sciences lean sharply to the left.

That said, this is courtesy of a 2009 Pew poll:

No, my point is that if there WERE any conservatives in the hard sciences, they got chased out by the teabaggers.

Does the study make any distinctions between fiscal and social conservatism? I could easily see where the more fiscally conservative scientists would consider themselves "independent" to avoid becoming mired in the religious fringe that the modern-day Republican party seems to attract.

I'm a total conservative though.

I hate totals.

Conservatives, however, are crunchy and nutricious.

Of course not, that's absurd.

This is God we're talking about. I think it'd be at least a +3.

Someone who believes in the Christian God, no matter how they define him, would be theist pretty much by definition.

edit: please note that I do not read the stream of conversation

Edited, Mar 1st 2010 7:03pm by Sweetums