Vaniver comments on Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence - Less Wrong

49 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 December 2007 10:14PM

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Comment author: BlueAjah 12 January 2013 05:46:28PM 6 points [-]

This article has a lot of bell-curve verbal IQ graphs from GSS (General Social Survey) data for the years 2000-2012, using the wordsum score as a measure of intelligence:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2012/04/verbal-intelligence-by-demographic/

It shows Republicans as smarter than Democrats, but Liberals smarter than Conservatives, and White people smarter than Black people, and some other comparisons.

Comment author: Vaniver 12 January 2013 07:19:19PM 3 points [-]

It shows Republicans as smarter than Democrats

Kind of; the great thing about those distributions is that you can talk about more of the distribution than one summary statistic. There's a clump of high IQ democrats, a clump of low IQ democrats, and then a clump of medium IQ democrats, whereas the Republicans look like one clump of medium IQ republicans. There are more Democrats from 0 to 5, more Republicans from about 6 to 8, and a tiny few more Democrats from 9 to 10.

This matches with the prediction that there is a significant group of low-vocabulary people who vote predominantly Democratic, the middles voting somewhat more Republican, and the highs about evenly split.