Why conservatives are probably not stupid

Some of the stupidest and worst-informed people I've ever met have been liberals, and some of the most intelligent and thoughtful people I've met (and I've met quite a number) have been conservatives. I spent four years at Georgetown, which is probably one of the most politically active schools in the country, so I think I have a decent sample of both the left and the right (albeit biased towards the intelligent end - but not as much as you might think, trust me).

This isn't a particularly robust article, but the point he makes is probably correct - intelligence makes one more likely to go to university, and going to university exposes one up to far more liberal influence than conservative. It certainly matches my experience. My experience has also been that the vast majority of liberals move at least a bit to the right after they grow up and have to support themselves.

(No one's ever totally objective about this stuff, but for what it's worth, I'm a moderate, to the point that I didn't feel I could vote either way in the last election.)

This entire debate is stupid without defining what we mean by liberal or conservative.

In my experience, in the USA, this is nothing other than a vague cultural affiliation and it has relatively little content. Conservative oldsters love their Medicare. Liberal Silicon Valley types are enthusiastically anti-union.

When did hacker news become the place to post musings worthy of King of the Hill's Peggy Hill?

And to everyone who might call this an article, have your standards really fallen that low?

My attitudes usually fall strongly in both camps (very conservative on law and order, very liberal on social issues/gay marriage/etc) but I see having a liberal outlook as being like having a scientific outlook.

Self-defined "conservatives", on the whole, appear keen to keep things as they are and not experiment with society or civic systems. Self-defined "progressives", on the other hand, seem more willing to try out experiments to see if they result in quality of life improvements.. this fits well with a scientific mindset, IMHO, so I'll probably always identify as idealistically progressive, even if many of my opinions become conservative due to experience.

I'd like to see a survey which pitches the ideologically driven (on the left and the right) against the pragmatic centrists.

Perhaps this is evidence that despite the attempts by the american right to re-define 'liberal' to mean what most europeans would call 'centrist' or even 'center-right', the american right is actually the one harbouring fringe, ideologically-driven politics, and those they see as liberals are actually the smart, pragmatic centrists.

LOL that blog post certainly didn't do anything to dispel the notion that conservatives are less intelligent.

I actually think of it like this: being liberal doesn't necessarily make you more intelligent, but being more intelligent makes you increasingly likely to be liberal. This is why the student bodies at all the top colleges in the US are overwhelmingly liberal. No, it isn't because the teachers there are lefties; the students were that liberal the moment they stepped on campus and smart people are much less likely to be manipulated than dumb people. Once you reach a certain level of intelligence where you are able to process news from a variety of sources and interpret it critically, you easily see that moderate liberalism is right on almost all issues where there is some notion of an objective right or wrong. This is why top colleges can be over 90% democrats.

Now if you aren't intelligent enough to understand the world, you could become either liberal or conservative. It really just depends on where you grew up and your experiences. It's sort of like taking a multiple-choice test with two possible answers. If you are bright and can understand the material, you will choose the liberal answer the vast majority of the time. If you are not smart enough to do so, you have to guess at the answer. Half pick the correct liberal choice while the other half picks the incorrect conservative choice.

The only intelligent conservatives either are libertarians who have simply done the mental gymnastics necessary to conclude that other human beings do not matter or are people who have been severely indoctrinated into conservative teachings at a very early age.

Here's a much better treatment of the subject: http://www.american.com/archive/2009/october/are-liberals-sm...

Summary: For various reasons the general population skews conservative, essentially driving the correlation. "Smart people" probably don't much skew liberal.