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Comment by juancn | Hacker News Reader

Voters are mostly emotional, not rational. The people that actually sway the elections vote by feel.

You have to always remember that about half the population has an IQ under 100.

That sort of “smarter than thou” attitude resulted in the Republican victories in the Eisenhower/Stevenson US Presidential elections of 1952 and 1956. Maybe Nixon too, with the “silent majority”.

Superficially smart, smug, supercilious and (ironic, eh) emotionally satisfying…but ultimately very foolish.

That's by design, of course. Whether people got smarter or dumber we might still assign 100 to be the median.

That half of any sizeable population will always be dumber than the average of that population is thing that feels worrisome even though its just how statistics work.

You have to always remember that about half the population has an IQ under 100.

And that the <100 half is much easier to herd.

IQ has nothing to do with it -- smart people are plenty tribal, too. anyone who has ever waded into battles in academia has seen this firsthand

cuz that's what it's about: tribe

as Scott Alexander once said: "the ideology is not the movement" (it's the tribe as much as anything)

https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/04/the-ideology-is-not-th...

I don't think that's completely true. When times are good, intelligence and education probably come out in the wash. But when times are bad, and people are losing their livelihoods, intelligence has a lot to do with how blame is assigned. In other words, you're a lot more likely to get scammed the less intelligent and less educated you are.

And that's what we got here in the US -- a conman ran a very successful con on people who just weren't all that smart or educated. And there were enough of those people to supplement the base tribalism and propel him to victory.

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