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You wrote: "Interestingly, “genotypic IQ” as estimated from DNA turns out to estimate the highest degree of liberalism of all the approaches."

That's obviously because "genotypic IQ" in GWAS studies is not based directly on IQ but is based on the proxy measurement of years of "educational attainment." And attaining a high degree of liberal education makes you liberal by definition because that's how they teach you to think. Also, liberals naturally tend to get more liberal education than conservatives because they agree with it and enjoy it more than conservatives do. Finally, the political label of "liberal" is effectively defined in the first place as the set of attitudes held in high status by "The Cathedral" (i.e., members of the academy and educated professional classes).

So the study is really nothing but circular reasoning stating that "people who go to many years of school have the same attitudes as the members of the highly-schooled social class."

The positive correlation with actual measured IQ (vs. polygenic score for "educational attainment") is also predictable because IQ correlated very highly with years of education (which is exactly why they use it as the proxy for IQ). But it's the education itself, not high IQ, which is driving the correlation. If they held education constant their correlation between estimated IQ and "liberal" attitudes would disappear. This is evidenced by the very fact that the "educational attainment" proxy is a stronger predictor than actual IQ.

Conservative commentators are presenting this low-IQ paper as if it's a test for whether conservatives are willing to "trust the science" when it insults them. But the flawed conclusion actually proves the opposite -- that you should always distrust "the science" when it is confirming politically correct conclusions. It will usually fall apart when you really examine the underlying logic and data.

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"[Y]ou should always distrust 'the science' when it is confirming politically correct conclusions"

I'd rephrase that to "...when it seems to not align with common sense." A finding that contradicts common sense may be right, but it should not be treated skeptically and probed for weaknesses etc.

Twenty years ago exactly there was the State IQ Rankings hoax, picked up and repeated and shared by many (an early case of a cheap hoax of the type all over social-media now). None other than Steve Sailer led a pitchfork-mob of debunkers and the whole thing was withdrawn with apologies. But even now I think there are people circulating that list and gloating over how much smarter Blue-State people are that the dumb-idiots out there in Red-States.

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But white Republicans have been getting less educated relative to white Democrats over the last 20+ years. Back then, for example, Colorado, a state that attracts upscale people, was a mildly Republican state in Presidential elections. Now, it's solidly Democratic. West Virginia was only mildly Republican at the turn of the century, now it's very Republican.

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White Democrats have been getting more “Educated” in what exactly? Social Sciences and subjective soft liberal arts concepts? If we isolated whites into whether they received Hard Science or Liberal Arts degrees, Social Work degrees vs Engineering degrees, BS vs BA, MS vs MA, how would the political beliefs fall out? I’m sure educational attainment is overstated in soft, easy and subjective subjects, no?

And how many Hard Science majors simply lie on their answer about political beliefs out of fear it can be used against them? Like the secret Trump voter phenomena of 2016?

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I think those claims are hyperbolic feel-good self-preserving statements. I think if you actually understood what you were talking about, you’d bring receipts instead of baseless emotional accusations. Show me the data supporting your statement that liberals are all ceramics majors while all the regressives are finance gurus. I’d argue morality and ethics and their relative strength is more correlated with professional credential variability. Beyond that, educated people tending to have more pragmatic liberal views aren’t refuted by Silicon Valley MAGAts and self-loathes like Peter Thiel.

You tell me what you do. And I’ll tell you my answer. Then we can decide how education affects ideology.

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If the “IQ” in this study is based on self-reported educational attainment, and not a G-loaded IQ test, I can’t see how the study isn’t questionable.

Looking for evidence that the proliferation of “education attainment” over the past 40-50 years has been mainly in the Liberal Arts and soft areas shouldn’t be hard. Just the shear numbers of women going to college is a sign.

The number of people who go to college to study Engineering and end up with a Marketing degree is probably too high to count. I’ve literally never met anyone go to college to study Social Work who changes their major to Physics or Accounting.

Colleges love this boondoggle and the expansion of Liberal Arts has been their gravy train. It’s easy money.

I have a Masters in Finance. Not exactly rocket science I admit.

I obviously believe in Classical Liberalism as it’s defined within Western Society over the past few centuries. Progressive within logical bounds. But today’s “Liberalism” and it’s Woke offshoots are appalling and increasingly destructive. So I may just be Conservative for Classical Liberaism.

So again, what does this study define as Liberal vs Conservative? Do we now say Steve Sailer and Charles Murray aren’t high- IQ? Or do we say this study has obvious flaws and too broadly defines Liberal vs Conservative, or that it conflates high educational attainment in a watered-down higher education system with having a higher IQ?

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You make a lot of assumptions. And the data you keep insisting on referencing but unable to provide because it’s “too high to count” is easily accessible if you wanted to do the leg work instead of casting baseless claims.

Also it’s “sheer numbers”. Shear means to remove or eliminate, Mr. Night School MBA.

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I'm pretty sure I disagree with Herbert on most things regarding public policy, but I agree with him here.

The finding that midwit college-educated people are disproportionately leftist, especially young people, is not news.

Like you, I suspect a huge fraction of the reason is because academia is now all about ideologizing. But whatever the reason, we shouldn't deny the reality.

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"The Sailer Strategy" was largely about picking up Scots Irish at the expense of professional whites because professional white votes were in geographic areas swamped by immigrants and no longer mattered.

The GOP adopted down class whites to counter the down class browns of the DEMs. Whereas the DEMs have an entire ideological structure to explain why they aren't really aligned with hood rats, the GOP doesn't really.

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Isn't Denver the city with most Federal jobs after Washington D.C.? I think that would explain Colorado better.

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I agree. We shouldn't deny the reality that midwit college-educated people are disproportionately leftist these days, especially younger midwits. With young female unmarried midwits the most leftist of all.

And of course, this is deeply intertwined with universities now being leftist-ideologizing camps where conformity to ideology is prized, rather than the ability to think for oneself.

Only on the "authoritarian" axis do I have any real problem with this studies "findings".

But said findings are fairly meaningless, other than to allow midwit leftists to feel better about themselves.

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Very well said. In previous discussions I've seen of this research, the phrase 'smart people' has been used as synonymous with high IQ. To which I have responded on the lines of: "people who cannot distinguish between disagreeable hard reality and their own 'politically correct' wishful thinking (or strategically choose not to) are not 'smart' .... just stupid and lacking in wisdom. This remains true whatever their nominal IQ". Sadly there are an awful lot of them

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You are confusing Wisdom with Intelligence. E. Gary Gygax showed us in 1975 that these are distinct traits that do not necessarily correlate.

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I am confusing nothing. And I don't need some E. Gary Gygax (whoever that is) to tell me about the meaning of the words Wisdom and Intelligence. Anyone with wisdom would not fall for such vacuous semantic pedantry.

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Gygax is one of the founding fathers of tabletop roleplaying gaming. He cocreated D&D with Dave Arneson.

And while it is certainly true that higher g-factor loadings correlate positively with a belief in wrong ideas, they correlate with specific types of wrong ideas, not just any idea that happens to be wrong. Nathan Cofnas theorizes that what separates leftoids and rightoids is the former's willingness to take the foundational egalitarian axioms of the 21st Century Occident to their logical conclusion, and I'm convinced he's right, because I myself used to believe the same things, and they're hit hard into the head of everybody in the vast majority of classrooms, popular media, and even academic literature. The dissident, intellectual, alternative rightosphere is a tiny corner of reality, swamped almost entirely by slop for morons about Obama being a Kenyan Muslim, or about the awfulness of vaccines and the wonderfulness of pill-form nutrition suppliments you yourself can buy for only $99.99 a month:

https://ncofnas.com/p/why-we-need-to-talk-about-the-rights

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Thanks for this info about Gygax. How I would want to respond to your other comments is way too long for a comment thread like this but is the substance of many (most in fact) of my writings both on Substack and previously when I was an occasional freelance contributor to various Right-leaning magazines and journals (including as it happens Takimag that Steve Sailer writes for).

Are We making Progress? https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/are-we-making-progress and

Love of the People: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/love-of-the-people are particularly related to the themes here.

My short answer here:

1) there is too much faith put in -and too little interogation of IQ as a measure of intelligence

2) there are too many different types of intelligence for the word to have an uncontroversial meaning but, for me, the kind of cognitive dissonance required to buy into the 'social justice' religion is ipso facto a failure of intelligence. (And Yes I've been there too as a young man when 'equality' seems such a nice and tidy philosophy when you have little experience to test it against.) To me a big part of what I call intelligence is Noticing....and I thought Steve's title was far and away the best of the recent rash of Rufo/Hanania/Sailer et al books about wokeness.

3) wisdom is what most people lack when dealing with abstractions beyond their own first hand experience. If I was to pick books that manifest it I would point to Burke and Oakshott as examples.

4) Yes I agree with you that the Rightist ecosystem is almost as brimful of nonsense as the Leftist.....particualrly its embrace of facile conspiracy theories.

But I say again, all this is too big and complex for a comment thread...hope you will take a look at the essays I linked above, if and when you may have time.

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