https://web.archive.org/web/20150226234712/http://www.triple...
T9 (Triple 9) is a high IQ society similar to Mensa, but which only accepts members whose IQ is in the .999 percentile.
It's a non-scientific poll, but in my experience while lots of my college friends were liberal, lots of my professors and the smartest people I know lean libertarian.
https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/staff...
And I haven't found your comment about libertarianism being rampant among professors to be true at all. Where did you go to school? That would be very much outside the norm.
And having an advanced degree doesn't mean you have a high IQ or are even particularly smart.
>I have a feeling people who feel the need to join one of those groups are more socially disaffected and have lower empathy than the their non-member IQ peers
Have a source? Anyway a lot of people are invited to join these groups when they're young, and I'd argue liberals are more likely to seek out the approval of others.
>And I haven't found your comment about libertarianism being rampant among professors to be true at all. Where did you go to school? That would be very much outside the norm.
I went to a mildly prestigious university. I have a Masters in CS and a Bachelors in Mathematics. I think it's likely that my teachers were more libertarian because I took very few liberal-arts classes, where I noticed the more liberal professors were.
Usually the ones that lean libertarian are old white guys. My Asian professors didn't seem into politics at all and the few female professors I had also didn't seem politically oriented.
I had one chemistry professor though who would go on and on about how much he hated the government and regulations and how good things were back when he could obtain [illegal chemical] easily.
Honestly the only time politics seem to come up is when the professor has some issue with some government regulation.
I can see how it might seem like many professors are liberal though, they believe in global warming, vaccines, human rights, but it turns out that many libertarians believe in all that stuff too.
I frequently hear this sentiment from the left, and it's terribly disheartening. It's something akin to "You don't want the government to provide everyone with a car? You must not like people having cars!" or "You don't want the government to arrest people for drinking soda? You must want everyone to die of obesity!". Libertarians aren't unemphatic, they simply have different solutions.