Intelligent People more likely to be godless liberalsFollow

What a little girl.

R&D isn't productive?

Yes. But we don't normally place the label "scientist" on the people who work in those labs. That term is usually reserved for people doing work that does not have a direct practical application, or the practical applications are being funded in a different mechanism than private industry does it.




It's hard to imagine that they got this data while actually talking to very many people in the "for profit" portions of any fields. So yeah. Not shocking at all that the skew would be so significant. Conservatives tend to believe that private industry should fund its own research out of its own profits. Liberals love to fund all sorts of things with government money. It's not surprising to see that the people who benefit from this process will tend to lean in the direction of that process.

You'll see a lot higher percentage of conservatives working in the private sector. Yet, no one would go out and survey just them and insist that some high percentage of the experts in a field were conservatives and therefore conclude that conservatives were smarter than liberals...

Nope. Apparently, only liberals feel the need to play those sorts of games. Their ideology includes a vested interest in convincing the public that they are smarter and more capable of holding the reins of power and money. Conservatives don't believe government should have that kind of power in the first place, and thus have no need to convince you that they are smart enough to be handed that power.

Just because their stuff has a longer development cycle doesn't mean it lacks practical application or productivity. I'm looking at you 1950s era computer science, the nuclear program, 90's superconductors, the list goes on.

Lol... I'm not arguing about the existence of God though... ;)



Ok. But how do you get from that definition of God to an assumption that "conservatives are an evolutionary dead end"? I don't have an issue with you happening to hold both views, but I can't see how one leads one to the other.

I'd also suggest that forming into groups of people who look and think like you do is hardly a conservative trait. I would suggest that liberals do this to an even greater and more obvious degree in fact. Certainly, they do this in the political arena far more than conservatives do...



/shrug

You're also assuming a meaning of conservative which is circularly designed to be negative. Kinda self-fulfilling really.

No. I wasn't. I was pointing out that potential for error in the statement that the smartest of the smart were liberal by postulating a condition which would match the statistics quoted, but would *not* have the same meaning assumed by those quoting the statistics.



And "advanced degree" automatically means one is smarter? This is the same issue as with the label "scientist". Most people working in a field don't bother to get a PhD unless they plan on either teaching, or working in an environment where they are funded via some sort of grant system.

Do you see how the entire argument you're using is based on bias?



How is "private industry" defined though Joph?

Read the page before that one in the report. The one with all the funding information. Just because someone is working in a "private industry" does not preclude their funding coming from predominantly government sources. Look. Even just the mindset of working in a grant-based system will tend to appeal to those with a more liberal political slant. It matches their world-view.



Define "produce results". Laboratories have to "produce results", but it's not the same as what I'm talking about. You seem to have this view of every smart person in a scientific field working in a lab on some project defined by someone from on high, in which their "results" determine their funding.

In the real world, there are orders of magnitude more equally smart people in most fields who work by applying their knowledge to actually build things that people will pay for (I even used this definition earlier). Useful things. Not things that happen to meet the on paper requirements set up in a grant. That's why the people in my field produce things like better cell phones and make a profit doing it, and the people in your field spend millions of dollars of taxpayer money to produce things like research showing that men like sex.



Lol... It rings a bit hollow to complain of having the "academic elitist liberal" label applied when your constantly pointing to academic research showing that people who think like you are smarter than people who think like me. Um... Gee. There's a logical flaw there somewhere...



The problem is that your definition of "actual evidence" seems to include only evidence which contains the very bias I'm talking about. I can only speak directly of the people I have met in my career Joph. But that's going to influence my viewpoint far far more than some study you linked to on the interwebs. Doubly so when said study uses some very strangely restrictive terminology...



I'll also point out for the record, that I said "people in engineering and science fields", which you immediately responded to which statements about "scientists". How about you do some looking to find studies of engineers?

Edited, Mar 1st 2010 7:56pm by gbaji

It's a good bet that it means the person with an advanced degree is smart. Smarter than the average person, even. Now whether or not they're smarter than the guys in your imagination that you demand we compare them to is another story, I guess.


Why don't you? You're the one with the bizarre notion that engineers represent some gold standard in intellectual brilliance. When you have anything besides your usual blind Gbaji guesses and conjecture, we can talk. But we both know that'll never happen.

"For the record", my looking up scientists had nothing to do with you saying "science". I was just looking up any careers with advanced post-graduate degrees and there happened to be information available for scientists in both hard and soft fields.

Edited, Mar 1st 2010 10:40pm by Jophiel

I think most lawyers are Democrats although I'm too lazy to try to dig up a cite.

ERTW

Irrelevant. We're not comparing them to "average people". Do all smart people hold advanced degrees? Yes or no?

Heck. Do even a majority of "smart people" hold advanced degrees? Yes or no?

If no, then doesn't this make the entire process of attempting to determine which political party has more "smart people" by counting numbers of people with advanced degrees flawed?


Yes. It does... As any "smart person" could tell you.

Somebody desperately craves validation.