Intelligent People more likely to be godless liberalsFollow

So you are both saying that research funding is less then 100% efficient.

Granted.

It is like saying we should not collect income taxes because some people cheat. Or that we should have any laws because some people will break them. You both seem to be laboring under the delusion that I'm claiming no waste of any kind. My god, of course there is! Comparing the waste in private industry versus government would be a profitable comparison.

"there's also some reasonable evidence that not only does publicly funded research not produce much in economic terms, but my actually produce negative effects by "crowding out" potentially more fruitful research by private industries in the same areas."

Oh yes there is some evidence of that. There just happens to be overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Specifically, the article may be right in the short term, but in the long term...e.g. investing in giant magneto resistance and getting the ipod there is no contest. Numbers vary from 3:1 to 10:1. You can google the sources.

Sure.

Yes. It's Fox News. It's presumably correct on the facts though. Bit at the bottom:



And those are just in the health related fields.

I think the broader point is that just because someone is a "research scientist", it does not mean that person is "smarter" than someone who is not. And certainly, attempting to qualify an entire political ideology by labeling selected groups of people as "smarter" and the showing an association between those groups and your own political ideology is a weak argument at best.

A strong argument would include, oh... I don't know.. actually listing off the principles you hold and arguing those things. Can we at least acknowledge that the "smart by association" approach the Left seems to love to engage in is bizarre? If your positions are smart, and you have good ideas, they should stand on their own merits. Trying to convince people to agree with you by tweaking some statistics to make it appear as though more smart people agree with you is pretty darn pathetic...



And here's where you present this "overwhelming evidence"? Funny how I provide quotes and cites and am accused of "making things up", but it's apparently completely unnecessary for you to do anything more than just insist you are right and I am wrong?

Look. I fully agree that government research in some areas does produce basic knowledge that makes many of the products that private industry produces possible. I'm not debating that at all.

What I am debating is that the people who do that base research are some how "smarter" than those who take that research and make something useful out of it. I am disagreeing with the assumption in the title of this thread linking "intelligent people" to liberal thought.

Keep your eye on the ball here. It's not really about debating research versus practical development. It's about the fact that I didn't claim one group was "smarter" than the other. All I did was point out that the claim being made only looked at one side of the issue...

Edited, Mar 2nd 2010 11:41am by gbaji

A research organization conveniently deciding to only look at folks in the fields of scientific research when determining what "smart people think" politically?

A Liberal quoting said research because it jibes with what he wants to believe, even though it doesn't actually say what he claims it does?

Dunno. I suppose there's no bias there...

Taking a page from traditional Islam, many wives mean more children to carry on the faith.

If a silly study ultimately leads to a finding that translates to improved male-side birth control, and consequently, a decline in unwanted pregnancies....is the research still 'silly'.

Who decides silly? You or Fox news. There is a system for determining who gets grant money based on the value that could be provided by the research.

On one hand you claim that a social welfare system hampers development and in the same breath you're ridiculing research to promote advancement.

Ya know what they say....there's no pleasing some people.

I thought about bringing that point up but decided it wasn't worth it.

Most "stupid studies" are only stupid when presented as sound bites for people too uninformed to know what's actually up. Not that there aren't legitimate wastes of time but just because some news writer can condense a study into one pithy line, doesn't alone make it stupid.

I suppose equally stupid are grizzle-cnuts like you who give curmudgeon a bad name with the audacity to lump me in with anyone, let alone that terminally insipid yeast infection.

Kwanza is a holiday, and therefore does not recieve federal grants for anything, nor does it do any research.

Kanazawa is the scientist.

More proof that conservatives are teh dum.

I kid. This is just proof that Varus is an idiot.

Tulip,

And obviously liberals don't have a sense of humour.

I mean really;

Kanazawa

Kwanza


Anyone want to bet this person doesn't receive federal grants? I'd be surprised if this "scientist" ever spent a day in the private sector.

Do as we say, not as we do.

And yet, oddly, that's exactly what you assumed their research meant.



Which you used as support for the argument that intelligent people are more likely to be liberal than conservative.


See a pattern here?