But it then takes big reached from population gentics, which as you not, isnt even anywhere near their psych wheelhouse. Yeah it includes both adoptees and not adopteds as control but a cursory look at the data/method set they drew off of there (its limitations sections) points to problms with the use of Koreans that raises flags. The polygenic scores used from from GWAS have an analytical flag on them because accuracy (from my pov, I'll add: assuming their even correct) decrease with genetic distance from the training set. This makes biases when using the scores for nonEuros, like the Koreans. The "study" people seem to acnowledge this and use a tool called Mendelian randomization (MAI-MR), to account for it, I don;t know what that it is, but as in the case of most "studies" that seek to enage in genetic determinism, especially for high specific groups of people, I'm skeptical, either way, since I couldnt get a quick grip in it myself, I asked Gemini and here's its opinion, for whatever its worth: "Although the study attempts to standardize polygenic scores within each ancestry group and employs multi-ancestry interacted Mendelian randomization (MAI-MR), this approach may not fully account for the nuanced genetic differences between these groups. One issue is that the decay in predictive accuracy of polygenic scores with genetic distance arises not only from differences in allele frequencies but also from varying patterns of linkage disequilibrium across populations. This complexity means that even within ancestry-standardized scores, the underlying genetic architecture may differ significantly, potentially leading to biased or less accurate predictions for non-European groups.
Additionally, the MAI-MR method, while innovative, relies on interaction terms to capture the heterogeneous effect sizes of polygenic scores across ancestries. However, this method assumes that these interaction terms can fully correct for the differences, which may not be the case. The genetic variants that influence cognitive performance in one population might have different effects or interact with different environmental factors in another population. This can lead to confounding results, where observed differences in political beliefs attributed to genetic factors might instead be influenced by unmeasured environmental or cultural factors unique to each group.".
But where I can step back in is to comment that the diff social environments they were raised in can (I think usually will) influence the results in ways that are not adequately controlled for.
And even before and then after all that its whole foundational references points are deeply questionable. It uses s single measures for political orientation that are simplistic, to say the least, political beliefs are many Ds, they span, noth across and within economic, social, cultural, socio-strcutural, and on and on issues. And the making composite scores by summing diff those diff "attitude scales" (lol) assumes equal weight and being cross comparable, this will drown out a whole lot. And the very worst is the assumption of a direct positive correlation between authoritarianism and hard "right attitudes" (again lol) views and a direct negative correlation between authoritarianism and hard "left attitudes" (yet again lol), which is just perposterous
Each single one of them is a psychologist. Now I am amongst the first to say that if they know it, they know it, but I don't have any reason to believe they do after reading the paper. Do you really buy this stuff? This methodology is weak, even if you buy into the genetics stuff (which I tend to have baked in skepticism of), MAI-MR method, which I don;t know anything about, but off the bat I can tell that its questionable because it assumes randomness in this in adoptee placement, and its going to assume polygenic scores play out comparably across different environments. Some cursory reading suggests that not only must it preclude environmental factors but it ALSO must preclude polygenic scores causally driving outcomes ONLY through cognitive ability, but thats a leap, probably for anyone, but especially for people who dont seem to mentions any deep understanding or research into what it a complex, at best only partially (slightly, even?) understood topic that is quite arcane. Also, the measurements were very weak.
Interesting study. I’m curious about the age of the participants when their “political beliefs” were assessed. I imagine they were old enough to know/care about politics. That would make them old enough to have attended college. Do the correlations hold up when accounting for the variance attributed to attending college?
Was that a slap in my face, or what...you must be another Stalinist. So typical of rude Leftists; they really don't want to get along with anyone but their own. Like Limbaugh told us years ago, they are an unhappy lot.
That said, it is indeed true in this country that midwits are disproportionately leftist. How much of this is entirely attributable to the education indoctrination system is very difficult to tease out.
" the association may be confounded or mediated by socioeconomic and environmental factors"
I take this to mean, at least in part, that if you're high IQ then you ALSO tend to be 'smart' enough to "know what you're supposed to believe." You signal that you "do hold" said beliefs (at times you may even signal that "you know that you're supposed to..."). This would mean that 'regime type' may greatly affect which direction IQ will correlate with.
That’s why Einstein and other brainiacs were duped for a while by Stalin: their social milieu reinforced these delusions. See Sidney Hook’s chapter, “My Running Debate with Albert Einstein”, in his autobiography, _Out of Step_.
Interesting theory. Since the research was done in Minnesota (home of the MMPI test) they could assess for both overt lying and sophisticated socially desirable faking by getting a value for using the two validity scales (L and K)
Read the article and believe your point is even more valid. Firstly, they show a negative correlation between IQ and self reported fiscal conservatism. I’d call bullshit on that one. Just sounds like what kids learn in college: If you want to get laid, tell the liberal chicks you’re not the kind of bad person who believes in getting and keeping money. I frequently hear conservatives in my hood talking about how careful they are speaking freely in a mixed group. I never hear those concerns from liberals.
John D. Sailer, of the Wall Street Journal, today published an investigative article which reveals that the U.S. National Institute of Health had in place an explicit "No White Males" hiring-policy. It was stated in their internal communications; it also matched their actual hires.
Let's assume that the people who get to run the NIH are high-IQ (we should hope). What led to their belief and practice that a hiring-policy of "zero white males" was the way to go?
I think the answer to this question may be similar to the IQ-vs-"liberalism" discussion cited by the other Sailer (Steve).
Of course, with the exception of the appointed surgeon general nearly ALL of high ranking NIH officials who made that policy were old white men. Fauci being exhibit A. They made a trifecta: They got to virtue signal, preserve their own top positions, and bring in lower IQ underlings who were less likely to be competition for them. All while spending taxpayers money to get less for more.
Good sir, I fear you are mischaracterizing "midway above-average IQ" as "intellect".
These are in fact very different things, especially in the current culture where leftists are highly encouraged to conform. In such circumstances, midway leftists will be the most conforming.
It might very well be my low IQ (as evidenced by my conservative beliefs) that leads me to pose this question, but Steve Sailor can you explain the purpose of flipping the scoring system in the second graph?
Seriously, if attraction to authoritarianism is a sign of lower IQ, today’s lockstep Biden/Democrat/MSMMedia watcher, lemming voter is the lower IQ cohort. In today’s politics the Trump voters may be more open-minded one who sees the “Emperor has no clothes” in the past 3 election cycles.
So maybe the study is based on antiquated notions of Liberalism and Conservatism. In 2024 the PaleoConservatives may be the ones who are more open-minded and who question the conventional wisdom that the Regime and its narrative force down upon the masses.
It seems the questions they used for "left" and "right" were mostly a small set of five or ten questions for each variable, taken from other social-surveys such as the General Social Survey. Except in one case there was only one single question:
QUOTE: Political orientation was assessed with the single item “What is your political orientation?” on a 1–5 scale ranging from “extremely conservative” to “extremely liberal.”
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.
"[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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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
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.
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:
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).
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.
On how the "high IQ correlates with leftism" finding was 'got'...
From the paper methodology section, on how they derived the chart, I quote:
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[QUOTE]: "Political orientation was assessed with the single item “What is your political orientation?” on a 1–5 scale ranging from “extremely conservative” to “extremely liberal.” Authoritarianism was measured using 12 items capturing three facets of authoritarianism (subordination, aggression, and conventionalism) from Duckitt et al. (2010)’s tripartite authoritarianism-conservatism-traditionalism model. Egalitarianism was measured with eight items from Feld-man and Steenbergen (2001) and Feldman (1988). Religiousness was assessed with the 9-item religiousness scale created by Koenig et al. (2005). The scale asks about participation in and frequency of religious activities. 11 items were used to measure socialism liberalism and six measuring fiscal conservatism. These items were adapted from similar questions in the General Social Sur-vey items (Smith et al., 2018). A list of all items for each scale can be found in the supplementary materials of Willoughby et al. (2021)." [END QUOTE]
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So: the easily-repeatable finding here that "high IQ correlates with political leftism in Whites" comes from a single question? The question simply asks study-participants to rate themselves on a number-scale of 1 to 5 ("extremely conservative" to "extremely liberal")? And this being done in the presence of a bunch of University of Minnesota academics glaring at you, clipboards in hand, problem-glasses resting impatiently on nose-bridges, happy greetings still hanging in the air, anti-Trump political paraphernalia in the vicinity? (The interviews were over the period 2017-2023).
__________________
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From "Table 2, political scales," info on their survey questions:
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-- Political orientation, 1 question: "What is your political orientation?"
-- Authoritarianism, 12 questions, sample: "Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn."
-- Egalitarianism, 8 questions, sample: "If wealth were more equal in this country, we would have many fewer problems."
-- Social liberalism, 11 questions, sample: "The use of marijuana should be legal."
-- Fiscal conservatism, 6 questions, sample: "The government is spending too little money on Social Security."
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From these sample-questions they provide, are these 'good' questions? I expect many would object to that "fiscal conservatism" question's wording, and maybe others.
You are talking about the graph's top row, labeled "Composite," but I don't know if it's fair to call it a "liberalism score" (classic 'begging' of the question of defining liberal, no easy task given its many confused and tangled meanings; is Wokeness "liberal"?).
The row labeled "political orientation" does come from one single question, according to the paper's methodology, a self-report on a 1-5 number-scale.
The social pressures and signaling inherent in many of these questions may apply to all (political orientation, authoritarianism, egalitarianism, "social liberalism," fiscal conservatism).
There’s no psychometric gravitas to those questionnaires. You are reasonably questioning the simple face validity of those questions in measuring what they purport to be measuring. It would appear that their scale has zero construct validity. At least zero evidence of it.
I agree. I would like to see the full set of questions used to classify the subjects as left or right wing. It strikes me as pretty timidly lefty to say that "The government is spending too little money on Social Security". Real left wingers are socialists. If respondents were presented with statements like "Housing should be government owned" or "High wage-earners should pay 90% of their income in tax" we might see a different result.
In Britain before Tony Blair, when proposals like this were practical politics, the working class uniformly voted for the left wing party and Labour was visibly the party of the thick. There are ways in which it still is.
This does not surprise me for a couple of reasons. It is intelligent to align yourself with the established power running your society. Dissent is often unwise, especially in a tribal setting. I can also see intelligent people wanting to give individuals more freedom to make decisions for themselves almost as a "luxury belief" for lack of a better term. An intelligent person is generally better at running his own life and doesn't need the benign constraint of social institutions quite as much as the average or below average person. Only when those social institutions are gone and their absence undermines a significant portion of society does he acknowledge that they were important in the first place.
Steve Sailer's title here is sensationalist ("Liberals tend to have higher IQs than their conservative siblings"). A more accurate 'headline' would be:
"Higher-IQ people in the USA tend to answer certain survey-questions in a more 'liberal' or leftist direction." That might be a more-accurate characterization of what's going on with this data.
Except there's to this day a fairly even number of times, and a fairly even number of places, where leftoids are out of power and rightoids are in. So if it's just about following trends, there should be a roughly 50-50 split of leftoids and rightoids across all g-factor levels. But there's not. Among whites, there's a noticeable IQ difference favoring the left at every level, because if you take the foundational axioms of contemporary American, and contemporary Occidental, society to their logical conclusions, the vast inequities which remain in our society must be the fault of those on top conspiring against those at the bottom:
Of course, the truth is that the foundational axioms of our society are wrong. But most conservatives don't believe this. They just don't follow the axioms to their logical conclusions, and object to those who do primarily on an instinctual rather than an intellectual level. Hence why the most popular right-wing influencers of the now are overwhelmingly morons and con-artists like Candace Owens and Andrew Tate, rather than intelligent people like Steve Sailer and Richard Hanania.
Fair enough. But given that Rich has been willing to stick his neck out and put in work on the side of unpopular but nonetheless badly needed recognition of the importance of HBD in our society, I'm compelled to be on his side barring a truly egregious abandonment of character on his part. He's actually working to draw back the elite human capital the Right needs to stay competitive, and the Left needs to for e them into a battle where they must acknowledge reality and offer something better than what they've been.
I'm fully prepared to eat crow for this, but I hope not to, and I owe him my support for as long as he earns it of me.
Why are people in this comment section so upset about it? It's not that terrible to have lower IQ than another group (let's remember also what liberalism is and how it maps with progressiveness). All in all, what matters the most is to be content, to attain a grasp of the meaning of life, to appreciate who you are and what you have (and I do not mean wealth). Look at it this way: do you want to have let's say 200 IQ points or to have a life of contentment based on your integrity, the love from your family, and what you achieve through hard work?
It's because the propaganda implication of "smart people tend to be liberal" is that liberal attitudes are objectively "correct" and that if you're smart, you'll figure that out. This feeds the smugness of liberals and makes liberal attitudes seem like a way to signal one's smartness.
Now, to the point: you make a very good argument. Yes, the perception is exactly what you say. My opinion is, then, that conservative voices must spread the message that high IQ is not correlated to common sense or to wisdom, in their philosophical sense. Also, IQ is not correlated to conscientiousness. IQ is linked to logical inferences which, as we've seen, are rarely the correct policy because, in their "mathematical" elegance, can't grasp the human element. TL;DR The smartest the person the more awkward and distanced from human reality he is.
Can't stop the glorious march of Elite Human Capital. 💯
Good for them, we're still right.
Hah! I bet it didn't take many Korean adoptees to skew those results.
Why would they have added Korean adoptees? That is bizarre methodology.
The data is from a study of adoption. It also includes control groups of non-adoptees.
But it then takes big reached from population gentics, which as you not, isnt even anywhere near their psych wheelhouse. Yeah it includes both adoptees and not adopteds as control but a cursory look at the data/method set they drew off of there (its limitations sections) points to problms with the use of Koreans that raises flags. The polygenic scores used from from GWAS have an analytical flag on them because accuracy (from my pov, I'll add: assuming their even correct) decrease with genetic distance from the training set. This makes biases when using the scores for nonEuros, like the Koreans. The "study" people seem to acnowledge this and use a tool called Mendelian randomization (MAI-MR), to account for it, I don;t know what that it is, but as in the case of most "studies" that seek to enage in genetic determinism, especially for high specific groups of people, I'm skeptical, either way, since I couldnt get a quick grip in it myself, I asked Gemini and here's its opinion, for whatever its worth: "Although the study attempts to standardize polygenic scores within each ancestry group and employs multi-ancestry interacted Mendelian randomization (MAI-MR), this approach may not fully account for the nuanced genetic differences between these groups. One issue is that the decay in predictive accuracy of polygenic scores with genetic distance arises not only from differences in allele frequencies but also from varying patterns of linkage disequilibrium across populations. This complexity means that even within ancestry-standardized scores, the underlying genetic architecture may differ significantly, potentially leading to biased or less accurate predictions for non-European groups.
Additionally, the MAI-MR method, while innovative, relies on interaction terms to capture the heterogeneous effect sizes of polygenic scores across ancestries. However, this method assumes that these interaction terms can fully correct for the differences, which may not be the case. The genetic variants that influence cognitive performance in one population might have different effects or interact with different environmental factors in another population. This can lead to confounding results, where observed differences in political beliefs attributed to genetic factors might instead be influenced by unmeasured environmental or cultural factors unique to each group.".
But where I can step back in is to comment that the diff social environments they were raised in can (I think usually will) influence the results in ways that are not adequately controlled for.
And even before and then after all that its whole foundational references points are deeply questionable. It uses s single measures for political orientation that are simplistic, to say the least, political beliefs are many Ds, they span, noth across and within economic, social, cultural, socio-strcutural, and on and on issues. And the making composite scores by summing diff those diff "attitude scales" (lol) assumes equal weight and being cross comparable, this will drown out a whole lot. And the very worst is the assumption of a direct positive correlation between authoritarianism and hard "right attitudes" (again lol) views and a direct negative correlation between authoritarianism and hard "left attitudes" (yet again lol), which is just perposterous
GWAS is very much in the Minnesota team's wheelhouse.
Each single one of them is a psychologist. Now I am amongst the first to say that if they know it, they know it, but I don't have any reason to believe they do after reading the paper. Do you really buy this stuff? This methodology is weak, even if you buy into the genetics stuff (which I tend to have baked in skepticism of), MAI-MR method, which I don;t know anything about, but off the bat I can tell that its questionable because it assumes randomness in this in adoptee placement, and its going to assume polygenic scores play out comparably across different environments. Some cursory reading suggests that not only must it preclude environmental factors but it ALSO must preclude polygenic scores causally driving outcomes ONLY through cognitive ability, but thats a leap, probably for anyone, but especially for people who dont seem to mentions any deep understanding or research into what it a complex, at best only partially (slightly, even?) understood topic that is quite arcane. Also, the measurements were very weak.
Interesting study. I’m curious about the age of the participants when their “political beliefs” were assessed. I imagine they were old enough to know/care about politics. That would make them old enough to have attended college. Do the correlations hold up when accounting for the variance attributed to attending college?
So am I, although I've never leaned left. Freedom was always at the top of the list for me.
Personally, every wealthy conservative I know is a brainiac. So, I have my doubts about this and just exactly who ran the tests.
When you have an IQ of 85, someone who has an IQ of 100 seems like a brainiac
Was that a slap in my face, or what...you must be another Stalinist. So typical of rude Leftists; they really don't want to get along with anyone but their own. Like Limbaugh told us years ago, they are an unhappy lot.
Cool anecdotes. 🙄
See my comment above. this study merely shows "higher", not "high" IQ.
Midwits who go to college are much more likely to be politically liberal than their lower IQ siblings who do not.
Even moreso if the political belief assessments are done when the people in question are still under 35.
This would be my point exactly.
That said, it is indeed true in this country that midwits are disproportionately leftist. How much of this is entirely attributable to the education indoctrination system is very difficult to tease out.
" the association may be confounded or mediated by socioeconomic and environmental factors"
I take this to mean, at least in part, that if you're high IQ then you ALSO tend to be 'smart' enough to "know what you're supposed to believe." You signal that you "do hold" said beliefs (at times you may even signal that "you know that you're supposed to..."). This would mean that 'regime type' may greatly affect which direction IQ will correlate with.
That’s why Einstein and other brainiacs were duped for a while by Stalin: their social milieu reinforced these delusions. See Sidney Hook’s chapter, “My Running Debate with Albert Einstein”, in his autobiography, _Out of Step_.
Interesting theory. Since the research was done in Minnesota (home of the MMPI test) they could assess for both overt lying and sophisticated socially desirable faking by getting a value for using the two validity scales (L and K)
Read the article and believe your point is even more valid. Firstly, they show a negative correlation between IQ and self reported fiscal conservatism. I’d call bullshit on that one. Just sounds like what kids learn in college: If you want to get laid, tell the liberal chicks you’re not the kind of bad person who believes in getting and keeping money. I frequently hear conservatives in my hood talking about how careful they are speaking freely in a mixed group. I never hear those concerns from liberals.
John D. Sailer, of the Wall Street Journal, today published an investigative article which reveals that the U.S. National Institute of Health had in place an explicit "No White Males" hiring-policy. It was stated in their internal communications; it also matched their actual hires.
Let's assume that the people who get to run the NIH are high-IQ (we should hope). What led to their belief and practice that a hiring-policy of "zero white males" was the way to go?
I think the answer to this question may be similar to the IQ-vs-"liberalism" discussion cited by the other Sailer (Steve).
https://x.com/JohnDSailer/status/1809627058927992900
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-dei-becomes-discrimination-academia-higher-education-research-race-1e411be4
Of course, with the exception of the appointed surgeon general nearly ALL of high ranking NIH officials who made that policy were old white men. Fauci being exhibit A. They made a trifecta: They got to virtue signal, preserve their own top positions, and bring in lower IQ underlings who were less likely to be competition for them. All while spending taxpayers money to get less for more.
Sounds exactly like Trump's plan for the next administration.
Liberals use their intellect as a defense against seeing reality. It is often their primary defense against anxiety as well.
Good sir, I fear you are mischaracterizing "midway above-average IQ" as "intellect".
These are in fact very different things, especially in the current culture where leftists are highly encouraged to conform. In such circumstances, midway leftists will be the most conforming.
It might very well be my low IQ (as evidenced by my conservative beliefs) that leads me to pose this question, but Steve Sailor can you explain the purpose of flipping the scoring system in the second graph?
Put the left on the left.
Where they belong.
“Trust me when I say that that this study isn’t some conspiracy rigged up by leftists to make conservatives look bad.”
LOL
Was it sarcasm?
As a Conservative with a demonstrably high IQ, I ask, "Can any good thing come out of Minnesota?"
Seriously, if attraction to authoritarianism is a sign of lower IQ, today’s lockstep Biden/Democrat/MSMMedia watcher, lemming voter is the lower IQ cohort. In today’s politics the Trump voters may be more open-minded one who sees the “Emperor has no clothes” in the past 3 election cycles.
So maybe the study is based on antiquated notions of Liberalism and Conservatism. In 2024 the PaleoConservatives may be the ones who are more open-minded and who question the conventional wisdom that the Regime and its narrative force down upon the masses.
It seems the questions they used for "left" and "right" were mostly a small set of five or ten questions for each variable, taken from other social-surveys such as the General Social Survey. Except in one case there was only one single question:
QUOTE: Political orientation was assessed with the single item “What is your political orientation?” on a 1–5 scale ranging from “extremely conservative” to “extremely liberal.”
So on that metric it is pure self-reporting...
Yeah, we need to see what they mean by authoritarian, and they'd better be using the right pronouns, or their careers are xistory.
🤡
My old climbing partner scored a 1570 on the SAT in 1965. A bed-wetting liberal. In fact, doesn’t believe that IQ is predictive of anything.
His wife scored a 1580, same year. A complete sweetheart, but admits that we’re not all blank slates at birth.
I’m not quite so stratospheric, but I’ve been extremely conservative since childhood.
Mountain climbers have to be the most literary of athletes. There is an enormously immense library of books written by climbers.
They survived, so they have to tell the world about it.
That same guy gave me a signed first edition of Heinrich Harrer’s Seven Years in Tibet. Harrer had quite a life.
Yesterday someone Tweeted that the primary reason they chose rock climbing as a hobby is that it excludes the obese
https://x.com/Trust_Lion_/status/1808956514604044680
Also the incautious...
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.
"[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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
"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.
Isn't Denver the city with most Federal jobs after Washington D.C.? I think that would explain Colorado better.
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.
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
You are confusing Wisdom with Intelligence. E. Gary Gygax showed us in 1975 that these are distinct traits that do not necessarily correlate.
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.
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
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.
On how the "high IQ correlates with leftism" finding was 'got'...
From the paper methodology section, on how they derived the chart, I quote:
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[QUOTE]: "Political orientation was assessed with the single item “What is your political orientation?” on a 1–5 scale ranging from “extremely conservative” to “extremely liberal.” Authoritarianism was measured using 12 items capturing three facets of authoritarianism (subordination, aggression, and conventionalism) from Duckitt et al. (2010)’s tripartite authoritarianism-conservatism-traditionalism model. Egalitarianism was measured with eight items from Feld-man and Steenbergen (2001) and Feldman (1988). Religiousness was assessed with the 9-item religiousness scale created by Koenig et al. (2005). The scale asks about participation in and frequency of religious activities. 11 items were used to measure socialism liberalism and six measuring fiscal conservatism. These items were adapted from similar questions in the General Social Sur-vey items (Smith et al., 2018). A list of all items for each scale can be found in the supplementary materials of Willoughby et al. (2021)." [END QUOTE]
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So: the easily-repeatable finding here that "high IQ correlates with political leftism in Whites" comes from a single question? The question simply asks study-participants to rate themselves on a number-scale of 1 to 5 ("extremely conservative" to "extremely liberal")? And this being done in the presence of a bunch of University of Minnesota academics glaring at you, clipboards in hand, problem-glasses resting impatiently on nose-bridges, happy greetings still hanging in the air, anti-Trump political paraphernalia in the vicinity? (The interviews were over the period 2017-2023).
__________________
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From "Table 2, political scales," info on their survey questions:
.
-- Political orientation, 1 question: "What is your political orientation?"
-- Authoritarianism, 12 questions, sample: "Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn."
-- Egalitarianism, 8 questions, sample: "If wealth were more equal in this country, we would have many fewer problems."
-- Social liberalism, 11 questions, sample: "The use of marijuana should be legal."
-- Fiscal conservatism, 6 questions, sample: "The government is spending too little money on Social Security."
.
From these sample-questions they provide, are these 'good' questions? I expect many would object to that "fiscal conservatism" question's wording, and maybe others.
No, the liberalism score was a composite of the political orientation, social liberalism, economic conservatism, religiosity and authoritarian scales.
You are talking about the graph's top row, labeled "Composite," but I don't know if it's fair to call it a "liberalism score" (classic 'begging' of the question of defining liberal, no easy task given its many confused and tangled meanings; is Wokeness "liberal"?).
The row labeled "political orientation" does come from one single question, according to the paper's methodology, a self-report on a 1-5 number-scale.
The social pressures and signaling inherent in many of these questions may apply to all (political orientation, authoritarianism, egalitarianism, "social liberalism," fiscal conservatism).
There’s no psychometric gravitas to those questionnaires. You are reasonably questioning the simple face validity of those questions in measuring what they purport to be measuring. It would appear that their scale has zero construct validity. At least zero evidence of it.
I agree. I would like to see the full set of questions used to classify the subjects as left or right wing. It strikes me as pretty timidly lefty to say that "The government is spending too little money on Social Security". Real left wingers are socialists. If respondents were presented with statements like "Housing should be government owned" or "High wage-earners should pay 90% of their income in tax" we might see a different result.
In Britain before Tony Blair, when proposals like this were practical politics, the working class uniformly voted for the left wing party and Labour was visibly the party of the thick. There are ways in which it still is.
This does not surprise me for a couple of reasons. It is intelligent to align yourself with the established power running your society. Dissent is often unwise, especially in a tribal setting. I can also see intelligent people wanting to give individuals more freedom to make decisions for themselves almost as a "luxury belief" for lack of a better term. An intelligent person is generally better at running his own life and doesn't need the benign constraint of social institutions quite as much as the average or below average person. Only when those social institutions are gone and their absence undermines a significant portion of society does he acknowledge that they were important in the first place.
Steve Sailer's title here is sensationalist ("Liberals tend to have higher IQs than their conservative siblings"). A more accurate 'headline' would be:
"Higher-IQ people in the USA tend to answer certain survey-questions in a more 'liberal' or leftist direction." That might be a more-accurate characterization of what's going on with this data.
Except there's to this day a fairly even number of times, and a fairly even number of places, where leftoids are out of power and rightoids are in. So if it's just about following trends, there should be a roughly 50-50 split of leftoids and rightoids across all g-factor levels. But there's not. Among whites, there's a noticeable IQ difference favoring the left at every level, because if you take the foundational axioms of contemporary American, and contemporary Occidental, society to their logical conclusions, the vast inequities which remain in our society must be the fault of those on top conspiring against those at the bottom:
https://ncofnas.com/p/why-we-need-to-talk-about-the-rights
Of course, the truth is that the foundational axioms of our society are wrong. But most conservatives don't believe this. They just don't follow the axioms to their logical conclusions, and object to those who do primarily on an instinctual rather than an intellectual level. Hence why the most popular right-wing influencers of the now are overwhelmingly morons and con-artists like Candace Owens and Andrew Tate, rather than intelligent people like Steve Sailer and Richard Hanania.
Agree in general, except on Richard Hanania being worth following. (I find him to be a high-brow demagogue and, indeed, a "troll.")
Fair enough. But given that Rich has been willing to stick his neck out and put in work on the side of unpopular but nonetheless badly needed recognition of the importance of HBD in our society, I'm compelled to be on his side barring a truly egregious abandonment of character on his part. He's actually working to draw back the elite human capital the Right needs to stay competitive, and the Left needs to for e them into a battle where they must acknowledge reality and offer something better than what they've been.
I'm fully prepared to eat crow for this, but I hope not to, and I owe him my support for as long as he earns it of me.
I would argue that American and European society have drifted consistently left since the French Revolution with sporadic reversions.
Why are people in this comment section so upset about it? It's not that terrible to have lower IQ than another group (let's remember also what liberalism is and how it maps with progressiveness). All in all, what matters the most is to be content, to attain a grasp of the meaning of life, to appreciate who you are and what you have (and I do not mean wealth). Look at it this way: do you want to have let's say 200 IQ points or to have a life of contentment based on your integrity, the love from your family, and what you achieve through hard work?
It's because the propaganda implication of "smart people tend to be liberal" is that liberal attitudes are objectively "correct" and that if you're smart, you'll figure that out. This feeds the smugness of liberals and makes liberal attitudes seem like a way to signal one's smartness.
Alex DeLarge, nice pick for a username, droog ;-)
Now, to the point: you make a very good argument. Yes, the perception is exactly what you say. My opinion is, then, that conservative voices must spread the message that high IQ is not correlated to common sense or to wisdom, in their philosophical sense. Also, IQ is not correlated to conscientiousness. IQ is linked to logical inferences which, as we've seen, are rarely the correct policy because, in their "mathematical" elegance, can't grasp the human element. TL;DR The smartest the person the more awkward and distanced from human reality he is.
Of course, those high IQ white Minnesotans allowed low IQ BLM rioters to burn down Minneapolis for the sake of egalitarianism. Or something like that.