Masters of the Universe
According to recent academic studies liberals are smarter than conservatives. Conservatives can take some consolation in studies which show they are physically stronger, prone to anger and fond of aggression. That means they were useful once, when dinosaurs ruled the earth. But their time has passed. Time’s John Cloud quotes a London School of Economics paper which says there’s evidence that “very liberal” adolescents have an average IQ of 106 and “very conservative” kids come in at only 95. That’s a major difference. Cloud’s main doubt about the LSE study is that while there are ways to measure intelligence, there’s no way to accurately measure “liberalism” and “conservativism” except by self-identification. So it might just be cool for some people to call themselves liberals because it’s “in”, which might explain some curious things. Andrew Sullivan, for example, says he’s a conservative, but then again he might just be slumming.
The implicit assumption that liberals are more intelligent probably explains efforts to pre-clear SETI messages through an international advisory panel involving biologists, historians and ethicists who will ensure the right people are “waving on the beach” when the starships arrive. After all, we want the people sending messages to be as much like the aliens as possible. And if liberals are more intelligent than conservatives, then it follows that super-intelligences are super-liberal. So the best showing mankind can put up is to gather up the sum total of our liberalism and say, “Peace be unto you. Greetings from the persons and womyn of Gaia!” But science fiction author David Brin notes not everyone is believes this approach is valid. What if aliens are not like that? What if it isn’t true that the politically correct will inherit the universe.
The message zealots label as paranoid anybody who wants open discussion. With their peremptory broadcasts, they bet our future on the assumption that all technological alien species will be altruistic. In doing so they ignore all the indications from human or biological history that suggest this is highly unlikely to be the case.
J. Storrs Hall believes that the opposite is likely to be true. Any intelligence mankind is likely to encounter will probably be aggressive and show no compunctions about harnessing the full energy sources of nature to suit their ends. The first indication they have arrived will probably be the dismantling of the outer planets. Our international elites won’t understand why they’re doing it and there’s your problem right there. He writes:
Star travel is expensive; it costs on the order of a ship’s own mass in equivalent energy to get it up to relativistic speeds. Any culture capable of that will be at least a Kardashev Type I civilization, and most likely a Type II. And the reason they’ll be doing star travel is to work their way up towards Type III. Any sentient creatures that actually get here will be nanotech-based robots, not water-based organisms. They won’t have spacecraft, they’ll be spacecraft. They will be unlikely interested in the carbon-poor mudballs of the inner solar system, but reap abundant carbon from the outer planets and carbonaceous asteroids to build Dyson-sphere-like structures around the orbit of Mercury.
Storrs Hall thinks there is a real danger in assuming that certain political attitudes necessarily correspond to the highest levels of intelligence. What could a world that has decided to go back to windmills and sandal-wearing have in common with a civilization that could truly cross interstellar space?
in a universe where the ultimate meaning of “carbon footprint” is the total mass of the superintelligent diamondoid robots you’ve built, spaceships burning cellulosic ethanol simply aren’t going to be anywhere near the fittest. Indeed, cultures that aren’t inherently aggressive and ambitious aren’t going to put the effort into sending out starships at all. The question is, what are they going to think of us, the thin layer of green slime coating an insignificant rock?
If I were an aggressive superintelligent nanotech robot, I would tend to place the boundary between “people” and “raw material” at the boundary of aggressive superintelligent nanotech robots and everything else. I might — just might — make a sentimental exception for intelligent organic species such as my ancestors. “Such as” in this case means intelligent organic species which are on a clear track to building aggressive superintelligent nanotech robots.
Or, of course, has already done so. If you really want them to show up as friendly neighbors, start working on that Dyson Sphere yourself.
If, on the other hand, you’re a culture that has elevated cowardice (“Precautionary Principle”) to be its highest virtue … you’re just dirt.
We probably have no idea how an advanced alien intelligence would think, if it existed. But there seems no reason to assume, a priori that they think like a stock liberal other than the circular claim that liberals are more intelligent and therefore intelligence is going to be liberal. If would be possible of course, to dismiss the objections of Brin and Storrs Hall on the grounds that they shows every symptom of low intelligence: Anyone who truly fears that it is possible aliens to use strength, manifest anger and exhibit aggressiveness is blasphemously claiming some paths to evolution might not have liberal outcomes And everyone knows that’s impossible.
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W, I’m not using my regular “handle”. My IQ has been tested twice to be higher than 144. My wife’s was tested at 140. Neither of us are – or have ever been – “liberal”. Those that think libs are “smarter” are just fondling their minds, imo.
So what you are saying that to go from the Earth’s surface to Earth orbit using chemical fuel takes the major part of the vehicle mass in fuel and then some (staging). To go from Earth orbit to another star system takes a comparable mass fraction, perhaps staging, in converting mass into energy? Cool.
Regarding 95 vs 106, whether that’s a ‘major difference’ or not depends on the sample size–there could be no significant difference at all. Both numbers are essentially average, being about 1/3 standard deviation from the mean, assuming that’s 100 and the SD is 15. Any of those people could vary that much on repeated testing at different ages or even different weeks.
That’s not even getting into what is “smart”, “intelligent”, etc. Like #1 above, my IQ is just fine and I’ve met ‘smart’ liberals and ‘dumb’ liberals. Most of them were, as Frost said, too broad-minded to take their own side in an argument or, quoting Trilling, ” . . . more concerned with ideas than thinking.”
A common conceit of liberal thinking.
A high-school educated relative once called me “an idiot” for making the case against AGW — at a family party celebrating my graduation from medical school.
I too am not using my regular handle. I have been tested by Mensa. You can wake me in the middle of the night and I’ll score 150 on a standard Binet IQ test. And in reading the host’s postings and the comments on this site I know I am not the smartest guy in this particular room. In the Mis-measure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould pointed out that when 19th century European scientists measured the intelligence of the races the results always showed Europeans to be the more intelligent. Liberals will always believe they are the smartest, handsomest, prettiest, most honest and compassionate people in the cosmos. I know. I was once a liberal. But that was in a universe long ago and far away. When I was a child I thought as a child, but now that I’m grown I’m a conservative.
Its a total mistake to confuse intelligence with motivations. Intelligence is just a tool that can help its possessor achieve their desires, but those desires are essentially non-rational. The standard mammal mother will most always fight to save her young even if such an effort will be fruitless from an intellectual point of view. People engage in dangerous sports for the thrill of it, men pursue women that they rationally know are no damn good, and so forth. Intelligence just gives them a tool that makes the fulfillment of their desires easier or more likely, if its sharp enough for the task.
For one to think that anyone or anything of high intelligence will have the same motivations as they do tends to make me doubt that the one holding such a belief has much intelligence at all. It sounds more like psychological “projection” to me.
#5–it’s “Stanford-Binet”. Binet did the original work which was later modified and improved at Stanford.
It seems to me they trot this or a similar “study” out about every 90-180 days in the MSM, usually on a slow news day. I read the article on CNN.com (http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/02/26/liberals.atheists.sex.intelligence/index.html?hpt=Sbin) and here’s the money quote from “George Washington University leadership professor James Bailey, who was not involved in the study”
Participants who said they were atheists had an average IQ of 103 in adolescence, while adults who said they were religious averaged 97, the study found. Atheism “allows someone to move forward and speculate on life without any concern for the dogmatic structure of a religion,” Bailey said.
Right, because there’s nothing dogmatic about atheism…
Now, I’m not a scientist or psychologist (and neither is the “expert” quoted above), but I’ve always understood IQ to be a pretty immutable measure of one’s overall intellectual abilities and has nothing to do with existing knowledge or capacity for intellectual curiosity. Clearly, CNN knows they’re dealing with some shaky science here or they would not have had to turn to a “leadership professor” for re-inforcement of the study’s findings. But then, this “study” and others like it are pure propaganda anyway. Wouldn’t want to confuse the knuckle-dragging masses with facts, now would we?
Intelligence is THE club with which progressives have been attempting to beat conservatives for a couple decades now. Reagan, Quayle, W, Palin … dimwits all, yada yada yada. It is so predictable a part of the insult arsenal that you can hear the “moron” mud-patties being formed between lefty hands as soon as a conservative generates some popular excitement.
Meanwhile, it is lefties who are non-breeding themselves out of existence … it is lefties who were by far the tribe most gullible about the biggest scientific scam perhaps ever … it is lefties whose repeated attempts at social engineering keep failing in the face of the realities of human nature … it is lefties who started and who perpetuate the most basic logical error in modern Western culture, “there is no such thing as absolute truth.”
One would think that having a high I.Q. would innoculate a person against subscribing to poppycock and propaganda, because such a person is supposed to have the mental capacity to recognize inconsistency and think through & beyond dead-end intellectual constructs … but the flourishing of dumb ideas among university faculty members kinda puts the kibosh on any optimism about above-average intelligence being a sure-fire idiotarian vaccine.
It isn’t intelligence but morality that is a better guarantor IMO of discernment & superior judgment. Of course it helps to have both. But if I had to put a premium on one or the other, I’d choose the moral man over the clever man. The moral man is more likely to recognize truth and to be able to distinguish it from error because he is not holding positions in order to justify or excuse his immoral behavior. Which, let’s face it, is probably Reason Numero Uno that people end up grabbing onto lies & error. Untruth is a fig leaf for sin.
The surveying of intelligence alongside self-identified ideological affiliation is not very useful due to the lack of objective measuring instruments for the latter quality in that type of survey. What would be more useful is to couple the testing of intelligence with a wide-ranging survey in which respondents are asked about their belief or non-belief (or “I dunno” positions) re: ideologically-related but objectively verifiable statements, i.e. who believes things that are just flat-out wrong, and who is able to intellectually probe WHY certain statements/positions are right or wrong. For example, it helps to understand that the Founders’ basic views of human nature (humans are sinful creatures) underlay the system of checks and balances and separation of powers in the US Constitution (distributed power restrains the ability of any one faction or govt body to turn abusive and tyrannical) … and, thus, someone who believes that “humans are inherently good” or “humans are a moral blank slate, and it is society that imprints goodness or evil upon the individual” not only needs to be exposed as having a view of human nature contrary to that of the Founders but also needs to prove that their view is in fact true before we go basing all sorts of public policy & institutional missions on that view.
But with the progs in control of both academia and the media, it is not surprising that they are self-convinced of their own intellectual superiority. They would just do well to remember what the Greeks taught, that hubris brings nemesis.
If they correlate only with adolescents, most intelligent and free-thinking yutes tend to be liberal, but the smart ones later learn to be conservative, we all know that. Bad experimental setup. Might be more interesting to poll only those above 120 – but I’m afraid it would come out about the same anyway. Like I said, bad setup.
Regarding the aliens, Brin’s “startide rising” universe is outstanding. Greg Bear’s “Forge of God” is another encounter with superior aliens – and say goodbye to the Earth. Larry Niven’s short story about the monks – was the title “The Fifth Profession”? Also Niven’s kzin/puppeteer universe of Known Space, and the Protector species of homo erectus – man is the least “intelligent” as such. Ender’s Game, more so in the earlier versions, who knows what Hollyweird will do to the story and the moral. I could probably go on for a while longer, and always, of course, finish with the classic Twilight Zone, “To Serve Man”.
Gordon/7
You’re right, it is Stanford-Binet. But then I wasn’t wakened in the middle of the night.
When the winged ships come, they will not be bearing gifts. This planet’s history of what happens when a more advanced civilization meets a less advanced civilization has proved an unhappy one for the less advanced.
The mighty Zulu nation, mighty conqueror and king
Armed with amulet and spear and shield
When faced with British rifles and the discipline they bring
Were forced despite their bravery to yield
The Aztecs built their temples to their blood demanding gods
They held in thrall as slaves surrounding tribes
And then the winged ships came and young Cortes ‘gainst fearful odds
Demolished everything with Spanish jibes
Oh yes they had successes, Isandlwanda comes to mind
And Noche Triste cost the Spanish dear
But in the end the higher culture wins is what you’ll find
The verdict of our history is clear
So send your SETI memos out, announce your peaceful ways
But when the winged ships come don’t be surprised
When Cortes steps out of the ship that we’ve seen better days
And find that slaves was how that we were prized
#10 Josh/ #12 Walt
The worst possible outcome is like the fictional universe of Fred Saberhagen’s Berserker series: self-replicating robotic ships whose mission is to eliminate all life whenever and wherever they find it.
After all, if you have a race that is intent on expanding throughout the galaxy, you might want to have an advance vanguard whose mission would be to destroy any and all competition for such a goal, potential or actual. If you find intelligent life destroy it.
And really, if you have X number of civilizations out there, and assuming for the sake of argument that most of them are the “touchy feely” kind that the progressives expect, the one civilization that isn’t is going to eat them.
To the carnivore, pacifism is seen as a great virtue when it is practiced by the prey.
I was tested in high school in the mid-140s and again about 20 years later in the low 150s, which I attribute more to experience than any real increase in intelligence. My Mother’s IQ was over 170. I can assure you that neither I nor my parents or grandparents or the greats and great greats were liberal. Yet my entire genealogical pedigree is peppered with doctors, dentists, engineers and concert quality musicians, all educated smart people, all Republicans.
My Mother used to say that if you can read, you can cook. It was her way of saying to concentrate on the skills that will make me able to be self-sufficient because there is sure to be a book or manual out there for the directions. She had her masters in economics from Berkeley and a 2nd and 3rd in personnel management and business from Boston College/Pitt, she was an executive, played violin in the symphony and was an award winning artist and writer, but when push came to shove, she believed that learning survival was job #1. I learned to hunt, fish, shoot, grind grain and bake over a campfire, set a trap, shoot with a bow and arrow, and lay down a trail before I learned the name of a single philosopher, poet, composer or theorist. I could read the stars and knew my trees and plants and what was useful for healing and for eating. My former husband never read a book unless for school, yet he designed and built us a home, could take apart and rebuild any piece of mechanical equipment or engine and many other things that are far more useful than a lib arts education. He grew up on a farm and when he finally got a chance to go to college on his GI bill, he was nervous at the thought of how far behind he would be. But after just a couple of weeks, he realized that his hands-on experience had provided him with a far better education than he was getting in college and he was bored to tears. He did get his degree in mechanical engineering, but other than correct terminology for gizmos and thing-a-ma-jigs, I don’t think he learned anything new that he didn’t know before going in.
If you want to waste your time sitting around with the likes of John Kerry and Barack Obama and the rest of their ilk and talk the nuances of this or that fine, but if you want to learn to survive in an 8.8 earthquake or some other disaster, I suggest you befriend someone with a real education, like Sarah Palin or even me.
I happened to love school, but my son detests it, but we both love learning and there is a difference. The only way I got him thru to his h.s. diploma was because he had to have a B average to play football. He is very bright but he’d rather do than sit still while some long-winded professor drones on and on. His problem is that he gets the concepts and context right away, but has problems with the details that teachers are so picky about and he gets bored. When he was in 8th grade they wanted to hold him back because he was a terrible speller and couldn’t do percentages and was failing. I thought that strange since he could figure batting averages in his head by the time he was 8. When I pointed that out to the teacher and had him give a demonstration, he didn’t miss a single question. The teacher sputtered something about having to pass the test the way it was written. However, as soon as my son understood that batting averages are percentages, he became a whiz in math. He still can’t spell, but then who can anymore with spellcheck?
When I lost my husband and was ready to meet someone new, I thought, oh good now I’ll look for someone who enjoys the theater and classical music and can sit and discuss whatever book had caught my attention. It took me about 6 mo. alone to realize that guys like that are totally useless as dating or husband material when you need someone desperately who can replace the garbage disposal, fix a broken pipe or replace the brakes on the car or build any piece of furniture I’m able to describe with a few hand motions drawing in the air. I’ll take practical knowledge over Ivy League idiots who don’t know a socket wrench from a screw driver every single day. BTW, my rube hubby earned a six figure income after retiring from 26 years in the Navy and went to work in the private sector. My son was earning $75,000 a year as a chef in an upscale restaurant where he started as a part time dishwasher at 16 before quitting to go back to school to get a degree in sports management so he could coach.
And one more anecdote, my cousin’s daughter graduated from medical school last year, her son, who actually tests nearly 15 points higher on the IQ scale is like my son, he detested sitting in school. He decided to get his degree in forestry and is now a forest ranger where he can be outdoors and doing what he really loves. If he met some of these arrogant libs, they’d probably think he wasn’t smart at all, when in reality he is the really smart one compared to his doctor sis. When I asked him if forestry school had turned him into an envirowhacko, he laughed and said no, he was a common sense guy when it comes to environmental management. He is a huge Sarah Palin fan, which should surprise no one, but, of course, cements him in the dummy category according to the libs.
Sorry this is so long, but heck I don’t comment that often, so consider this my contribution for the year.
bogie wheel
I agree being intelligent doesn’t mean that you’re fair to your fellows and compatriots
a test, that any politicians that request our vote, should take, and the results exposed. (well of course they would lie)
http://www.yourmorals.org/
Mark Steyn puts it best:
“Take the most devastating rapier wit you know – Oscar Wilde, Noel Coward – and put him on a late-night subway train up against a psycho with a baseball bat. The withering putdown, the devastating aphorism will avail him nought.”
Moreso if one isn’t quite as clever as one thinks – then the only real difference is the baseball bat and the willingness to use it.
Anymore liberalism seems like a marriage between perpetual adolescence and book learning (you wonder why liberals tend to hate business men and women – too adult and practical). I always (naively) thought that learning was its own reward (plus of course the material benefits of applying that learning), not a means of running down those you’ve a priori (and all too often incorrectly) defined as less sharp.
Been around academics and other “intellectuals” all of my life. A fair number of these have relationship/life problems far more convoluted than those of their supposed intellectual “inferiors”. Perhaps being “smart” is being better able to lie to one’s self/paper over obvious cognitive dissonance. They can congratulate themselves daily on their cleverness and it won’t change a thing.
@bogie wheel, cmt 9:
Well said, sir!
Braaaains we need braaains
versus
So long and thanks for all the fish
I’d put my nickle on the porpoises with a purpose in a universe with malevolent intergalactic highway crews. Greenpeace might look like arrogant twits to intelligent aliens, just as they do to intelligent humans.
There is considerable online speculation as to the role of a foreign intelligence service in the pilfering of the East Anglia files. But which one? My vote would be for Russian intelligence as they have both the means and the motive. If they were indeed responsible I would like to personally thank Russian intelligence for pilfering the East Anglia files and posting them for everyone to see.
Putin, when asked if he had any problems with Medvenev said, “No, he is a Russian Nationalist just like me.”
A perfect storm is brewing for the IPCC
This is like Neal Young — Don’t Let It Bring You Down I hate that whiny voice of Neal Young too but here it seems to work. And I love to see that pyre in the sky of the burning castle of the IPCC.
“Don’t Let It Bring You Down”
Old man lying
by the side of the road
With the lorries rolling by,
Blue moon sinking
from the weight of the load
And the building scrape the sky,
Cold wind ripping
down the allay at dawn
And the morning paper flies,
Dead man lying
by the side of the road
With the daylight in his eyes.
Don’t let it bring you down
It’s only castles burning,
Find someone who’s turning
And you will come around.
Blind man running
through the light
of the night
With an answer in his hand,
Come on down
to the river of sight
And you can really understand,
Red lights flashing
through the window
in the rain,
Can you hear the sirens moan?
White cane lying
in a gutter in the lane,
If you’re walking home alone.
Don’t let it bring you down
It’s only castles burning,
Just find someone who’s turning
And you will come around.
Don’t let it bring you down
It’s only castles burning,
Just find someone who’s turning
And you will come around.
I hope that study is true and that Liberals have above average IQs because that will make them a minority of the electorate. God bless majority rule.
Enrico Fermi once asked ‘if there are aliens, then where are they?’ This so-called Fermi Paradox juxtaposes the proposition that Earth is a typical planet in the universe with the apparent silence of the heavens. At one level it’s an ontological reverse of another: ‘if God does not exist then why are we here?’ If we’re not special then why are we alone? If we are alone then why are we not special?
As with all paradoxes, a variety of explanations have been advanced to explain the quiet of the stars. One hypothesis, which may or may not appeal to liberals is called the zoo theory. It holds that advanced civilizations, being liberal, don’t want to interfere with primitives and abstain from contacting us because they wish to leave us alone to develop on our cosmic reservation. The fact that this prohibition is universally observed has the added benefit of establishing that liberal-like thought is the necessary evolutionary path that all worthy civilizations eventually attain. If all advanced civilizations resembled Greenpeace and hence preserved us in a state of nature, if would provide more proof, if any were needed, that liberals are smarter than conservatives.
The other explanation for the Fermi Paradox is that the heavens are silent because it’s dangerous to communicate. Just as creatures in some vast primeval forest burrow and hide from predators, so then do all the civilizations out there that have managed to survive conceal their existence. The Fermi Paradox is explained by comsec. This has the attraction of appealing to nature. Anyone who has been out in the woods knows that if you are not at the top of the food chain then survival depends on not broadcasting your existence. If that’s the case then a universe of watchful silence implies that conservatives are really smarter than liberals.
It’s of a piece with their faith in Communism finally working one day – they insist their desires are Truth, and damn the evidence.
If an alien race went out to contact humans on Earth, I would assume they were alien missionaries interested in converting us to their “true faith”.
I would really get concerned if several different alien factions descended upon Earth, each claiming to be the “true faith” and claiming the other faiths to be false. The idea of humans getting drawn into a religious war among aliens does not appeal to me.
I really wish you guys would use smaller words. I’m having trouble following this thread. Like, what does Kim Kardashev’s star power have to do with all this?
L3
Even a total ‘tard’ [Palin approved 'tard' version™] should be able to grasp the concept that you can’t extract blood from a turnip. -And, yet…we have our turnip suckin’, empty pocket robbin’, sleazy car-salesmen (at best) vampire leftist politicians out in full force trying to make ‘change’ that nobody in their right mind wants to ‘believe’ in.
The saga continues…
I once had a Captain. Said Captain was, on a good day, with a downhill run, and a blazing tailwind; a PC-enslaved twit whose greatest ambition was to “Uriah Heep” his way to high rank without benefit of any knowledge of law, law enforcement, or how to deal with criminals either on the street or in custody. He used to loudly justify his various pronouncements by saying that he had an IQ of 142 and by God he was a genius. Incidentally, he was also a militant atheist, and not opposed to ranting on about the subject to both staff and the occasional felon. He was, by the standards used by the Left a superior specimen of humanity.
In fact, he was a hazard to navigation.
I was a SGT. I and two of the officers on my shift had all been tested by Mensa. We all outscored him by a significant amount. However, that, and couple of bucks will buy you a cup of coffee. We did not tell him, because a) payback would ensue for shattering his world view, and b) we were too busy trying to hold shift and unit together in spite of the flailing of the “superior specimens”.
The only good thing about working for him was that I acquired the nom d’ blog I use here in the course of a …. discussion wherein he described me as being to the right of Genghis Khan.
Oh, and his rise to prominence came to a shuddering halt when he encountered a bit of reality that was not in his world view for which he could not file a memo to CYA himself.
I take claims of superior intellect by Leftists with the same gravity I view their claims of superior morality.
Subotai Bahadur
Liberals always have need to assert they are more intelligent.
Like the high school punk [virgin] who always needs to talk about how many babes he’s had.
106 to 95, hey that’s only sevan or eihgt pionts diferrence. (*whew*) what snot to like abuot that?
Intelligent people can be stupid. I have observed that intelligent, well educated and moral people can be pathologically liberal. This is such a contradiction. I can see someone with two out three of those virtues being liberal but all three at the same time is beyond belief. This hilarious opinion that liberals are more intelligent than conservatives must surely come from stupidity. It is interesting (and disturbing) that stupidity seems to trump all of the human virtues.
Very droll, Richard. I was thinking about writing about the same Time piece, but no need now. But I wonder what would be the results of really examining the methods of this study. Scratch that. I’m pretty sure I can imagine how biased and stupid they’d be. One last question: did my IQ shrink ten points when I switched my politics? And what about the quote falsely attributed to Churchill? You know the one about a man at twenty having no heart if he wasn’t a a liberal… and after thirty having no brain if he wasn’t a conservative. Maybe this study was authored by the Scarecrow.
RLS/30; well shucks –there i had thought that the passage of time adds experience & leads away from liberalism toward conservatism. Now along comes the novel plot twist –actually time subtracts IQ and leads away from…hmm…and so forth (i forgot what i was trying to say).
Wretchard at 21 said:
“The other explanation for the Fermi Paradox is that the heavens are silent because it’s dangerous to communicate.”
The Fermi Paradox is another one of those “elephants in the room”. There has been life on our planet for 3 1/2 billion years. Biological evolution on our planet has always been two steps forward and one step backwards due to periodically getting whacked by an asteroid, climate change or some other nasty event that nearly wipes out all life on the Earth. However it’s not difficult to imagine life on some other more benign world that achieved interstellar capability hundreds of millions of years ago in the past. Even if mother nature placed an upper limit of 5% speed-of-light on interstellar travel, a hundred million years is more than ample time for a civilization to expand across the entire galaxy (the Milky Way galaxy has a diameter of 100,000 light years). There should be abundant/common place examples of extra-terrestrial intelligence (ETI) in plain view, e.g. the equivalent of an ETI’s used oil filter serving as a cult object in a ancient Greek temple like the Kaba stone in Mecca (the Kaba stone is a common iron-nickel meteorite), or images from the Cassini spacecraft showing a wrecked ETI’s transfer stage orbiting Saturn. However there has been no evidence at all that any life exists anywhere in the universe except on Earth despite the fact that everything we know about our Sun and Earth indicates that we are very ordinary.
This is a ***Huge Contradiction***.
Most of the explanations for the Fermi Paradox are very nasty, e.g. a dominant ETI wipes out any competing intelligence upon discovery or even worse, there is something in the Laws of Physics that causes all intelligent life to destroy itself before achieving interstellar capability.
The Fermi Paradox is in the same league as that other Elephant in the Room, i.e. “Is there a reason why we exist?”. I suspect the two are connected.
@Sara (Pal2Pal):
guys like that are totally useless as dating or husband material when you need someone desperately who can replace the garbage disposal, fix a broken pipe or replace the brakes on the car or build any piece of furniture I’m able to describe with a few hand motions drawing in the air.
Turns out there’s a book for all those things.
So, really, you can have both, if the guy is willing to get his hands dirty.
Bogie wheel @ 9:
GMTA – I was going to write down this same road. The Lefties also seem to be fairly passive-aggressive which is a self limiting way of acting. (Others get tired of being gamed and kill them.) Conservatives (small ‘c’) tend to be more overtly aggressive in ways that matter – guarding hearth, home and family actively, gathering goods to make a ‘living’, etc.
Aliens coming our way will tend to be more like “The Visitors” (who treat us a food animals) or the critters in “Predator” (out for sport hunting to sharpen skills) or the creatures in “Independence Day” (Q: “What do want of us? Can we make an accommodation?” A: “Die. Die. – As the plan to consume the system and leave it strip mined.) than the friendly spindly things in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”. The really, really smart ones will mine the planets of what they can and move on. They will peer at us and go “Eww!”, perform extermination and maybe put some in a zoo as pets (look at the stupid things we found there!).
The only writer that I have ever found who treated this subject with any rigor was Orson Scott Card. Google his “Hierarchy of Exclusion”.
wretchard @ 21:
As far as we know. It may be absolutely full of chatterboxes talking in ways we do not understand. Or as you say, talking amongst the known friendlies but keeping a low profile to the unknowns so as not to attract the nasties.
Subotai @ 26:
There are far too many of them running around loose you know.
E/32; two art works addressing that –the void beyond science’s last stepping stone:
1) Kurt Vonnegut’s novel “The Sirens of Titan” –wherein all of human history turns out to’ve been just a small part of the shipping process –from one side of the universe to the other –of a spare part for a broken-down ETI spaceship.
2) An Australian film of the 80s “The Gods Must be Crazy” –a gentle human comedy of manners wherein a Hottentot tribe, completely out of contact with the modern world, suddenly has to contend with a coke bottle –green glass variety –that has been thrown out an off-course airplane passing overhead. the bottle is so interesting, has so many uses in work and play, that the individual tribe members soon confront something new under the sun –disagreement, and how to cope with it.
Both works share one big thing –humor. Expressed both ‘on screen’ and in artist’s tone: value of humane kindness in the divine comedy.
It’s interesting how just about anytime there is a thread about intelligence/IQ on the interwebs, the number of people who supposedly score 3+ SDs above the norm is about 3-4 times as high as the number of people who say they scored in the average range.
buddy larsen @ 32:
I’ve read and enjoyed many of Vonnegut’s novels including “The Sirens of Titan”. “Cat’s Cradle” and “Player Piano” are two other important novels by Vonnegut. I was actually thinking about Vonnegut when I wrote my earlier comment about how intelligent, well educated and moral people can be pathologically liberal. Vonnegut wrote some incredibly stupid things about Islamic terrorism. For example from Wikipedia:
“I regard them as very brave people.” “They [suicide bombers] are dying for their own self-respect. It’s a terrible thing to deprive someone of their self-respect. It’s [like] your culture is nothing, your Race is nothing, you’re nothing … It is sweet and noble—sweet and honourable I guess it is—to die for what you believe in.”
This is the sort of moonbat nonsense that one would expect from Noam Chomsky. It amazes me that this nonsense came from the same guy who wrote “Cat’s Cradle”. People defend Vonnegut by saying he made his comments on Islamic terrorism when he was old and dotty. However I suspect he would have held the same opinions when he was in his prime.
One of my favorite teachers ever, eighth grade life science teacher Mr.Bass, told us one fine September morning that out of a class of 28, 20 of us had IQ over 140. We were all suitably impressed. He went on to tell us what that meant: the only reason for a bad grade in his class was laziness. He said with that much brain to draw from, cooperative effort would get everyone an A.
I was greatly impressed. I went home and told my Daddy. He said IQ is like a bank account. No returns on being smart, just using smart.
Then he said if anyone ever volunteers their numbers when talking about IQ, to automatically subtract 20. And if they kept on talking about it, subtract another 10. If you’ve got it, you don’t need to tell everyone. He said, “believe me, they’ll know.”
We never did find out who the mystery geniuses in life science were, but we all scored high in that class. Nature or nurture? 40 years later, I don’t know
Missed the editing window, so here’s the follow on. When grades came out, Mr. Bass reminded us of what he said at the start of the year. Twenty some of us went on to be National Honor Society in high school. Some few dropped out of that because pompous high schoolers weren’t our cup of tea. Most of us, however went on to have successful lives and raise successful children. Will find out more details at our 40 year reunion in June.
I think these types of studies are great.
The sight of all of these superior intellectuals constantly patting themselves on the back is a source of endless amusement to me. What makes it even better is that most of the time the back patting comes in the midst of an article that spouts some ridiculous nonsense or advocates for some unrealistic solution to a problem. That’s the cherry on top of the sundae.
Lefties and the “elite” often raise issues that should be discussed, and then immediately advocate some solution for the problem that has no hope, is not based in reality, and will likely make the problem worse. They then congratulate each other on their intelligence, enlightenment, and life in the “reality based” community, and move on to the next problem.
Many of them seem to have a total inability to understand that there are real people involved in all of the issues they discuss, or how those people will react to their solutions. Book smarts are fine and necessary, but you also need some sense, and that’s where they tend to come up short. Thank God for that.
I’m no Psychologist, but I’ve been around awhile. I’ve found that naked pomposity is almost always a product of a deep seated inferiority. A truly intelligent person tends to display a bit of humility.
If your intelligence ranks in the top one percent in the world, how much do you really know, compared to what there is to know? A truly intelligent person realizes this, and can ponder contradictory ideas without being threatened, or dismissing them out of hand as the product of an intellectual inferior.
Why is it that all of these intellectual elites seem to come down on the exact same side of every question, with very little deviation? They tell themselves it’s because they’re enlightened. In fact, with them the “science is always settled”. In reality, if you had one hundred truly intelligent people in a room, and posed a unique problem to them, you’d get contradictory answers ranging all over the place.
Their intellectual solidarity is rooted in their desire to be seen as a member of the club. How much diversity of opinion would you see if you went to a dinner party hosted by one of the “elite”? An unorthodox opinion is not seen as something to be pondered, but rather as a social gaffe.
Some of us “non-elites” react to this with outrage, but I think amusement is a better response. Ridicule them if you must, but don’t be angry with them. Their delusion is the only thing many of them have to cling to. Anger gives them a legitimacy that they don’t deserve.
There is such a thing as Emotional Intelligence as well. Liberals flunk that one every time.
dtm/41; (they) …also need some sense, and that’s where they tend to come up short. Thank God for that. –if they DID have some sense, then we wouldn’t have to thank God they don’t.
E/38; the thing about the Vonnegut quote is, it’s only half the thought –the other half is, if your very being is an insult, you have to either do something about it or not –either rid the place of yourself or the insulted one, or just ignore the whole thing as ‘the human condition’ –as apt for the resigned “And so it goes” (as he himself ended his Slaughterhouse Five chapters).
IOW, Vonnegut should’ve given the same weight to that thought as his fiction fans give to his politics –that is, short shrift –to be overlooked in order to address the malleable parts of the whole.
That’s where Wikipedia is slightly fiendish –progressive to the bone –the ‘what to emphasize’ being a hundred percent always political even if not one in ten thousand youngsters writing school papers are yet able to comprehend same. ‘beware the geek bearing gifts’ –LOL
http://www.studioflorist.com
Thank you very much for the Tips with fresh flowers presented on your site! I did as it is written there and the flowers that my beloved presented me are still alive! And besides now I know the meaning of all the flowers! And I am even thinking of becoming a florist myself! Thank you, studioflorist.com!
Sometimes, “intelligence” just means a heightened ability to rationalize bad ideas.
I’ve got a relative like that. For her, “smart” is defined purely in terms of tastes and interests. If one has “smart” tastes and interests, one is “smart”. Actually thought is no longer necessary.
Man, those liberals sure are smart.
Relative to the “smart atheists”:
My Swedish father-in-law, a top physicist, attended nuclear physics conferences around the world as well as each annual congress of Cosmologists. Cosmology is the branch of theoretical physics which studies the origins of the universe, black holes, anti-matter, etc. — basically, the scientific answer to metaphysics, the philosophy of the origin of being.
He told me year after year that 85% of the top theoretical physicists of the planet, when polled at their congress, answered the query “Do you believe there is a God?” with “Yes”.
45. Serrrr: I thought this forum was moderated? A moderated forum should not need “Tocque” nor rel=”nofollow” in the anchors. And spam would not get through:
Someone did a study of what liberals and conservatives dream.
The results showed that conservatives are far more likely to dream about external threats. I guess this fits in line with their aggressive nature.
But the really interesting thing about the study to me was when the results were announced.
July 2001.
Two months later those nightmares became real.
I was just now reading a Drudge link to some IMF currency story –the link was to the ABC site, where atop the comments sits a reader who has figured out how to solve world currency issues:
Stop #### to Fox Fake News and move out of Mom’s basement. America has turned into a gigantic trailer park.
pooch430 2:14 AM
So here’s your progressive voter (*gasp* yes, “voter”) –motivated to read an article about global finance, thinks trailers have basements.
Wretchard #21 and Eggplant #32:
Right after the USSR collapsed someone suggested a possible answer to the Fermi Paradox.
There are indeed billions of intelligent races out there, but they are all Leftists, have adopted communism as their political and economic philosophy, and thus are too friggin’ poor to build a radio set. Capitalism is in reality a uniquely human invention. This latest data you cite shows that most of us are too dumb to realize the superiority of communism. The rest of the intelligent races of the universe are so smart that they are communists and are desperately trying to figure out the secret of making bread and building a mud hut that won’t fall down when it rains.
The best description of capitalism I ever heard is that it is “What people will do if you leave them alone.” Maybe that is not true of all other intelligent races. And the ones where it is true want to be left alone.
This is all reflected in the space exploration plans of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and most especially, Baroque Obama; i.e., don’t do any at all.
Subotai #26:
I greatly respect your experience, service, and erudition and value your opinions. However, for several years now I have been troubled by the phrase “to the right of Genghis Khan.” From my perspective the Khan was a flaming Leftie:
1. He conquered and expanded his empire so he could impose taxes on more people.
2. He was possibly the very first whacko environmentalist. He hated cities, tore them down whenever he could, and considered depopulating the whole of northern China to provide pasture for his horses.
3. He was very much in favor of unwed mothers, bedding every woman he could get his hands on. The majority of the population that now inhabit this former domain are genetically related to him.
By my calculations “To the right of Genghis Khan” would put someone well to the left of Lenin.
That’s true –had Genghis been a rightie, he’d've concentrated on his pony-raising biz and left everybody else the hell alone.
o/t but good grinz:
http://reaganiterepublicanresistance.blogspot.com/2010/02/cartoonists-having-field-day.html
uh, I can’t prevent myself of smiling, people who gargle, to be the smarts that belongs to the “right” political party process of the same hubris that they repproach to their opponants !
so intelligence of the heart isn’t the appanage of a party.
Someone once said it’s a limited mind that considers itself the sole repository of absolute knowledge. Education is a necessary, but not sufficient, component of wisdom.
The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know.
#13 Tcobb: guess it’s time we started practicing our ‘goodlife’ act.
There was a similar study recently that said all conservative were mentally ill or they would not hold the views that they do. I think it was done at Berkeley.
2) All the talk of the coming Singularity (see Vernor Vinge) just -assumes- that once it comes, we will all believe the same things. IOW, no pesky disagreements about icky things like abortion or Islam or the proper role of government. No sir. The enlightenment to come will show us all the true path, which — surprise — just happens to be the liberal world view.
The conceit of liberals continues to astound me. Perhaps its easier than thinking.
I suspect the studies and MSM’s trumpeting of the studies, is really an attempt to 1. Pass health care and 2. Get reelected. After all, aren’t all the ‘smart’ people supporting Obamacare, Reelect Obama and Chevrolet?
It is a really tacky status commercial meant for…(wait for it)…never mind, you got it.
Well lets see now. I ( someone nobody has ever heard of outside a relatively small circle of friends and professional associates) have a measured I.Q of153, Don Imus 164, and Richard Fenyman, (a personal idol of mine and when alive, thought to be the world’s foremost particle physicist after Einstein) an IQ of 127. There is something going on, it seems, besides innate, pure braincell potential. To quote Fenyman, who, when confronted with the news of his recorded IQ dug up by his staff from his childhood records, (and fearful of his reaction) tearfully replied in gales of laughter: “To think, I have accomplished so much with so little!”
There is an important issue of terminology to understand before discussing the report. The UK study allegedly shows more intelligent youths grow up to vote for the Liberal Democratic Party. American readers might jump to the erroneous conclusion that “Liberal” in UK terminaolgy equates to the US label, “liberal”. They do not.
The UK Liberal Democratic Party is Center-Right on political spectrum. Social Democrats are Centre-Left, while Labour is Left and the Conservatives are Right.
The closest equivalent to Liberal Democrat in the US would be the Rino wing of the Republican Party, or the Clintonian rump of the Democrats. The UK Liberal Democrats are definatley not ideologically comparable to Obama and the socialist-left in America today.
Well, that was about the most fun I’ve had reading a thread in a while. Here’s hoping it’s a long one.
Out in the universe, there is a map that is used by all space faring beings. On it, there is a red circle surrounding our solar system. The caption reads: Do not visit for any reason, The third rock from the sun is inhabited by idiots.
IIRC Some years ago someone published a book comparing IQ’s on a racial sort. Weren’t the deltas greater and the book poo-pooed?
52. buddy larsen:
Well there’s a whiskey point here. A good pony raiser puts considerable thought into breeding his ponies. A good stallion could breed a lot of mares. And the successful horesman set up his best stallion to do just that. Ghengis Khan like a lot of kings of the horse age figured themselves to be the best stallion. So naturally part of their job was to breed as many mares/women as possible. I have seen genetic studies of peoples in Ireland that trace whole sections of a population to one king from 1200 years ago or so. The viking kings of Rus were want to do the same thing. There are a zillion other examples.
It wasn’t just one’s political beliefs and their religious beliefs that this study said were an indicator of intelligence. Oh, but it gets even better! (paragraph-break mine)
“Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa at the the London School of Economics and Political Science correlated data on these behaviors with IQ from a large national U.S. sample and found that, on average, people who identified as liberal and atheist had higher IQs.
This applied also to sexual exclusivity in men, but not in women. The findings will be published in the March 2010 issue of Social Psychology Quarterly. [...]
“The reasoning is that sexual exclusivity in men, liberalism and atheism all go against what would be expected given humans’ evolutionary past. In other words, none of these traits would have benefited our early human ancestors, but higher intelligence may be associated with them.”
Yes, it gets even more fun. Straight, conservsative men who believe in God are teh estupiod – and our eventual interstellar visitors won’t be the long hoped-for hot lesbian Amazon chicks, but instead the Village People.
61/michaelhoskins: The Bell Curve by Murray and Herrenstein was unremarkable except for one chapter which discussed IQ by race. That chapter said that whites outscored blacks by 10 point on IQ tests. The authors were pilloried as racists, even though no one refuted the studies they quoted.
This is the dirty little secret of education. Whites -do- have higher IQs than blacks, and Asians outscore whites. No one knows how to increase IQ; much of it is hereditary. So when you discuss children failing in school, you wind up discussing race. We can’t point out racial differences, since everyone is equal, so the subject is studiously ignored.
Richard Dawkins, a famous English aethist, when asked where life came from said, likely it was seeded by space aliens. He got that idea from another brit from the 50 francis crick–who discovered the double helix of the chromosome. Crick when asked as to the source of the language of genetics — said it was likely seeded by space aliens.
In origins questions its helpful to understand that this response, that the code came from elsewhere in an earlier time — merely pushes the matter back in time.
ie so great the code came from space aliens. ok where did they get it.
we have in effect two great mysteries. one is is to do with the more familiar and uncomplex elements, the inorganic chemistry of the periodic table. all elements come originally from the big bang. the current model holds that all something came from nothing in a big bang some +-14 billion years ago or so. how can that be possible?(part of the reason for the steady ascendancy of the deity into his heaven in the last 40 years has been that the natural scientists have come round to a view of the universe origins that closely tracks the bible.)
the other great mystery is the origins life. did life come from the elements themselves. that is was life coded into the elements of the universe just as hydrogen was coded into the quark soup of the early universe and the periodic table of elements was coded into hydrogen and helium? So also was complex life coded into the periodic table? Or did God himself having once created the universe enter into the universe and breathe life into it.
jW/64; yup –and der Juden have us ALL beat –
(snip)
Jews are a famously accomplished group. They make up 0.2 percent of the world population, but 54 percent of the world chess champions, 27 percent of the Nobel physics laureates and 31 percent of the medicine laureates.
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Jews make up 2 percent of the U.S. population, but 21 percent of the Ivy League student bodies, 26 percent of the Kennedy Center honorees, 37 percent of the Academy Award-winning directors, 38 percent of those on a recent Business Week list of leading philanthropists, 51 percent of the Pulitzer Prize winners for nonfiction.
In his book, “The Golden Age of Jewish Achievement,” Steven L. Pease lists some of the explanations people have given for this record of achievement. The Jewish faith encourages a belief in progress and personal accountability. It is learning-based, not rite-based.
Most Jews gave up or were forced to give up farming in the Middle Ages; their descendants have been living off of their wits ever since. They have often migrated, with a migrant’s ambition and drive. They have congregated around global crossroads and have benefited from the creative tension endemic in such places.
No single explanation can account for the record of Jewish achievement. The odd thing is that Israel has not traditionally been strongest where the Jews in the Diaspora were strongest. Instead of research and commerce, Israelis were forced to devote their energies to fighting and politics.
(end snip)
–it’s astonishing how quickly the naked ape incorporates behavior into genes –Lamarck would be tickled to read the Brooks piece. it’s pretty easy to see how the exigencies of stayed fed through wintertimes is still evident in IQ test results –as well as language traits. The longer and colder the winters, the more technical capacity imbedded in the languages.
Libs are more emotional, more bitchy, more hypocritical, but not more intelligent, and certainly way less practical.
Heh –not being Jewish nor Asian, i can’t even do a simple copy paste and yet remember to check the edit.
#21 w
wretchard writes: “The other explanation for the Fermi Paradox is that the heavens are silent because it’s dangerous to communicate. Just as creatures in some vast primeval forest burrow and hide from predators, so then do all the civilizations out there that have managed to survive conceal their existence.”
Very interesting comments. But while hiding (avoiding contact) may work for some creatures, its been been disastrous for humans. Cultures that have sought out trade and communication with other cultures have gobbled up, conquered, enslaved, and in almost every way dominated, but also in many cases immensely benefited, those who seem to have chosen to avoid contact, or who have chosen to try to remain in their valleys or hills.
(As an aside, one rather curious and inexact exception is the population of Ni’Ihau off Kaua’i in the Hawai’ian chain. A private, family-owned island has somehow managed to preserve, or perhaps one should say to allow to be preserved, a population of Hawai’ians to live pretty much as the original Hawai’ians lived. Ah, private enterprise. [Based on "The Ultimate Kauai Guidebook". I'm sure Wiki has more.])
So, libs claim that having an above average IQ’s means they are more moral? Yeah right. I think victims of Ted Bundy et al would strongly disagree.
The Greenpeace video fails miserably. The aliens come across as bumbling idiots when one can’t work the remote control and not very advanced either when they still use paper and, yikes, feather quills to write with.
First, as a liberal (certainly by the standards of this room) the study is bunk. Liberalism was defined as concern for genetically nonrelated people and support for private resources that help those people. This definition does not square well with a right left political dichotomy. Secondly IQ itself is a dubious measure of intelligence (speaking as someone comfortably 1 StdDev above the norm). Finally a 6 point IQ gap is meaningless even if we accept IQ as a reasonable stand in for intelligence.
That said the alien speculation and nonsense liberal caricaturing in the article and comments are even more ridiculous.
??? Who should they go to? Clearly choosing academics of any stripe will knot the panties of a large group of conservatives. If there is any difference in intelligence and/or educational achievement between conservatives and liberals I would guess that it has very little to do with most of our policy differences and much to do with the current anti-intellectualism embraced by a large swath of the current conservative movement.
It was statistically significant and education, wealth, etc were controlled for.
It would be as accurate to say that theism* shares a single dogma. Atheism consists of exactly one belief or rather one lack of belief. To say it is dogmatic is to show complete ignorance as to what dogmatism is. Try Websters or a Google search if you really are that confused.
* encompassing all religious belief from Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Taoism, Buddhism, Satanism, and every other religion imagined
I think of IQ as a measure of the brain’s “hardware” – its raw processing capability.
Knowledge and wisdom are the “software” that uses the IQ to make decisions.
Hence, high IQ with insufficient knowledge and lack of wisdom can be worse than low IQ with better “software”.
So what have we learned so far?
If we want a smart president, we can’t go wrong with a gay atheist Jewish Asian liberal. That mofo would be on a plane beyond that inhabited by Buckaroo Banzi. Ken Jennings would refuse to go on Jeopardy with that guy.
If having a high IQ were an adaptive trait which allowed humans to survive, thrive, and reproduce their kind and thus pass on their genes why are there so few of them?
Why do men think the things they value are always useful? Sometimes they may be but often they are as useless as teats on a boar hog. Take for instance the ability to play chess. Some of the greatest minds and highest IQs the human race has produced have devoted all of their lives and energies to playing this game better than the next man and to what end? That is no a rap on chess per se. I myself at times in my life have spent a lot of time and energy playing it very very badly so I appreciate how hard it is to play it well. It is just at the end of the day what have these brilliant minds accomplished.
BTW of the two greates American players one was an irrespnsible reactionary anti-semitic neo_NAZI and the other was a failed lawyer and foot fetishest. Neither reporduced and both had IQs that were off the charts to go along with their total lack of common sense.
IQ tests are tests, nothing more, nothing less. Some individuals possess superior test taking skills. To a certain extent, for some, it is an innate ability. For others, it can be learned. And for some, they figure, who cares, I’m too busy doing interesting things.
I suspect, and I stress that I have no scientific facts whatever to back this up, but I never let a little thing like that get in the way of a good theory, that reading skills and a massive amount of time spent reading, influence IQ tests more than any other factor. Were I 40 years younger, I would pursue this study and use it as the basis of my doctoral thesis,…Heck, who am I trying to kid. If I were 40 years younger, I would join the Navy this time and try to find out if co-ed submarines are as much fun as I think they are going to be, ….or not….
66/buddy larsen: Ok. I wasn’t gonna go there, but since you brought it up, check out Charles Murray on why Jews are smarter than everybody else: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/jewish-genius-10855.
For a -real- eye opener on just how destructive the Great Society was to blacks, read Murray’s Losing Ground (http://www.amazon.com/Losing-Ground-American-1950-1980-Anniversary/dp/0465042333/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1267375920&sr=8-1). It is hard to believe that well-meaning people could be so stupid.
I propose a slightly different take on this subject, one that’s sure to both delight and annoy liberals at the same time. All my life, I’ve deeply admired creativity and wanted desperately to be creative myself. But I’m a wannabee. I have only small gifts here – but enough that I have acquired a small cadre of really creative friends. I can hold my own in their company as long as the going doesn’t get too tough. If we really got into a “mine is bigger than yours” creativity contest – the riddle game between Bilbo and Gollum, say – they know that they would wipe the floor with a poseur like me. And that’s OK with them; everybody knows it, nobody cares, and that’s one of the things I really like about them. But the more creative my friends are, the more liberal they are. It’s all but a perfect correlation. Without exception, they are intelligent people. You HAVE to be intelligent to be creative. These people are creative because they have the unique ability to disconnect belief from accepted fact; creativity requires a perpetual suspension of disbelief. And there’s the trap. Creativity is adaptive as long as it is harnessed to reality. But reality is an impediment to creativity. In the absence of feedback on the actual state of reality, it becomes all too easy for these creative people to believe (for example) that you can spend your way out of debt. But conversely, as an engineer, I am surrounded by some of the best analytical people in the world – and these people are almost to a one conservative. They take reality as it is, and ruthlessly pick it apart to discover what works and what doesn’t. My creative friends are indifferent to analysis at best, and some of them don’t even have any idea what it means. I find myself in kind of an interesting position in that I can walk fairly comfortably in either world (though I’m not world-class in either). I like my liberal friends as friends – and prefer their company in most cases to my conservative friends – but, by God, I wouldn’t trust my business or my country into their hands for even a microsecond. And yes, these people all *VOTE*. Perhaps there IS a correlation betwen IQ and liberalism, but it implies nothing at all about Darwinian adaptation.
Hominids,
Take me to your leaders – those wearing burlaps sacks and Birkenstocks…
JH/74; Bobby Fischer may’ve gone a little crazy later, but he was a great hero when he took down the Big Bad Soviet Boris Spassky for World Chess Champeen. A great day for Uncle Sam and his free market amateur-to-professional (rather than orwellishly data-mining the nurseries) approach to games –Fischer’s win was on a par with the famous 1980 ice hockey team’s. I was just a wet-behind-ears youngster but my whole feral pack of junior wolves dropped the West Side Story switchblade ideal and took up chess. Later i got so good, i could whup every roughneck and mess cook on every drilling rig from the the Gulf of Mexico to the Caribee, from the South China to the North Sea –at least, the ones i was on, anyways. So i’ll always recall the good things about old Bobby.
***
jW/76; –many thanks –looks like good articles –your It is hard to believe that well-meaning people could be so stupid re the Great Society vs its creation, the permanent urban underclass –yes –the sin is too enormous to contemplate. A reckoning will come.
78: Boghie:
Hominids,
Take me to your leaders – those wearing burlaps sacks and Birkenstocks… [Added by programmer] Don’t be concerned, we wash our food before we eat it.
***********
There, fixed that for you.
Programmer
“ex-X files”? Soon to be ex-”ex-X files”.
…-
“UK’s UFO unit says it will shred ex-X files
Britain’s defense ministry says it will shred records of UFO sightings after a huge rise in the number of reports submitted by the public.
The Ministry of Defense said Sunday that new reports will be thrown out after 30 days, rather than kept on file.
It means details of the sightings will be exempt from freedom of information laws that have allowed campaigners to force Britain’s government to disclose details of apparent UFO encounters.
The ministry had 634 reports of UFO sightings in 2009, the highest total since 1978 when the public submitted 750.
In December, Britain scrapped a phone line and e-mail account for the public to report details of UFO activity.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com …”
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2461040/posts
Since Jon Ray has authored more than a few published papers on the topic, a few excerpted comments from one of his blogs (http://dissectleft.blogspot.com/) on the subject of this post may be of interest (for convenience, I’ve included his embedded links in the following):
I see that Time magazine has picked up on the study that I critiqued yesterday: “Why Liberals and Atheists Are More Intelligent”. The “Time” article is surprisingly good and even points to evidence contradicting the headline claim. A small point, though: The author says that Leftists are more open to experience but the reference he gives for that shows nothing of the sort. The claim is however an old favourite of Leftist psychologists. My last look at the academic literature on the question is here. I conclude that, as psychologists usually define it, there is no political polarization on openness to experience. Leftists are however sensation-seekers. That might seem like a fine distinction but it is not if you look at how psychologists use the various terms concerned. The “openness to experience” claim is a way of saying that conservatives are rigid and narrow-minded whereas the sensation-seeking finding implies that Leftists like novelty for the sake of novelty.
…
The study excerpted below is amusing. It is coming out in a sociology journal but concentrates on psychology to the exclusion of sociology! Amazing what can happen when you have an axe to grind!
The article is mostly speculation and theorizing but it does have some actual findings about IQ on which to build its house of cards. But the writer totally overlooks the social context in which the findings were gathered. They are not IQ findings from adults but rather findings about adolescents. The fact that data about adults were not presented is of course the giveaway.
The study found that the more intelligent adolescents were more liberal. So what does that prove? As someone who has taught both psychology and sociology at university level, I have little doubt what it means: It means that more intelligent kids are better at picking up and absorbing the lessons drummed into them by our Left-dominated educational system. It means no more than that. The sociological context overlooked is, in other words, the fact that the individuals concerned were still at school. I think that can reasonably be called: “Overlooking the obvious”.
For the findings among random samples of adults, see here. Much more pesky!
Evil Pundit@72
Or in other words bad software on a fast processor will only get you the wrong answer faster so you have more time to suffer the consequences
The old joke used to be first prize is a week in Cleveland and second prize is two weeks in Cleveland. Who the heck wants to get to Cleveland sooner rather than later raise your hand.
WillDoMathForFood, I agree with your take. I think this is one of those cases were correlation does not necessarily imply cause and effect. More intelligent kids are more likely to go on to college or university, were the pressures of conformity to liberal PC thinking are enormous. I suspect the correlation that the author found in this study is more an indication of academia’s success at brainwashing young people, than that intelligent people are politically liberal because they think through things better than their working class conservative counterparts.
Actually when Dan Quayle corrected the spelling bee student by adding an e to potato he and the student were actually both wrong. The correct spelling for potato is as shown below.
If gh is pronounced p as in hiccough
If ough is pronounced o as in dough
If phth is pronounced t as in phthisis
If eigh is pronounced a as in neighbour
If tte is pronounced t as in gazette
If eau is pronounced o as in beau
Then the correct spelling for potato would be ghoughphtheightteeau
Thanks seiyaku.com
Well, with so many breit spirits in America, I can’t understand why your country is doomed !
Don’t tell me you hadn’t your time, ie reagan, Bush father, Bush junior…
BTW why you universities are hiring foreign brains ? when they could get national’s for a cheaper price ?
Love that Steve. Give me some more mashed ghoughphtheightteeaus
English needs spelling reform almost as badly as I need a spell checker and I think we are one of the few western countries that hasn’t had it.
Why can’t the English learn to spell?
Having made my obligatory wisecrack above, it’s time for a (more) serious comment.
Intelligence is often a valuable asset; but frequently it is a liability.
Consider, for instance, playing a game of chicken: two cars, one driven by the other by a liberal member of the intelligentsia (the “genius”), the other driven by a conservative resident of the local trailer park (the “idiot”), are heading towards each other at high speed. The objective is to get the other guy to swerve.
Who will win this contest? The key is not intelligence; the key is commitment. If the idiot locks his steering wheel so that he must go straight – a form of commitment – the only rational decision for the genius is to swerve. (Obviously the worst outcome is if neither party swerves.)
Now, the genius – being the more intelligent of the two contestants – knows this. The idiot may, or may not. The genius knows he’s smarter, but also knows that the idiot may not understand the way the game is structured; the idiot might be too stupid to know that he should swerve. This puts the genius at a structural disadvantage.
Moreover, commitment based on identity is stronger than commitment based upon economic gain. The idiot may be a macho tough guy, and will do a lot to preserve this reputation. If he loses, he loses a his identity. The genius, on the other hand, has a less to lose by swerving – everyone knows him to be an effete metrosexual, so swerving doesn’t cost him much. In fact, it may reinforce his identity as a “lover, not a fighter.”
So, in a game of chicken, a genius can be at a pretty significant disadvantage.
Now games of chicken are very commonplace in this world. A lot of folks who attend the “school of hard knocks” learn early on that you can advance pretty fast in this world simply by having more nerve than the other guy. To the aggressor goes the spoils. This behavioral lesson is something that one learns especially fast in sales positions, and those positions often require little raw intelligence or creativity. But they are the fundamental driver of any organization – it’s hard to run a business if you have no sales.
Bringing in the topic from another BC thread, Britain and Argentina are in a game of chicken over the Falklands. For years, Britain appeared to have a stronger commitment than Argentina; then the junta decided to test this commitment – they also locked their steering wheel, if you will. The result was not pretty, but it made clear that the UK was committed to defending its interests there, and the US was committed to supporting them. Why? Because of the “special relationship” – a relationship that is much more about identity than economics: language, culture, and tradition.
But if the US is truly going to remain “neutral” – I’m talking about in private, not what they say publicly – this will decrease the ability of the UK to commit. It’s like having your H2 swapped out for a Chevy Impala. Argentina knows this, so true neutrality increases the likelihood of an another attempt to take the Falklands.
The rational thing, from a pure economic standpoint, is for the US to remain neutral. It’s the “smart” move. It’s what a genius would do. But it makes it more likely that there will be another war, and it makes it more likely that the idiots will win. Pacifism, once again, makes war more likely, and gives the advantage to the aggressor.
Maybe that’s why “too clever” is an insult, not a compliment.
L3
I know there are others out there who are capable of out of the box thinking. In that mode they can find multiple correct answers to most questions on most IQ tests. I think the people who really do well on IQ tests tend to think like the Progressives who create the tests in the first place.
I wonder if Progressives would find religion to be more exalted if they were smart enough to realize that they are ardent members of a very fundamentalist secular religion (i.e., Neo-Marxism).
Related to L3′s observation –take a look at this chart:
http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/94752/
and see if the negative space between the red line and the black line measures anything having to do with our alliances in shambles –and our two bestest allies of all, Britain and Israel, both being under pressure –and in the case of Israel, extreme pressure.
But no matter –our progressives assume they’ll be able to talk mother nature out of abhorring the vacuum they are busily creating.
***
another thought re L3′s post –tho the idiot wins the chicken race, the genius wins the moral victory (“this silly game is not worth a death”). So, the moral victory is what you win when the other guy wins the actual victory.
“fundamentalist secular religion”
that’s funny I found the same expression on islamic blogs about our secular state
Steve,
Please note also that the correct plural form is ghoughphtheightteeaux.
Cheers,
L3
ghoughphtheightteeaux.
some Chinese or arabic tranlation into roman letters !
It has been my experience that political affiliation decisions are made more on emotion, faith, kinship, friendship, economic standing, and experience, than analytical ability. It would take each of us all our waking hours to thoroughly analyze every political decision before us, and that is simply impossible. We’d still need accurate data which is never, ever quite there and accessible.
Ultimately we make decisions broadstroke based on how we feel men are capable of dealing with other men on a sustained basis. Basically we are thinking intuitively.
I know of no intelligence test that is designed to measure superior intuition.
Phonetix too Phar:
ghoughphtheightteeaux baked in a casserole with layers o cheeses:
“ghoughphtheightteeaux hog rotten”
groan…
if scholars like the IQ items, enterprises prefer to rely on these tests:
http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp
BTW I’m an INTP
#95
Looks like potatoes are making a comeback and I love them Hog Rotten. Perhaps the ghoughphtheightteeau phamine is over!
SD/97; I’m dublin that sentiment!
bogie wheel @ 9
Excellent points, they are keepers.
I have posted this before, it bear repeating:
“Most people say it is the intellect which makes a great scientist. They are wrong: it is the character.”
A World Without Heroes: The Modern Tragedy, George Roche, © 1987, By George Roche and the Hillsdale College Press,
dtmack @42
“The fear of man lays a snare…” Proverbs 29:25
LEO@88 – I agree with your analysis that real American neutrality in a Falklands war makes such a war more likely, bur unfortunately I also think that if there is another war Falklands war the USA is better off if the Argentine’s win than if the British win. The reason being that the UK is in long term decline and a win in round two will only guarantee a round three at some point in the future and eventually the UK will lose. Better for us if they lose in round two.
BTW special relationship or no special relationship we pulled the rug on them in the Suez Crisis so don’t be surprised when a president with no sense of Anglophilia leaves the Brits high and dry with no TLAMs.
This just in from SETI:
The first message from an intelligence outside of our solar system has been intercepted and translated. It’s coming into our newsroom at this moment. Here it is…
Humans with the higher IQs…
…will be used…
…as the entree.
Well, there you have it. Those aliens ARE smart.
I have another explanation for atheists and liberals having a higher intelligence- intelligent people are more inclined to boast about how smart they are, and they are drawn to worldviews that reinforce their egos. Now, there are certainly a great many intelligent people wise enough to know their own limitations and show humility; liberals don’t.
The other thing is that sexual exclusivity and atheism don’t logically go together. The atheist believes in no absolute morality that would, in general, restrain him from sexual promiscuity. The conservative Christian, however, does. Furthermore, sexual exclusivity in men actually carries an evolutionary benefit in some situations, albeit, situations that an apish man would not see. Parental care and guidance increases the survival rate and reproductive success of one’s offspring, and it is far easier to attract a single mate and have sex with her frequently than to constantly try to attract new mates. Then there’s the matter of sexually transmitted diseases, which can sterilize you or even kill you- a man who does not take his mate’s virginity has no guarantee that she will not expose him to some awful disease like syphilis.
Those who’ve read my scintillating verse
Know genius is unmitigated curse
We’re prone to love ourselves and hug each line
Though prone may not describe, more like supine
Yes genius is a curse some of us bear
Yet we press on because we truly care
For lesser mortals who may read our stuff
Just don’t question our IQ or call our bluff
That the “liberal” camp includes the more than 45% of our population who are too damned stupid to know they’re being lied to, and/who are third-world criminal aliens immediately gives the lie to any suggestions the Left is intelligent. And then there’s that pesky morality thing that, whenever the Left rules, ends up with millions having to be slaughtered. Mainly because their very human Nature, against which the left passes an endless catalog of “laws,” simply cannot be suppressed.
And although “conservatives,” by every objective measure and standard, demonstrate to be measurably and markedly more intelligent than are those on the ludicrous Left, up pops the small problem of the Left’s sanity — and makes it all moot.
As, for example, is put forward by Doctor Lyle Rossiter.
Doctor Rossiter is a Psychiatrist, Board-certified in general and forensic psychiatry, has more than 35 years of experience in consultation, evaluation, reports, and testimony in civil and criminal matters; is an expert/consultant for plaintiffs, defendants, and prosecution — and is author of “The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness.” Doctor Rossiter makes the case that the ideology motivating (il)liberals is actually a mental disorder.
“Based on strikingly irrational beliefs and emotions, modern liberals relentlessly undermine the most important principles on which our freedoms were founded,” he says, “Like spoiled, angry children, “liberals” rebel against the normal responsibilities of adulthood and demand that a parental government meet their needs from cradle to grave.”
While many on the other side of the political horseshoe (Michael savage, eg) have made similar observations, Doctor Rossiter boasts professional credentials and a life virtually free of activism and links to what (il)liberal nuttershave called, “the vast right-wing conspiracy.”
For more than 35 years Doctor Rossiter has diagnosed and treated more than 1,500 patients as a board-certified clinical psychiatrist and has examined more than 2,700 civil and criminal cases as a board-certified forensic psychiatrist. He received his medical and psychiatric training at the University of Chicago.
Doctor Rossiter says the kind of liberalism displayed by every major candidate for the Democratic Party presidential nomination may be understood only as a psychological disorder.
“A social scientist who understands human nature will not dismiss the vital roles of free choice, voluntary cooperation and moral integrity – as liberals do,” he says. “A political leader who understands human nature will not ignore individual differences in talent, drive, personal appeal and work ethic, and then try to impose economic and social equality on the population – as liberals do. And a legislator who understands human nature will not create an environment of rules which over-regulates and over-taxes the nation’s citizens, corrupts their character and reduces them to wards of the state – as liberals do.”
Doctor Rossiter says the liberal agenda preys on weakness and feelings of inferiority in the population by:
• creating and reinforcing perceptions of victimization;
• satisfying infantile claims to entitlement, indulgence and compensation;
• augmenting primitive feelings of envy;
• rejecting the sovereignty of the individual, subordinating him to the will of the government.
“The roots of liberalism – and its associated madness – may be identified by understanding how children develop from infancy to adulthood and how distorted development produces the irrational beliefs of the liberal mind,” he says. “When the modern liberal mind whines about imaginary victims, rages against imaginary villains and seeks above all else to run the lives of persons competent to run their own lives, the neurosis of the liberal mind becomes painfully obvious.”
102 Mythbuster:a man who does not take his mate’s virginity has no guarantee that she will not expose him to some awful disease like syphilis.
I agree but it should be noted that ‘man’ is interchangable with ‘woman’, ‘his’ with ‘her’ etc. There was a time when it was mainly men who spread std’s. Today both sexes can probably be blamed equally.
Not sure about intelligent people being more boastful though. I generally find that people who are socially insecure tend be boastful regardless of their actual intelligence level.
The higher the IQ the more facile in seeing complex relationships. Things can be figured out. The great blind spot is not realizing that most real world problems are np-complete, i.e. not computable. Here history, tradition and experience are the only guides. The less clever are less prone to this mistake.
“Beam me up, there’s no sign of inteligence here.”
[brief pause]
“What? Oh, sorry. No, once you get through all the layers of fat, it’s stringy and doesn’t taste anything like chicken.”
#1 Bill Gannon said: ‘My IQ has been tested twice to be higher than 144′
—–
I’m unfamiliar with 144′s posts but I know leftists are often smart but in a different way.
Leftists are school smart, which means they have achieved and prospered in a K-12, college, graduate and post graduate protected experiment. They are protected for the simple reason that they got where they are in a ‘safe and protected’ environment.
American leftists all have straight teeth. They have straight teeth because they are not the first generation of their family here.
I exaggerate my generalization. However, third world parents are not worried about climate change. Third world parents care nothing about carbon footprints, Third world parents do not care about or benefit from concerts held by elites.
This may turn up again. I hit an unknown key combination accidentally and a post went awa’ w’ th’ cyber-fairies. If it doubles up, I apologise.
#51 RWE:
Thank you for the kind words. If I may, I’d like to offer a couple of thoughts. When dealing with my former field of endeavor the Left-Right conflict [I realize that the seating arrangements of the French National Assembly are a very imperfect metaphor for political reality. Those on the far "Left" and far "Right" ends of the "spectrum" actually belong side by side with the "spectrum" bent around into a circle. The two "extremes are actually very alike in their contempt for the individual, their love of the collective, their view of rights as temporary grants of the State, and their means, methods, and justifications for the use of the coercive power of the State.] largely plays out in the field of personal responsibility -vs- societal responsibility. The “Left” [including my former Captain and hordes of bureaucratic staff weenies] believes that criminal conduct is caused by a flawed society, that punishment is barbaric, and that the individual will be “cured” of his anti-social tendencies by understanding, education, and compassion coupled with an infinite number of second chances. The goal of the police, courts, and corrections is to enable that cure.
Those of us who actually worked the line tend to believe that if one does the crime, one should do the time. Further, that payback is a bitch. We also realize that there is no “rehabilitation” until the consequences of the criminal life are more than the criminal can bear AND that fact penetrates their skulls. However, while they are locked up, they are not harming the public.
Basic criminological statistic. 80% of the crime is committed by 5% of the criminals. In the 1980′s the cities in Colorado were trying to go the way of Democrat controlled cities back east. Crime was getting out of hand. Parole was all but automatic in our statutes. After a series of murders and rapes by criminals who has been early paroled from murder and rape convictions; the legislature changed hands and some serious changes in sentencing laws and repeat offender laws were put in over the objection of the Democrat governor. Over the next few years, the crime rates went down drastically as more and more of the real bad guys were locked up and stayed locked up.
Our Democrats are screaming still. Besides being against punishment, they cannot get it through their heads that if you lock someone up, even though it costs money it is less than the damage they do to society. They have the governorship and both houses of the legislature and want mass early releases of criminals to save money. It will happen.
In any case, the Khakhan never heard of parole, probation, or deferred prosecution. The Yassa was fairly direct, to the point, and except for the Khakhan’s family pretty much covered everyone without exception.
1. He conquered and expanded his empire so he could impose taxes on more people.
2. He was possibly the very first whacko environmentalist. He hated cities, tore them down whenever he could, and considered depopulating the whole of northern China to provide pasture for his horses.
3. He was very much in favor of unwed mothers, bedding every woman he could get his hands on. The majority of the population that now inhabit this former domain are genetically related to him.
I don’t impute a moral or ideological flaw for his conquests, because that is how every powerful state acted up until the creation of modern Westphalian nation state that separated the state from being the personal property of the ruler. His [and that of his Orluks such as Jebe Noyon] desire at first to level China was early in his career when he first went south of the Great Wall. Fortunately, he encountered and hired Ye Liu Chu-tsai and was convinced that ruling a civilization was better than ruling empty steppe. Once he got that admittedly foreign concept into his head, he promoted civilization.
As for his gene pool, I refer to the conduct of pretty much every ruler of the time, especially since Judeo-Christian morals were not applicable being totally unknown to them. There is the point in the Yassa that declares the children of slaves or concubines to be as legitimate as children of wives. Although children of the senior wife had priority and only they could inherit, all other children were both legally legitimate and treated equally.
Within the bounds of law and Empire though he and his law were far more tolerant in the true sense than the Left is today. ALL religious persons were exempted from taxation, regardless of faith. The Empire did not care who you worshipped so long as you did not revolt or violate other laws. Believing in trade and functionally what we would call capitalism all traders between cities and regions were exempt from taxes. And to encourage trade a system of caravanserai’s was established throughout the Empire. Even in conquest, the idea of equality under the law once peace had returned was present. Although it was such a foreign concept that it did not sink in for a while. Hell, the Democrats don’t grasp it yet.
The Khakhan went to war with Khwarism in Central Asia. It was not a war of expansion. He had sent ambassadors and traders to propose peaceful trade relations along their common border. He was more concerned with finishing off the Southern Sung dynasty and had no apparent ambitions towards Central Asia at the time. His ambassadors were either killed or mutilated and the traders robbed. Repeatedly. So he destroyed Khwarism and its dynasty.
At least one of his actions after Bokhara surrendered [and was spared sacking except for the citadel which resisted after the surrender] was misinterpreted. Yes,he and his troops rode their horses into the main Mosque. And he called for the citizens to bring fodder there for his horses. They took it as an insult. But under Mongol practice of the time, by feeding the horses of his army, they were placed under his protection as subjects of the Empire and not as enemies. Once an area was conquered, so long as it paid its taxes, furnished its allotments for the army, and did not revolt; the Empire did not care how they worshiped, how they ruled themselves under Mongol law, and who was in charge locally. Sounds far closer to what is denominated as the American Right than the authoritarian, corrupt, top-down desire to control every aspect of everyone’s lives that permeates every aspect of the Left.
YMMV
Of course, trying to fit the people of the past, and of distant lands, and their actions into our modern templates is not going to work with any degree of historical accuracy. With different cultures, histories, and the morals of the times; they cannot be expected to have lived in accordance with what we now think.
May I offer the book “Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World” by Jack Weatherford for your consideration?
Subutai Bahadur
How many ‘intelligent’ people have you met who are for all practical purposes, stupid?
Intellect is of no value if you cannot figure out how to use it or to put whatever else is around you to practical use.
Methinks the intelligence point may simply be the conceited hubris of the smug & condescending, trying to convince everyone else they are more worthy than others when their real fear is they may not be worthy enough, to shovel crap.
OK, now let’s look at IQ scores of various ethnic groups. Then we can decide if they are conservative or liberal.
RWE @ 51-
In regards to capitalism, you’d think the lefties with all their belief in evolution, would recognize that capitalism is inherently survival of the fittest.
If it doesn’t survive in the free market, it dies.
But then again, these same lefties keep on insisting that socialism works…
Al Gore is a liberal.
Mr. Chambers, Don’t get on that ship. “To Serve Man” – It’s a Cookbook!
Rubicon/110
Great post! Moral: Don’t cross the Rubicon.
Dah, is he saying illegal aliens are smarter than us?
Although I think that the results of this study might well be factually accurate, it settles nothing about the right side of the issue (to oversimplify grossly). To illustrate, a few observations.
First a thought experiment. Suppose that it would have been possible to subject to intelligence testing the fishermen, beggars, lepers, widows, prostitutes, publicans, and other folks drawn to the teachings of Jesus, as well as the priests, scholars, rulers, and other folk, elite and non elite, who rejected them. I don’t doubt for a minute that the anti’s would have had a clear, perhaps dramatic edge on the pros. That doesn’t prove that Jesus was wrong (nor,for that matter, that he was right, though I know where I’ve placed my money).
Another illustration. I work as an academic in an elite liberal arts college with colleagues, for the most part much more liberal than I, for whom, in at least some cases, de Sade, the Vagina Monologues, the Rocky Horror Picture Show, and Madonna as a proper object of scholarly study are respectable, even iconic. I am far from the brightest mind in this company, but working among such colleagues (some of whom are, as folks, very fine people) for a quarter century has utterly shattered my boyhood reverence for high octane brains. The hotter the car the bigger the crash.
Lest someone cry sour grapes, I will say that I have learned from my friends. Perhaps some of them have learned from me–so some claim. Part of what leads them to scepticism is the ability to think through and accept the counter intuitive or anti-traditional position. This can obviously be a good thing.But great gifts can also lead to hybris and ruination. It is not for nothing that Jesus said that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich (i.e. greatly gifted in any way) man to enter the kingdom of heaven. To adapt another of Christ’s insights, if you can’t find in your heart the simplicity of a child, when simplicity is in order, then your humanity is incomplete.
I am willing to believe that the more brilliant people are the more statistically likely they are to disagree with me about what is good and what is not, what and whether wisdom is, and so on. But it no longer disquiets me.
Best,
Richard
Rubicon: I was going to make the same point. My dad had an IQ in the 140′s and pissed away his talents; my mom and brother have IQ’s in the 130′s and both struggle with motivation and procrastination issues.
Here I am, the over-achieving eldest child with a mere 120-something IQ — with several advanced degrees, a modestly successful business, and a lot of other blessings. Why? Because I worked my posterior off and had a little something I like to call — DISCIPLINE!
It has been my experience that once people’s IQ’s start climbing past 130, they are smart enough to justify any inanity they want and shift the blame on everyone and anything else. The liberals can have the high IQ’s, I would rather have GRIT!
Intelligence is probably overrated. Flight is so useful nature keeps reinventing it. Birds and bees do it, fish do it, bats do it, reptiles have done it. If intelligence were terribly useful, museums would be filled with the fossilized artifacts of The Old Ones — the dozens of nonhuman civilizations that rose and fell during the last 300 million years of land-dwelling vertebrate evolution. The great silence from beyond suggests that Forrest Gump had it right. Intelligence may be as rare in the universe as it is here. Stupidity, however, abounds, and usually finds a way to put itself out of its misery.
Bosh. Tosh. Codswallop. Horse manure. Bullshit. Sounds like another creation of ersatz scholarship produced by the George Lakoff Academy of Politically-Motivated Research and Ballroom Dancing.
Leftists start with a political prejudice–all conservatives are fascists, or beat their grandmothers for beer money, for example–and proceed to craft an “argument” “proving” them. They then format the document very neatly with a lot of colorful Excel charts and pass it off as serious research. The three experts who vet it are blind, retarded, and slightly to the left of Lenin.
All of this is absolute nonsense.
Seems to me you’re only as smart as your certifications…otherwise you’re summarily dismissed. I know several certified idiots.
The word “Liberal” draws its meaning from the idea of individual human liberty – freedom of the individual from the despotic intrusions of liberty-destroying government power. Our Founding Fathers were the Classic Liberals – their principles of government laid out in our Declaration of Independence – their mechanics to bring those principles to life laid out in our Constitution and Bill of Rights.
Who are the modern American Liberals? They are the very ones who deny the self-evident truths of our Declaration; the same ones who destroy our Constitution with their arbitrary, proto-totalitarian “Living Constitution” – a better example of Orwellian Newspeak is not to be found.
So, the modern American Conservative is one who adheres to the American Declaration and Constitution – a Classic Liberal. Like the oligarchies of Monarchy, Fascism and Marxism (all Leftist government power structures); the modern American Liberals are Classic Conservatives – enemies of individual human liberty and pursuit of happiness (private property honestly earned through creative labor).
Intelligence (IQ) is no guarantee of morality (MQ), liberty and justice; its perversion (the insanity of Doublethink) is necessary for the functioning of any totalitarian government. Totalitarian government needs perverted intelligence as much as it needs stupidity because in both cases government lies can be successfully implanted into the minds of “the masses.”
“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously (the truth and the lie), and accepting both of them… with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth… Those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it is; in general the greater the understanding the greater the delusion; the more intelligent the less sane… If human equality is to be forever averted; if the “high,” as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently; then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity (Doublethink).” George Orwell – 1984
“Crimestop…includes the power of not grasping analogies; of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc (Socialist Principles of Oceania), and of being bored or rebelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop in short means protective stupidity… The world view of the Party imposed its self most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm because it left no residue behind; just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird… In the long run a hierarchical society was only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance.” George Orwell – 1984
Basically, we fly on two wings. Discipline and faith. If either falters we go down. And yet if both are kept in balance we can fly on the wings eagles.
I may not be the brightest, but I am capable of acting on behalf of my own self preservation, unlike a lot of the Left, who seem to take the attitude “We suck, therefore, screw us”.
The LSE is not a serious institution. Better to knit a sock than to worry about its opinions.
First item: There are those who “know” about things. I.E. a professor who has studied love for 50 years, and can tell you everything about it, yet has never experienced it, and does not know it. In contrast, a four year old who has lived in a loving environment may “know” more of what love truly is, because they have experienced it.
Second item: There is knowledge and intelligence. A third component that has so far been missing from this discussion is wisdom, that which Solomon sought. My short-hand definition of wisdom is being able to learn from other’s mistakes. Experience is learning from my own mistakes, and stupidity is not learning from my mistakes.
Third item: Being comfortable in chaos. Just started reading “Caliphate” by Tom Kratman, about the long war with Islam, a story that starts in 2103. One line stuck me. On page 28, a character says: “War is chaos, sir, and we practice chaos every day.”
Note the word practice. A humble word, but crucial. They call it a spiritual practice because you never master it.
The chaos that is the universe is required to be able to give us free will. A universe without chaos is predictable, no free will. The deeper i go on my infinite journey into theology and quantum mechanics, the more i am impressed by God’s design. One of the deep paradoxes is that God and the universe are knowable, and not knowable at the same time. There is Truth, and you will never know it, yet you must seek it, knowing you will never find it, as we march into the chaos that is…
Item four: There are psychopaths among us. Charming beings, only concerned with control, and their own power. Far too frequently you find them in elected office. If you find one with a high IQ, it simply means he is able to be a more polished monster.
Item five: God does not seem to be impressed with a high IQ. He seems much more interesting in people with a heart for him. Most seminaries are full of people who can tell you any number of facts about God and religion, but don’t have a clue who He is.
“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Prov. 1:7)
For more on the relationship between the fear of God and wisdom go here and here.
I guess this has been pointed out, but the picture in the caption is from the Menagerie episodes from Star Trek, not The Day the Earth Stood Still.
I was in all the advanced classes, graduated college with a BS in Computer Science (minoring in Philosophy and Math), and was a self-affirmed liberal for years. Then one day, after buying my first house and with a 9mo old son, 9/11 hit. That moment was a crystallization of several thoughts that had been floating around my ol’ noggin’. I’ve been a conservative ever since.
I think I always was one, but did not realize it until that fateful day.
Subotai: I salute you. If you were even half as good as your namesake, then you must have been a very great SGT indeed. Now some observations:
1. I’ve NEVER met anyone who said “I’m smart!” who wasn’t a complete idiot.
2. I never considered the Khan either Left or Right. He just applied the logic of the steppes to his personal empire.
3. On crime and punishment: I once asked a fellow worker, who hailed from Pakistan, about the Pakistani prison system. He said: “We don’t believe in prisons. There are very few of them. We believe in punishment… administered immediately and up-front.” I’m guessing he was referring to chopping off a thief’s hand and other such punishments.
Here in America we have a different system, which delivered up this tidbit back in 1994: I was watching a documentary filmed in a prison in New York(?). It showed the case of a prisoner who had escaped, killed 3 people, and was recaptured. A film crew caught the scene where the DA was told by a Judge that it was pointless to prosecute the perp since he was already doing a life sentence for murder. If found guilty for the additional three murders, he would get… a life sentence. The Judge advised that the DA drop the charges and save everyone time and money. The film crew then went with the perp’s lawyer back to the holding cell and caught the touching scene as the perp found out he wasn’t going to stand trial. The perp looked into the camera and said these immortal words: “You see dat?! I’m ABOVE the law. I can KILL ANYONE I want, and they can’t touch me!!!” After seeing this, I became a believer in the death penalty. It’s not so much “an eye for an eye” as “let’s stop this killer from doing it again.”
4. I’m a conservative (surprise!) and I every time I hear how smart liberals are and how stupid conservatives are I naturally get irritated. You see, when I was doing a 5-year engineering program in 3-years and was only one of six people to graduate that year in my field, I was rather surprised that there wasn’t a hoard of liberals in front of me on graduation day. (Maybe the other 5 people were liberals! Could be.) No, as far as I could tell, my “betters” we all collecting their degrees in Literature, English, Sociology, and Political Science. There were hundreds of them. So there you are. I was definitely in the minority so it must be true: Liberals are more numerous and therefor smarter.
5. This one is for you Subotai: people who serve in uniform are sheepdogs. They believe there is evil in the world (wolves) and they dedicate their lives to stopping it. Sheepdogs don’t believe in “rehabilitation” or changing the wolf. Sheepdogs are there to stop the wolf. On the other hand you have the common people in our society – the law-abiding citizens. These people are the sheep. Being a sheep isn’t a bad thing. You live your life and mind you own business. A good thing. The problem is, many of these sheep (liberals) don’t believe that the wolf even exists. They think that it’s all a “misunderstanding.” There are NO wolves, just black sheep who have lost their way. Liberal sheep think that if you nuzzle up to the “black sheep”, that he won’t harm you. You can thus control the “black sheep” by being nice. Sheepdogs know better. There ARE people who are just plain EVIL and must be stopped. Sheepdogs live for the day when they get to confront the wolf.
This is why you’ll be hard-pressed to find liberals in the military. The military, and the Police, are loaded with sheepdogs. They understand evil. They’re out looking for wolves. I was once a sheepdog myself (US military) and as a fellow sheepdog, I salute you once again Subotai. Thank you for your service.
In order to quiet the conscience it is necessary to reduce those you wrong or plan to wrong to a status that is not fully human. It is necessary to elevate one’s own and to debase the “other”. The only variable is the degree of sophistication involved in accomplishing this. This is a practice as old has humanity. In extreme cases it leads to efforts to exterminate the untermenschen.
Subotai Bahadur @ 109 said:
“Our Democrats are screaming still. Besides being against punishment, they cannot get it through their heads that if you lock someone up, even though it costs money it is less than the damage they do to society.”
I’m guilty of sometimes listening to NPR (that great bastion of liberalism). It appears that a newly emphasized part of the liberal narrative is for repeat offenders to be released from prison. There’s this pseudo-argument that it costs lots of money to keep bad guys in jail so they should be released (the cost to society in having these people loose is conveniently ignored). I don’t understand why liberals are advocating this but it is interesting that they’re doing so, (Maybe they see criminals as an oppressed minority??). I wonder what percentage of the criminal population are liberal democrats? Perhaps criminals are more intelligent than the rest of us?
Look no further than the Communist Manifesto for a de-linkage between crime and punishment.
“The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property… In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend… The distinguishing feature of communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois (middle class) property… The proletariat (criminals) will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state (criminal government)… Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property.” Karl Marx
http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html
If the liberal mind scoffs at the possible exist of a super being like God, why would a super intelligent being believe or care about the existence of things call humans?
#135 Eggplant:
While it was some years ago, before the Department of Justice became “the Peoples’ Ministry of Justice and Retribution”, there was a study of the costs of career criminals -vs- the costs of incarceration. Depending on security levels [A Minimum or Community classification inmate is cheaper to incarcerate than an Administrative Segregation Maximum inmate, largely because of the ultimate driver of all operational costs, staffing levels. While the capital costs of building and maintaining a facility are large, they are one-time costs that are minimal over the life cycle of the facility] it costs between roughly $20k to $90k a year per inmate depending on the security classification in that range, with variations in local costs of living being allowed for.
The higher security classifications, by the way, are not assigned randomly. There are national standards, enforced by the courts, on inmate classifications. To get into Administrative Segregation-Maximum; functionally you have to have repeatedly posed a) a serious escape risk, b) repeatedly committed felony level crimes within the prison system, or c) pose an active risk to the safety and lives of staff or other inmates. All of this has to be documented to a fair-thee-well in formal hearings available to the courts. There is no “throw them in the hole” because someone says so. They earn their way in and out of higher classifications.
Sounds like a lot. Until you look at the other side of the equation.
Most crimes are not “one-offs”. They are part of the ongoing series committed by someone who has adopted a criminal lifestyle as his/her norm. It may be robbery, theft, burglary, rape, child molestation, drug dealing, fraud, or whatever. But someone, say does not go out and commit a single armed robbery or child molestation during their life out of nowhere. As I have said before, 80% of the crimes are committed by 5% of the criminals.
The DOJ added up all the costs to the public of the acts of a career criminal over a year. Not only direct costs such as stolen property, but also medical costs, mental health costs, added insurance costs [in a high crime area, EVERYONE pays higher premiums], the additional costs of policing and other life safety services over the norm, additional court costs, higher costs of doing business in high crime areas, etc. In purely monetary costs, a career criminal costs society over $550k a year. That is not counting the psychological costs [psychological damage to rape and molestation victims akin to PTSD, the equivalent for victims of other violent crimes, fear of being able to go out and about in one's own community,etc.].
However, the costs of having criminals out and preying on people are distributed over the plebians and the politicians of the Left can ignore it. They are safe in their gated communities.
At to why they advocating releasing criminals [and repeat offenders are just the ones who make up that 5%] I have a theory. It is not a politically correct theory. But it matches certain data points.
I do not know how many of you have dealt with clinically sociopathic/psychopathic personality types up close and personal on a long term basis. I will bet that pretty much everyone has, in passing, for statistical reasons I will go into below.
After catching someone doing something in violation of the local Revised Statutes, if the first thing out of their mouth is, “You only busted me because I’m [insert Federally protected class of choice here]!”; it means you have them. It is just a matter of finding the proof. After all that and you have them well and truly caught and the evidence in hand, however, regardless of protected class status; if you engage them in conversation you can guarantee that they will say something to the effect that it is not fair, because you [the cop] are just the same as them, and you [the cop] just haven’t been caught yet. Anyone else in the field care to confirm or deny?
They truly and consistently believe that. That everyone is a criminal, and it is just because of the unfair breaks and prejudice that they got caught. That they really are just like us and we like them.
Now let us look at the attitudes of the Democrats and the few that are farther to the traditional “Left” than they are. When dealing with criminals, they view them as victims of chance, that they are “just like us”, and there for the grace of Gaia, Lysenko, or the Lightworker, go all of us.
Anyone else see a parallel there?
I will toss out some other statistics, knowing that someone will comment about the possible fraudulent use of statistics. It is pretty much a given in demographics that 3% of any statistically significant population group is sociopathic or psychopathic. They are the “lunatic fringe” in common parlance. My humble little home, Colorado, has a population of about 5 million right now. That means we have about 150k sociopaths and psychopaths who are likely to think like those criminals.
Counting all prisons, county jails, and mental hospitals; we have maybe 30-40k people locked up in one form or another.
That leaves maybe 110k of them running around loose. For whom the rules of our society do not apply, as far as they are concerned. This difference has some implication.
I offer the “standard distribution curve” aka the bell curve that applies to most statistical analysis. That includes the range of abilities within that 150k.
If we are only locking up 30-40k out of 150k; would it not be reasonable to assume that we are catching the slow and stupid ones? The left hand side of the bell curve. Where does that leave the rest?
Would it not be within the realm of consideration that a group of people who are arrogant, self-centered, amoral, and who operate outside the rules as a matter of course in combination with abilities on the right hand side of the bell curve; would end up running things like a certain political class we know? And maybe would reflexively advocate policies that would benefit themselves and their fellow 3%?
Not quite QED, but something to think about.
Subotai Bahadur
re:#127 presby
On free will: I would add that true love especially between God and man requires free will. So a God who wants to love and be loved is “stuck” with free will and at least a little chaos.
Which goes a long way to answering the 2 big questions:
If God is all powerful, why do bad things happen?
and
If God is loving, why did …..?
Am confoozed. A “survey” or “test” or “clinical study” or somesuch stated that Republicans “know more” than Democrats. Saw that over at LiveScience a few weeks ago. It sure upset and baffled the leftoids, that did.
I don’t think any studies of any kind these days should be given any credence whatsoever.
As an ex-”liberal” (as that term is defined in modern times), I believe it is my intelligence and ability to absorb knowledge that has helped wean me off of “liberalism.”
Instapundit ran an article sometime back by a guy desperately hoping we were truly alone in the universe.
See, if we were not, we’d have been visited.
We have not been visited.
Therefore, something catastrophic happens to civilizations before they get to interstellar travel.
Always. If there were ten thousand intelligent races, ten thousand of them collapsed.
So, given those odds, it must happen to us.
As earlier posters have mentioned, there has been time for other cultures to get out of their own system and to ours.
How long from the Bronze Age to Pioneer leaving the Solar System? About five thousand years, which could have been advanced by not having one or two bright guys et up by cave bears forty thousand years ago. Or something else equally unremarkable.
So, says Reynolds’ article, pray we are alone.
Ah yes…. one man once said, there is no evil. There are only degrees of acceptable conduct.
He reminds me of the guy who justifies opposing the death penalty.
“He also reminds me of those who while swimming in a swamp, push their friends toward an attacking hungry gator, hoping it will eat their friend first & no longer be hungry.”
The rest of us (the supposedly unintelligent ones), don’t go swimming in any swamp in the first place! Duh!!!
#141 Richard Aubrey:
There is the question of time scales. Say that we have been visited. One question is when. 5000 years from Bronze age to where we are [perhaps unwisely] shouting our existence to the rest of the galaxy at the speed of light.
It is a big, and old [13.7 billion years old], galaxy. There are a lot of planets [several hundred we know of, albeit not earthlike]. And there is a lot of space between places. Our radio/TV transmissions are in an expanding sphere with a radius of only about 100 light years. How many stars are there in that sphere that might have outposts of another star-faring civilization? So human transmissions have probably not acted as a beacon to draw in visitors, yet.
If they came by chance [and it would be one hell of a chance given the size of the galaxy and the apparent distance to any planets that might be occupied] they probably came before there was anything but a few thousand primates who had just learned to walk upright and were in transition from scavenging to hunting. Not promising as a high priority to observe, especially if life is common as it well may be. Just another wet, rocky ball with active combinations of amino acids.
And if our transmissions are a beacon, we also have been listening for close to half a century with SETI for similar signals. Having heard nothing; it is possible that there are no star-faring, or high tech, civilizations within 50 light years. Or that our transmissions are not of the type that is common in the galaxy.
The galaxy is about 100,000 light years across. It contains about 400 Billion stars. According to the Hipparchos satellite data, there are about 7,000 stars within 150 light years, and that is a pretty small sample. We are in the outback of a relatively sparse arm of the Galaxy. The odds of us being found by, or finding, star-farers in our small area during the time we have been findable or worth finding are small.
I don’t think we have enough data to come to a conclusion as to whether we are alone, other than to seek more data. I do have my doubts about the wisdom of broadcasting in any way our existence and location. Liberals are wrong about so much else, depending on their judgment that ET is a version of themselves writ large may not be rational. 1) It can be taken as a reasonable working hypothesis that any star faring civilization is extroverted and of sufficient self assurance and ego strength to believe it worthwhile to go see what is over the next hill, or more exactly orbiting the next star. Note that I am not saying necessarily aggressive and hostile, just extroverted and self-confident. Such civilizations are probably used to dealing with difficulties and opposition in the process. One would not want to accidentally commit a galactic faux pas and get swatted as a species like a fly. 2) As has been noted before, the human history of encounters between technologically advanced and less advanced cultures has pretty much indicated that it is not a good thing for the more primitive group. Add in the effects of culture shock [see aboringinal cultures -vs- the West], and I would rather keep our head down until we scope out the neighborhood and maybe have a bigger club to hand.
And if we meet ET’s in space, I favor giving them Liberals as expendable hostages. Not only are they [Liberals] expendable, but they are probably scientifically illiterate enough to send them [ET's] playing hounds and hares in the wrong arm of the Galaxy looking for us.
Subotai Bahadur
Dear Sara(Pal2Pal)
So, how many marriage proposals have you gotten since your post #14?
I’m updating my resume. Nearest thing to dating I’ve done in a few years…
Wretchard’s #21 very nicely sums up the reasoning of the book “The Killing Star” by Pellegrino and Zebrowski. IMHO, there aren’t many hard sci-fi books that do a good job exploring a realistic encounter with hostile aliens (or why they would even be hostile).
They build the case that once we can cross interstellar distances they would almost certainly see us as a threat, and that’s why the universe is so silent.
The funny thing is that you almost never see that view expressed anywhere (indeed, the book is out of print – I had to hunt to find it).
Once again, Wretchard nails the interesting angle – I guess that’s why I come here
subotai,
The chances of a visit have to do with the likelihood of life elsewhere, naturally.
I’ve heard exobiologists (a scientific discipline with no subject) claim that for various reasons including carbon’s promiscuous interest in bonding with practically anybody, the use of liquid water, and several other issues, life will be more likely on a carbon/nitrogen/liquid water world in a stable orbit around a stable star (such as Sol). For those folks, chasing jovians is probably not a priority when there’s warm, friendly Terra. Marconi’s first effusions would not be the only interesting factors.
So they would look at us, presuming they’re there.
Of course, generations of scifi writers deciding you can have more adventures with carbon-based life forms than hydrogen-based pure philosophical waves of thought may have prejudiced the issue.
Given sufficient billions of years, anything that can happen must happen.
The question is, if they’re out there, what’s keeping them away.
Subotai,
I saw an old HBO interview with Parke Deitz and “The Iceman”, a contract killer in prison for life in New Jersey. What I found interesting was that many of the characteristics of the sociopath (low fear response, limited emotional connection to otherwise horrific situations) had positive utility in human society. Some of those “sociopaths” may be at work doing horrifically dangerous, scary and necessary jobs. The lack of those responses is probably a continuum and how those abilities/deficits are used would define whether someone is the slasher-type sociopath or someone with the stones to cut open a chest, stop a heart and sew in cardiac grafts with near-invisible threads. Neither one can flinch at bleeding, or cutting open another human. It’s the intent that defines a sociopath, at least from that school of thought. To do my job, you almost have to either build a compartment into which you put the “OH GOD I’M SHOVING A QUARTER-INCH STICK INTO THIS GUY’S NECK SO HE CAN HAVE DIALYSIS”, or you come with it hardwired. Me personally, I had to build it, and I gotta tell you, it’s rickety.
The really cool guy on the SWAT team that never panics, never gets too upset even when things are falling apart may share a substantial set of neural wiring with the criminal sociopath on the other side of the door that SWAT is about to breach. The difference is that the Good Guy has decided to accept a moral framework conducive to societal betterment, and the Bad Guy is in it for himself. Deitz would tell you that the difference between “positive” sociopaths and criminal ones is the degree of socialization they experience in childhood. This is not to imply that anyone who carries a gun or badge is a sociopath, or that people who are preternaturally cool are inherently dangerous, just that your 3% number probably includes some upstanding citizens as well as dangerous people.
And yes, I think the political classes are loaded with sociopaths.
————–
WRT the original question, normally I don’t talk about this but since LSE brought it up and we’re all sharing, I’ll chime in.
I don’t have a specific IQ reference number but I continuously scored in the 99th percentile on standardized testing through high school. I made it to the last cut of Presidential Scholars in 1986 (top 500 American HS students, at least according to the Presidential Scholars folks). I have a BS in Biology, an MD, and a subspecialty board certification in Diagnostic Radiology. I can count on one hand the number of people I have met that are hands-down smarter than I am, and I have never been a liberal in any sense of the word.
This, and 75 cents, will get me a Diet DP out of the vending machine. Of all the things that are overrated, intelligence as measured by IQ is probably the most overrated, particularly for politicians. I don’t particularly care that Obama reads Urdu poetry, I do care that his political philosophy and policy decisions derived from that philosophy are not going to work.
The reason that IQ is important to progressives is that they believe their alleged superior intellect entitles them to make decisions for others. I find that interesting because I know more, about more, than pretty much all of them and don’t feel that my intelligence and fund of knowledge gives me any cause or right to order their lives. I don’t know what works for them in their lives any more than my ability to read a mammogram means I know what makes that sound when the car starts acting funny. The real eye-opener for me was The Black Swan, and the concept that what you don’t know is far more important than what you do know. I don’t believe that concept will ever really sink in to the people who generate studies that suggest that conservatives would make great Morlocks but that’s because the concept comes from an asset other than intelligence. Namely wisdom.
I feel like most of my comments these days are in the nature of “damn, this is a truly great blog.”
But I don’t mind saying it again – any post weaving SETI and “liberals claiming higher IQs than conservatives” is bound to be epic, and W and the commentariat made this a fantastic thread.
Also, despite being a part-time fanboy of SETI and modern physics, I’d never heard the explanation for the silence between the stars attributable to the prey keeping their heads down to avoid the predators. The weakest part in Carl Sagan’s “Contact” was where his scientists lecture the knuckle-draggers about how any universe-traveling ETI simply HAS TO BE friendly and benign.
I don’t know if the USA is going to provide for the capital formation it will be necessary to create to make the investments to get off the earth and the solar system.
Right now not only is the noise from the earth going out a 100 light years or so but so also are tracking abilities for planets. A hundred or so planets have been discovered in recent years. That number is expected to go up ten fold in the next 10 years. Its an epic age of discovery.
Three parts to the coming age need be placed in conversation now.
1.)Colonize as much as possible
2.)Make sure that the colonies become self supporting.
3.) Protect the earth.
Buckets @ 148: I remember reading a SciFi short story long ago (and sorry, I don’t remember the either the author or the title) about a first SETI contact with a bona fide extraterrestrial radio signal. All the scientists get really excited, until they start to try to decipher its meaning. Then they discover that the alphabet that the message is based upon has a completely uniform distribution of letters. The “oh, crap!” moment occurs when it dawns on them that the most likely way that this would happen is if the message were deliberately encrypted – and that nobody encrypts a signal unless one or more players in the game is hostile.
On the subject of why “we haven’t been contacted” I enjoyed Assistant Village Idiot’s image of a Martian observing those strange hominids on Earth, patiently checking in every 100,000 years:
As to intelligence: I suspect it is easy to feel smart if you only tackle simple problems. If you abstract away all the messy details about the 3% psychopaths and the old grudges and iron rice bowls then it is quite easy to devise schemes for world peace, and annoying that all these inferior intelligences won’t follow along.
Yes, and Obama is the greatest liberal genius of them all; truly, Wile E. Coyote, Super-genius, made flesh.
Interesting how liberals who believe in tooth and claw Darwinian evolution if the alternative is a benevolent and caring God, dismiss the obvious conclusion that at the top of the heap will be the species most able to destroy its competition and pre-empt the best habitats for its own reproductive purposes.
Aliens will land on earth and one will step out make a short witty speech, plant a flag or whatever the alien equivelent to a flag is, collect rocks look about and take pictures may or may not drive a vehicle over hill and dale then before leaving will play a game of how far they can hit a golf ball, dump their trash and will ignore anything else.
squash head
Suppose the lunar astronauts had met a sentient being. Different schedule?
Sure liberals are smarter. So what?
Rubbish in = rubbish for brains = rubbish out.
The input is more important. That warped input is why you see so many lefties around nowadays. And the infection is spreading.
I’m hoping it doesn’t spread to Asia.
Aliens could be here right now, but are smaller than atoms and don’t even see us (or we them o’ course). The same way that the Milky Way Galaxy could end by spattering like a june bug against the windshield of a passing space cruiser too large for us to comprehend.
Right, because there’s nothing dogmatic about atheism…
Of course there isn’t. Atheism is not a belief at all, it is simply the rejection of a specific arbitrary claim, said claim itself being what is known as dogma.
The religionist assertion of “atheism = dogma” goes to demonstrate that what matters is not intelligence, as much as rationality. It is that sort of buggy “thinking” — bad ideas — common to the Left and conservatism, that are wrecking the world.
If the aliens are here, they are hidden. Would you want to reveal yourself to a race which “thinks” like that while wielding a nuclear arsenal?
pooop again
Mad Fiddler,
Are your comments now by subscription only? The comment is in my mailbox but it looks like you deleted it here.
Just remember the kid at McDonald’s handles your food, not mine because I don’t eat there. That is a good reason for you to tell him he is a genius. Professor Egglehead never has and never sill do you any good. That might be a good reason to tell him that his house is 3″ over the building line.
The Russia and United state of America C-START which is for missile defense,missile interceptor, and anti missile warfare always correspond with time travel machine for galactic pictures.
C-START means Continue start or Common start for viewers of galactic photographic pictures in laboratories and technical workshops if the the commercial products
of time travel machine are purchased in the market will the consumer and customer start where the developers watched or will they replay already watched pictures of galaxy.
Then the first buyers and late purchasers of galactic picture and time travel machine will the picture L-Cross to what they have viewed on the satellite or is their a storage memory that will play former events.
For instance exam was schedule to last for 1 hour and some people came late as far as 45 minutes to end the examination will the people that start the same time with the examiner submit their answer script with
other late comers or can they be given an extra time to write every thing where by some late comer may finish every answer option more than people that came early depending on their mental capabilities.
People assume that there is something interesting on earth that other life forms might be interested in.
The problem is that they would have to come from a world exactly like ours to live here.
That’s not likely.
As for resources:
The gas giants of this solar system have the great resources in terms of hydrogen methane and water. And likely it easier to get metals from the asteroid belt than from earth.
Water and power (from water or methane or hydrogen or whatever)are the basics for life.
What will make the solar system available for colonization will be the ability to easily pull water and hydrogen from the moon or mars or wherever. The biggest news of the the last decade in this regard was the discovery of water on the moon. Water will provide for water and power and food.
Wellllllll, having read the entire page and not having a clue what my IQ is I would have to say that this is about the MOST intelligent group of comments I have ever read after an article on the web. As far as aliens are concerned they would either come for our oxygen (kill us) or our water (also us dead), Sooooo if they come adios muchachos.
W
163. Walter:
There’s plenty of water in space which would provide for both hydrogen for power and oxygen for breathing and water drinking–if they drank.
Ack! Ack! That’s what it will be like if “alien” aliens actually come to, uh, “visit” with us ala “Mars Attacks.” If it’s the other aliens (from down south ala “Mexicans Attack”) it’s us going “Back! Back!” So, for God’s sake, whatever you do DON’T let fly the doves or greenbacks.