Passages from The Globe and Mail

The study, for those who wish to dig deeper

I popped in expecting it to be a spoof report. Oh well, this might be fun to show my father, it'd at least explain the current batch of GOP runners..... and Donald Trump.

I'm looking forward to a civil and well versed discussion.

On the topic: Fox News.

I predict that the OP will lead to a civil, rational discussion.

Edit: Ninja'd by SimonG.

I knew it! I was always suspicious of people with lower intelligence. Not that I have anything against them, mind you, it's just, they don't really fit in with us, they're a totally different breed. And in the end, aren't stupid people responsible for all the evil in teh world? I say let's round them up and send them back to where ... er ...wait .... :P

As someone who used to live extensively in the world of academic publishing, massive props for the journal for offering the full PDF text of the article for free. There's nothing more annoying for a grad student than seeing a cool or interesting study trapped behind a publisher's paywall...

Dem peeple dere are bigguts.

I bet they eat the yellow snow too.

Did this really need a study? :-) If you're not subjected to or experience anything outside of your own little world, of course you're going to have ideas and generalizations that may seem "primitive" to others.

But does it explain why those who receive more education can still be prejudiced?

And what about tribes who still live in the Stone Age, apart from society? Are they "ignorant"? Surely they would be "prejudiced" against anyone who isn't a part of their tribal society.

The only problem with studies like these are that they seem to come from the perspective that they know what is "correct" and everyone who doesn't fit is somehow fundamentally wrong. Human nature, and the human experience, is way too broad to paint with so few colors.

I always found each side, left and right, to be of equal intelligence.

The liberal side was good at arguing at why the status quo and past policies were no good, and the conservative side was good at arguing why the status quo and the liberal agenda for the future was no good.

The funny thing is that both agree on the status quo not being good enough, argue on the path forward, and leave the future much as the past has been: getting nowhere in any real sense.

The faces change, the ideas change, but man is pretty much the same as he has always been, only better at obfuscating what that is.

I think it might be an intellectual pancake of meta-structures, with "the stupidest people, followers of X" at the bottom, "marginally less stupid people, haters of X" on top of them and "relatively bright believers in X" even higher.
You know - "little science leads to atheism, much science leads to faith", implicitly assuming that "no science at all" leads to faith via ignorance...

Of course - there's always the possibility of there being an even higher layer, where people are smarter than level 3 non-naive believers... but there might as well be level 5 above that.

Also - what about the Japanese ? Not necessarily right now, with all the modern muddling of cultures, but weren't they traditionally strict and xenophobic yet intelligent ?

Also - what about elves ? (To all you empiricists out there - I mean this as a thought experiment) Is it possible to imagine bigotry alongside intelligence ?

Old story. The mash were in on this last week: http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/science-%26-technology/right%11wing-people-smart-enough-to-hate-everyone-201202074868/

While I did not read the entire article, I remember reading about it a few days ago in the daily mail (and considering the quality of the daily mail, I just laughed at it. The daily mail is about as bad as Fox News, but at least it is better than Pravda.ru)

The impression I got was that a lot of the reasoning behind the published result of the study was:
As low intelligence often leads to a greater degree of prejudice, and a lot of homohopic and racist people identify themselves with far right winged organizations->right winged beliefs means lower intelligence.

Now can anyone spot the obvious issue with this way of reasoning?


(for the record, I don't identify myself with any right winged group)

it's called ice cream

I agree with this - just look at Vic Toews.