Northwestern’s James Lindgren has posted “Ideology and Intelligence in Legal Scholarship” (Journal of Empirical Legal Scholarship, 2011, forthcoming), and from its abstract one gets the idea that the paper will be nothing if not controversial (and, I suspect, the replies ironically performative):
A variety of commentators have suggested that there is positive correlation between the ideological valence of legal scholarship and the intellectual capacity of the author. In their most common form, these suggestions posit an association between “progressive” or “left leaning” political views, and “IQ” or “intelligence.” Recent developments in content analysis and the measurement of inellectual capacity now permit empirical testing of these claims. In particular, sophisticated content analysis techniques enable researchers to provide an reliable intellectual capacity estimate based on the measurable characteristics of texts; these characteristics include sentence complexity, logical paragraph structure, and extensiveness of vocabulary.
For this study, 200 law review articles were randomly selected from a pool of 30 student-edited law reviews in the WESTLAW JLR database. Content-analysis software was used to generate Siegel-Spaeth ideology scores (normally used to estimate the ideological position of judges), and the Retiel technique was used to provide an estimate Stanford-Benet score for the author of each article. Standard techniques were applied to determine the statistical significance of the resulting correlations.
The results do not confirm the standard hypothesis. Siegel-Spaeth ideology scores that indicate “progressive” ideology were negatively correlated with the Stanford-Benet estimates. The Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient (-0.61) provides strong evidence of a negative relationship between progressive ideology and intelligence.
Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but all one needed do was read the various responses to my last bit on Ayers from the fine academic and legal minds at several leftwing sites.
I thought perhaps they’d been purposely misrepresenting my arguments. But perhaps the real problem is that they’re simply weren’t sharp enough to understand it.
I can be quite nuanced, you see.
(h/t geoffb)
I’m curious if anyone has considered applying these analytic tools to Obama’s oeuvre from his time at Harvard Law Review?
Oh, wait…
Huh.
As I was reading the beginning of the summmary, I was anticipating that they’d “found” a negative correlation between intelligence and conservatism, as per usual, wondering what they were counting as signs of intelligence, and figuring that the definition of intelligence would be tautalogically linked to progressivism.
But now that I see that the results come out favorably for my team, I’d just like to say “hooray for objective scientific measurements”!
This part caught my eye:
To the surprise of no one. Or no one smarter than an Ivy League lawyer, anyway.
Also from that article
A few brilliant progressives; the rest, well, I’m sure they have high emotional intelligence, and they come to the “correct” conclusions.
In an America governed by Barack Obama!!???
No.
Fucking.
Way.
I think stuff like this best serves the notion that trying to equate intelligence with political ideology is a non-starter.
We’ll have to wait until the statisticians at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit have had a chance to reevaluate the data.
cranky
I have to agree with you. I don’t think intelligence has much to do with ideology … and if proggies are scoring low according to this measurement of their written texts it is because leftism is a lazy ideology.
>Anything bad that happens is never the fault of the victim
>If its not the fault of the victim, it is the fault of the Other
>Bash The Other
>Dismiss anyone that argues against us by stating they are The Other, too and standing in the way of progress
rinse, lather, repeat
What kind of ideology makes draconian policy based on things that haven’t been invented yet? Or may never be?
Really, leftism is the “ideology” of uncivilized children “I want it NOW and if you don’t give it to me NOW, YOU ARE UNFAIR AND A BIG MEANIE”
It’s not intelligence … it’s maturity! (and morality)
There’s one thing we can all probably agree with; sheep aren’t too bright.
I’m starting to worry about a correlation between a Pearson’s R-value of -.89 and the date.
I dunno. Anyone who has tried to have a serious discussion with a typical Leftie (I’ve tried with my UC Davis-dwelling stepdaughter) would tell that the results of this study are spot on. While their facts are non-existant, yours are demonstrably wrong, due to their origin, or some other unarguable flaw.
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heh.
but before gloating too much, I would point out two things:
1. 200 articles is a rather small sample.
2. the metric sounds questionable. for example, complicated sentence structure may flow from the pen of a man who holds a thought for longer than two seconds. it may also indicate incoherent garbage.
I’m tempted to classify this study as entertainment; it’s an amusing retort to the “conservatism is stupid; there’ve been STUDIES!” trope. rather akin to laughing at the left’s response to our kinetic libya action.
“But perhaps the real problem is that they’re simply weren’t sharp enough to understand it.”
Maybe if we write stuff in crayon on shopping bags. You know. In big letters and simple words.
Hrmmm. I’ll have to look into how this “Retiel technique” works.
Other research (here) has shown that when you use big words and complex sentences, readers tend to view you as being less intelligent.
I think stuff like this best serves the notion that trying to equate intelligence with political ideology is a non-starter.
I’d have to disagree with you on that, although not too strongly.
Certainly people can have all sorts of ideological beliefs completely independant from their intellectual aptitude.
But you also run into situations where ideological views are, in any in depth examination, fucktarded and wrong, and you have to be a moron to believe them.
Or a liar.
You can be brilliant, and put egality ahead of liberty, or some such. Sure. Or vice versa. But a great deal of dumbass ideology requires you to abstain from any critical evaluation of it because it’s internally contradictory, or predicated on assumptions that are demonstrably false.
Of course, there are a lot of progs who’d say the same thing about my ideology. But just because people disagree with each other, does not mean something is all relative.
I know a lot of intelligent people who are also liberals. I think they turn their brains off when politics are involved.
I have to agree with you. I don’t think intelligence has much to do with ideology … and if proggies are scoring low according to this measurement of their written texts it is because leftism is a lazy ideology.
Which is the crux of it – the intellectual work required is very low. In fact, too much work undoes it. It’s a dumb thing.
The problem I think is everyone wants to think about ‘intelligence’ as almost an abstract – ‘raw capacity’ not directed toward anything.
Then a distinction can be drawn between someone who has not done work but COULD, if they tried, and someone who could not.
But I don’t think there’s any such thing. It’s impossible to quantify a person’s raw intellectual capacity towards anything and everything, in general. Some people excel at some areas while sucking at others. Is an autistic person very intelligent or very stupid?
Depends on what criteria you evaluate him on.
Hypothetical or theoretical maximum capacity is non-quantifiable. All you can measure is aptitude when applied.
So being intellectually lazy is being intellectually stupid. You can’t give them credit for what they cannot or willnot (which?) demonstrate.
The only problem is, people reject that you can call them ‘stupid’ because they will demonstrate extreme intellectual aptitude in other subjects or areas, or at other times.
So what? That’s not problem. Like I said – is an autistic very smart or very stupid? Both. Everyone is. To simply say a person is “stupid” or “brilliant” is either expressed as a generality, in which case it both allows room for multiple exceptions and is also quite relative, or else it needs to be expressed more specifically. A person is stupid or smart at what, and possibly also, when in particular.
People, when they try to distinguish something like “IQ” or raw intellectual capacity from other areas where one applies their mind, in order to do so, define it as something that can’t be proven to even exist.
I know a lot of intelligent people who are also liberals.
Intelligent at what?
Obviously not politics.
You’re saying they “are intelligent people”. Based on what?
Is the retard who can figgure square roots in head intelligent?
Here is, I think, a distillation:
So someone who has a great aptitude for mathematics and poor aptitude for politics is intelligent but wrong on politics.
Someone who has a great aptitude for politics and a poor aptitude for mathematics is stupid but right on politics?
Why is it not that the person who is great at math but piss poor at political philosophy not just an idiot who happens to be gifted with numbers?
What is the ‘essence’ of intelligence, so to speak? How does one ‘be’ of it?
Case in point:
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/314215.php
Now you can assume they’re just bald faced liars. Good assumption.
But someone is going to believe them. Probably lots of people.
And they will be fucking idiots for it.
Wait, my bad…
Suppose to be this.
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/314213.php
A lot of insane people are highly intelligent. Same goes for progressives.
But again, (because this is interesting to me) I would challenge you and ask, how the hell does one be both insane, and intelligent?
A lack of sanity does not strike me as an ‘intelligent’ or ‘smart’ trait.
It boils down to – you can have extremely high aptitudes and capabilities in some areas while simultaneously lacking even basic competence in others.
Which, to some degree or another, is true of everyone. And true in different ways at different times for any one.
How do we discern which mental aptitudes should be labelled as intelligence? (And how frequently must they be demonstrated?)
A mind can work extremely well at irrational thought. Just because the product bears no relation to objective reality doesn’t mean it doesn’t fit into some kind of logical framework.
The difference between fiction and insanity is that fiction stays on the page or the disc. Both are outside the realm of reality and in both cases the quality of the delusion depends quite a lot on the intelligence that creates it.
Yes, I think this is correct. What did Churchill say? That ‘if you’re not a liberal at 20 you have no heart, but if you’re not a conservative at 40 you have no brain’? To someone of 20 it makes sense to say that if we could only sit down with these radical Islamists we could convince them that we should all coexist. By the time we’re 40 we’ve hopefully lost that naivete because we’ve met and dealt with people who are crazy as a craphouse rat and/or evil to the bone. Likewise, at 20 the Marxist dictum of ‘from each according to his ability and to each according to need’ sounds like a beautiful idea. By the time we’re 40 we’ve learned the hard way about free riders and freeloaders and understand why Marxism doesn’t work in the real world.
It’s not that we’re smarter per se we’ve become wiser in the ways of the world. But academics are often sheltered from the school of hard knocks, perhaps why leftists and their ideas persist in the ivory towers of academe. They’re not stupid but they are often shockingly naive and immature.
This study has a censorship bias problem because they don’t see the papers that were rejected by the student editors. This correlation could be completely the product of editors favoring left leaning papers over conservative ones of similar quality.
And I always thought there just was a negative correlation between receiving a law degree and intelligence…
#15
The operative word in the article being,’unnecessarily.’ hence the crayons and brown paper bags and simple words.
I think that the intellectual level of leftists, of course, can be high.
But since the basis of the ideology is so demonstably wrong, that said leftists can fit into Robert Audrey’s description of Freud:
Genius forced into mere ingenutity.
Or there’s a difference between ‘credentitaled’ and ‘educated’.
I think Col. Tamm is a pretty smart guy, for a lawyer.
A mind can work extremely well at irrational thought. Just because the product bears no relation to objective reality doesn’t mean it doesn’t fit into some kind of logical framework.
Is the suggestion then, that ‘intelligence’ is a measure of the complexity (regardless of accuracy) of a thought a person can muster?
That strikes me as fairly workable.
Well of course. I thought of it.
My take was on a different thread.
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