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this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
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That doesn't explain it for me, because in order to chock Trump support up to low intellect, you have to reason that the intelligence distribution somehow tracks with political alignment, and that just isn't the case. No, calling them all stupid is too easy.
You probably know way more about intellect than I do. I admit I have very little tolerance for mentally lazy or emotional arguments, whether I think the person can do better.
Let me put it this way. If you can't do abstract thinking, or if you believe all complex issues have simple answers, answers which of course require you to twist reality to justify your simple answer, I am gonna categorize you as a fairly simple-minded person. You can still posses great domain-specific kbowledge regarding certain things, you can still be a friendly and good person, but I don't think such folks should be doing the thinking.
Anyway, I wish I was still as optimistic on people's intelligence as you are. It seems to me like you also don't want it to be true. Sucks either way.
I understand. It's a very tempting explanation and all the more so when you're trying to explain behavior and thinking that doesn't make much rational sense, if any. My point was simply that we've done many studies testing IQ across conservative/liberal lines and there's no clear pattern that indicates one side is substantially more intelligent than the other (studies have found statistically significant differences, but the point is it's not as simple as liberal=smart, conservative=dumb). Imagine a standard distribution (bell curve) of intelligence scores. The left-most third of that curve would be your 30% of the population that are "truly dumb." In order for that to explain Trump supporters, all of them would have to be in that left-most third of the curve, which would mean liberals would make up the vast majority of the rest of the curve. We're talking about ~70% of conservatives being in the bottom third of said distribution. If that was actually the case, society itself would look very different, like the wealth distribution between liberals and conservatives would be totally lopsided in favor of liberals, you'd barely see any conservatives on college campuses no matter where you were in the country, etc. It's just too lopsided an IQ distribution to be realistic.
The explanation is that the cognitive errors Trump supporters exhibit exist in all of us more or less independent of IQ. Einstein was just as prone to investment bias as the average person, for example. In short, even the very smart can think very stupid things. What's mind-blowing to me is that such an immensely large proportion of the country has bought into the same brand of extreme, anti-reality, willfully blind bullshit in such a short time period. The article is right: this is exactly what you observe in cults, but on a scale literally a million times larger. There's a reason cults tend to start small and never grow beyond that size: most people can spot a charlatan when they meet one. In order for cults to grow into recognized religions, it typically takes time, because they have to grow slowly, building up a critical mass of members, which then lend the cult legitimacy. What doesn't make sense to me about Trumpers is that they seemed to buy into his bullshit in huge numbers literally overnight. I don't get that. It don't make no sense.
My gripe with IQ is that it is not the complete picture of intelligence, and more so that it is even hard to agree on what is intelligence exactly. e.g: Are you truly intelligent if you have good pattern recognition, but poor EQ, and willingly opt to listen to your emotional brain all of the time.
I am not saying that trump supporters occupy perfectly the left side of the distribution, be it for IQ or whatever good measure of intelligence we might have. Obviously intelligence is also not just it. Lazy, proud, hateful and people with a tendency for authoritarianism will vote for trump, they're not all 'truly' stupid, but I think most truly simple-minded folks at a big risk of falling prey to cults and populism.
To add onto this, there is a correlation between being uneducated and supporting trump. There is also a correlation between education and IQ (if that matters). It is not perfect, so it is not all supporters. The way I see it, you can still support trump if you're very intelligent, but also cruel. Or if you know better but you lack the EQ to go over your family values and your entourage of cultists.
I guess, my point is that IQ fails to address what we observe in society, because IQ lacks one or many of the components needed to truly draw conclusions from it. When I call people 'truly dumb' for being susceptible to cults and populism movements, I am sort of stretching the definition of intelligence, which is the point I tried to make in the previous post. I don't need to know where someone is located on a normal distribution to make a judgment of intellect, because, to me, by definition, if you're blind to objective reality, fails at the simplest syllogism exercise when it comes to your beliefs, and let hate flow through you and everything else, then you're 'dumb' to me. You're that 1 out of 3 person who I can't rely on for anything, whether you posses the ability for critical thinking and simply decide not to use it for your whole life, if whether you're simply incapable, in both cases I can't, and might never be able to reason with you.
I believe the reason why a cult which requires such blatant cognitive errors to adopt is that there is way more 'dumb" and unreliable people that we'd like to believe, and it could happen anytime anywhere, you just need to right "brand" of stupid shit at the right time, and you can count on 30% of the population being potential buyers.
IQ, if we're talking about leadership, is dangerous without emotional intelligence, empathy.
I think to your last two sentences: it only seems like overnight. 2-3 decades of conservative talk radio and 24-7 Fox News amplified by the echo chambers created by social media and YouTube, laid the foundation of this.
Add in an undercurrent of racism and having a popular black president, a societal push for diversity and inclusion, etc. Not to mention policies and government actively working to get rid of social safety nets and creating an economica environment where people are struggling. They are ready to feel attacked.
All you need is a megalomaniac who is willing to exploit it for their own gain.
60+ years. They killed Kennedy to get Nixon, they killed Martin and Malcolm, they killed RFK, they sandbagged Carter with help from Iran to get Reagan, they did the Clinton impeachment and the Brooks Brothers Riot to get Bush, they lied about WMD to get perpetual wars in the middle east, they threw everything at Obama, they gave social media data on a hundred million Americans to Russia in order to elect Trump, and trying to steal the election is only their latest crime against democracy.
It's possible they also killed Pac and Big, and did 9/11.
Same people, and their daddies.
I think a big part of it is that it takes some intellectual humility to admit when you've been duped.
For a party of anti-intellectuals, this would mean accepting that everyone who had been calling out Trump as a lying criminal was right.
It's easier for those who've dug-in to double-down than to face that kind of reckoning.