***Official H&F LC Thread***

You can say non-college educated men were far more likely to vote for Trump than for Kamala and college educated women were far more likely to vote for Kamala than for Trump. You can also say non-college educated women were more likely to vote for Kamala, but not to the extent of college educated women. And, you can say college educated men were evenly split between the two.

If you just said that in the first place, no one would have replied with an objection to that claim.

Obviously it's not a "guarantee" but there is definitely data to show that education and intelligence are positively correlated. Here's one study which shows this. It's easy to find others.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PM...

You can also correlate intelligence with educational attainment:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligen...

100% agree with all those reports.
What I was trying to say with my 102 IQ report was that if you did an IQ test on any large group of college graduates, 50% will have
102 IQ or over and 50% will have under 102. If we assume that there are say 10% in the 120 IQ, and there is a minimum IQ of say 90 to get into college,
there must be a lot of 102-90 IQ people with College degrees.
Something like this. (apologies in advance for my crude sketch)
Now the majority of those to the right of the 102 line didn't get high paying jobs after
getting their degree and vote D because those with lots of debt vote D hoping for college debt forgiveness.
Not an official study, but my guess of why majority of female college grads vote D.

Apologies,
The label on the diagram should read IQ distribution of college graduates.

Yeah, like I said, that's cool and all. We can say all of those things. But you're not answering the question, as you well know. Let's try again:

So when we add up all of those subgroups, less educated people, as a group, tend to vote for Trump. Yes?

You keep trying to force conclusions where they don't exist. In this data set, gender is (likely) too important simply to disregard. I don't think you can just add men and women together and treat them as a monolithic group when the differences between the two groups are so large. You can say support for Kamala tends to increase with educational level, if you really want to. That's in the data, independent of gender.

As I stated earlier, the GOP wants the votes of the working class. In this election, working class voters were important in keeping Kamala from winning a single battleground state. If you (you voted for Kamala, so yes, you) want the elitist "we're smarter" trophy to go along with losing the trifecta, have at it. I hope the GOP expands its working class support in 2026 and 2028. In 2028, if Dems have a clear voter IQ advantage, it will be because they lost that election pretty badly.

"I was doing an event with the steel workers, across the street where I live, and I was noticing [a] different kind of energy with this, with Trump. It was clear at that time that people were voting for Trump. And the Democrats’ response was, ‘Aren’t they smart enough to realize they’re voting against their interests?’ And that’s insulting, and that’s, I mean, that’s, that’s just not helpful. It’s condescending. And if anything, that reinforces that kind of stereotype." -- Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA)

I keep asking why is this so important to you. So, why?

Absolutely yes. That is a conclusion that is reflected in the data.

Now think of this..

47% of men take stem degrees.. 53% non stem degrees
30% of women take stem degrees, 70% non stem degrees.

Now assume a high % of non stem degrees do not actually improve your earning potential and are much more likely to put you into long term debt.
(My first girlfriend did an Asian Studies degree) Never did anything in work related to it. For her, degree/no degree she would have gotten the same pay in her after college work. I know it is just an anecdote, but I say it because it is an example of what I am talking about.

It looks like STEM/non STEM degrees has a decent correlation with the split on the College educated vote for Trump and Kamala.
Just another possibility to think about.

OK, bros, we've finally done it! After weeks of posts, we're finally there.

Sure.

Yes. I'm glad we can finally agree that saying that is correct.

So, going from education level to intelligence, is not that big a leap. I explained that just a couple of posts ago, but here's a good source to show the correlation (same as I posted before.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PM...

I have never disagreed with this.

In this case "you" is perfectly fine, as I was a Kamala voter. Sounds like we even agree that smarter voters, tended to vote Harris; less smart ones tended to vote for Trump. We can both have at it!

I 100% agree with this as well. Back in the day when Clinton was crushing elections, I think the less intelligent voters tended to vote Clinton. I'm sure I've seen a source on that somewhere, might take a while to dig up.

I agree that it is insulting. I agree that it is bad strategy. I also think that in many cases, at least some of those people (but definitely not all) of those people were voting against their interests. And, yes, telling them that they are dumb for doing that, even if you might be right, is not the best way to go about it. I've been consistent on this throughout.

It's not. As most everyone else here knows, I one sick puppy when it comes to stuff like this. There wasn't much "point". As I mentioned earlier, what you or I write here in the H&F LC doesn't make any difference in the grand scheme of things. It's pointless. I'm weird. I have spent far more time posting about things far more trivial. Also, like I said earlier I don't really interact much with people like you, so it's novel and probably good for me in some ways.

I agreed all along that support for Kamala tends to increase with educational level. I don't agree that you can say that correlates with anything regarding the intelligence of supporters of either candidate.

I read all the articles and studies you posted suggesting that formal education, even in college-age adults, may raise IQ. It's an interesting hypothesis, but an unproven one. There are also studies on the other side of this showing that the average IQ of college students has dropped significantly as a greater percentage of the population goes to college. The study Mindflayer shared above found that undergraduates’ IQs dropped from 119 in 1939 to 102 in 2022.

If there is an effect on IQ due to continued stimulus of the brain, it would also be interesting to learn if the internet has had an effect on the IQ of non-college educated people. They can read and learn with ease too, should they so choose. I'm not aware of any studies, but it does seem clear that we live in a different world than we did a couple of generations ago.

Nope...I never said that. 😀

That's another mistake the Democrat Party keeps making. They think they know what's best for the working class, but clearly many working class don't see it that way. The party does come across as condescending, as Fetterman noted.

Democrats might try asking working class voters what they want, rather than asking high priced consultants what the working class wants. Trump clearly did a better job speaking to these voters than Kamala did. LOL that one multi-billionaire using nothing but instinct can outperform the party that used to claim to represent that group.

Rich & Mind,

You guys do yourself a disservice and bluntly come across as complete ****ing ******s when you link a blog article with a dead citation link and misrepresent it as a study, then incorrectly quote the study repeatedly.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication...

The actual "study" you're referencing is a preprint that is not peer reviewed and studies undergrads who matriculated, not graduated.

Please stop with your bullshit "facts".

Or like read the dogshit you're citing: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/2munr It is ****ing AIDs.

IQ of top 10percentile 119.. reflects the study.. 1939 only 10% of population went to university
IQ of top 40percentile 104 .. Please note that many people who have high IQ, (bookeepers, plumbers, electricians etc.)
did not get a degree so the IQ number is higher than 102 avg of those with college degree.
IQ of top 60 percentile 96...
around 60% of Americans studied some college but only 39% have degrees.

The meta analysis is just a summation of all bunch of IQ studies. I would assume that all the prior IQ studies are peer reviewed.
If you are implying (saying the meta analysis is not peer reviewed) that the meta analysis picked only the studies that gave the lowest IQ for college graduates and skewed the result downward, yes this is possible.

I am just looking from the outside, trying to figure out how and why you guys voted the way you did. The reason I study things like this,
is that when I am convinced of a discrepancy in the information provided and the actual reality I try to make big investments that puts my money
where my thinking is.
It is a very Mungerish thing to do.
Ie. when my friends believed that Kamala was going to win and the betting odds were 2-1 for Trump, I told them that if their deep analysis was correct that
they should be making bets and taking advantage of the odds.
I do the same, but in equities and real estate.

Come on, Rich. Are we doing that thing again when it's a fact you don't like, your standard for proof is unattainable. How exactly would anyone prove this to you if this is not enough:

Even if the average college student's IQ is going down, it doesn't mean it's less than than the average person who doesn't go to college. Moreover, the article I linked is fairly recent.

If you want to still stick to your guns and say, "Gee, I don't know, maybe education doesn't actually make people smarter. Sure, it makes sense, and there is data to suggest it, but who can really know?", then you're really beyond reasonable discussion.

Well, perhaps I misunderstood you. What was this supposed to mean:

Are you giving Harris voters that trophy or not?

I don't know why you keep posting this stuff. Dems are bad at strategy and a lot of things. One of the reasons I am not a Democrat. These exchanges would be a lot shorter if you didn't feel the need to keep saying stuff that is irrelevant to the point and that I am not disputing.

They'd have to measure the IQs of a target college group (incoming freshmen, grads, grad students....whatever they're trying to measure in that specific study) and compare that to a population of non-college grads, for starters.

A study that shows that, maybe, some students gain a couple of IQ points from studying is not even remotely proof that college grads have higher IQs than non-college grads. The study itself didn't claim anything like that.

If someone wanted to prove that Kamala supporters are, on average, smarter than Trump supporters, they would have to conduct IQ tests of Kamala voters and Trump voters, compare the two populations, and show a statistically significant difference.

I said you failed to prove your hypothesis. Education makes people more knowledgeable. Does it raise IQ in adults? The studies you shared are a starting point in that discussion, not any kind of definitive proof.

It was a mocking statement. Democrats always claimed to be the party of the working class. If they now want to be the party of the elite, it's a losing proposition for them. If they wish to say they're smarter (which they do), I encourage them to embrace that.

We're discussing if Kamala voters are smarter than Trump voters. It makes sense to discuss the impact of that perception on what matters to political parties -- winning elections.

I think what you are implying is causation intelligence and who you voted for, and I don't think that that is the case.
ie. If you flipped the policy so that Trump was pro abortion and college debt forgiveness and Kamala was against those things,
then the vote of College educated women would have flipped.

I think the causation is the policy; and the distribution of the college educated vote reflects that.

I'm not only not implying causation. I've said about 5 times explicitly that I'm not arguing causation.

People who are dumber tend to vote Trump. Is it because they are dumber, that they vote for Trump? Not necessarily.

That's just your opinion -- one that you failed to prove.

mind,

So you may not have gone to college, so let me explain how this actually works. First you matriculate, at which point you are an undergraduate, generally you work on this for four years, at which point you graduate and can be referred to as a college graduate. Or you don't finish and while in school remain an undergraduate. You can never simultaneously be an undergraduate and a graduate.

That meta analysis studies undergrads, not graduates.

If you want to make a jackassy point, atleast try to use the correct terms of art instead of either being entirely uneducated about the subject or just blatantly lying.

Just to circle back to this, since you were curious, mission is accomplished.

After dozens of AIDS posts Rich is finally able to admit that less educated people tend to vote Trump.

So all we're left with is "Are more educated people, as a group, more intelligent than people with less education?". Not "Is a random college grad smarter than a random non-college grad". But the average of all of them. This is something that should be non controversial. There are piles of evidence to suggest that this is the case both ways (more intelligent people tend to obtain more education and more education tends to make you smarter). There is extremely scant evidence to the contrary.

If you were to tell me that someone believed that "Nah, people who don't go to college are just as smart or smarter than people who don't", I'd believe you. But to actually see someone spinning the wheels of self-delusion in real time is just not something that you get to see every day.

It also goes the other way. People with higher IQs are more likely to go to college. There are lots of reasons for this that have nothing to do with IQ (like they tend to have smarter, richer parents who also went to college), but at the end of the day they do. This was covered earlier.

Come on, man. We know that would not be enough. If someone did that study we know you would claim liberal bias. You just did that a couple of pages ago, remember? To paraphrase you "Noble conservatives would never go out and try to prove someone is dumber or smarter. Never. The only people who would do that are liberal. Obviously they are biased against conservatives. They have an agenda. We can't believe that. "

As I said, it has also been seen the other way. It's shown that people with lower IQs are less likely to go to college. This isn't even controversial. Let me know if you need more citations on that and if it will convince you. We know that it won't.

It's pretty hilarious that when it's something you want to believe "Texas punishes shoplifters more harshly in California", you don't need any evidence. No prosecution rates, incarceration rates, arrest rates. Nothing. You just know it's true. But if it's something that you don't want to believe, you become some sort of amateur data scientist who can confidently dismiss that overwhelming consensus of everyone who studies the topic.

That's too bad. I really thought you were awarding that trophy.

Not really. We're not talking about winning elections. At least I'm not. You are and you seem to really want to, but it has nothing to do with what I'm talking about.

I don't know why you keep misrepresenting what I wrote. I said support for Kamala tends to increase with educational level. As non-college educated women favored Kamala, I don't think you can just ignore the gender gap and lump them in with non-college educated men, as I keep explaining.

As I wrote earlier, you can say non-college educated men were far more likely to vote for Trump than for Kamala and college educated women were far more likely to vote for Kamala than for Trump. You can also say non-college educated women were more likely to vote for Kamala, but not to the extent of college educated women. And, you can say college educated men were evenly split between the two.

It's not a logic exercise. It's a data exercise, and the data doesn't prove your hypothesis.

"More education tends to make you smarter..." More educated makes people more knowledgeable. Consensus has long been that IQ is locked in at an early age. Studies showing minor changes are interesting. Do they reflect students getting better at test taking? Are their other biases? I think we'd need to see a lot of studies with a lot of rigor before the claim that adults can increase their IQ by studying more can be even close to proven.

Just because someone conducts a study doesn't mean it's proven. Look at all those now-debunked food studies,, for instance. A study is a starting point.

You're trying to argue that A has a relationship to B, and B has a relationship to C, and C has a relationship to D, therefore A>D. Sorry...that's not proof.

I said conservatives aren't out calling voters dumb because we know that's a poor strategy. The only people who ARE doing that are (for the most part) liberal.

https://calmatters.org/justice/2024/11/retail-theft-proposition-36-election

CalMatters

Why Californians got tougher on crime: Bleak downtowns and attention-getting retail thefts

Yeah, that's the same as less educated people tend to vote for Trump. Fill in the blank below:

If above is true, then at lower education levels, support for Kamala tends to decrease and people vote for ______ instead.

I'll give you a hint: Orange.

Is this really that hard?

Of course you think bolded. And "a lot of studies" is always going to be more studies than exist.

Yeah, I get it. You reject facts that you don't like. It's very clear. I don't know why you are bothering with the charade. It's completely transparent.

Sure, man I get it nothing is proof. Yes, if A is correlated to B and B is correlated to C, then it is highly likely that we can correlate at to C. Sure there are weird edge cases we could likely construct.

That isn't all you said:

You said conservatives aren't going to do a study that would "prove" dumber people tend to vote Trump. Only liberals would. Therefore we can't believe it. You can drop the charade, this would be your exact line.

I spit my drink out at this part. "LOL that I want to argue this*". But the fact that you want to just throw out nearly all known research on the correlation between intelligence and college, well that's just common sense!

*I'm pretty sure you don't know what I'm arguing, but that's irrelevant.

Soulman was wrong. This was better than I thought. Please, Rich, tell me more! If "On average, less educated people are just as smart or even smarter than more educated people" is in your range, I need to know what else is rattling around in that brain of yours.

After reading the wall... I ran out of popcorn again.

At lower education levels, support for Kamala among women tends to decrease, but women still favor Kamala.
At lower education levels, support for Kamala among men tends to decrease and men go from split between the two candidates to favoring Trump.

LMK when the American Psychological Association accepts that as fact. LOL that you think every college student sees a statistically significant gain in IQ from undergraduate studies. You have a habit of overrepresenting studies and their conclusions.

I didn't say you can't think it. I said you failed to prove your hypothesis.

And for the same exact reason. Why would the GOP want to look elitist when we actually want the votes of the working class?

Even if you were correct, you'd have to break down the voters by a lot more than educational level to have a good estimate of their respective IQs. LOL at you thinking you've shown a statistically significant difference in IQ between the two groups.

But, since you think you know, please tell us the average IQ of Kamala voters and the average IQ of Trump voters, and please show that the difference to be statistically significant. That's the standard for proving your hypothesis.

Whoa there, buddy. We're going backwards. Remember when you said above (and it's fine, I don't disagree with it) repeatedly a couple of posts ago, and I said OK what if you add up the groups. You finally said:

So we've already added up the men and women. You seemed to get it just a few posts ago. Now we're regressing. Yeah, there is a disparity between men and women, and that might be relevant if I were making any arguments about causation. But I'm not, so that doesn't matter.

Once you have concluded bolded, which it seemed you had just a couple of posts ago, it necessarily follows that support for Trump will increase with lower educational levels. The logic on this is not that hard. I think you have it in you.

Look Rich, I get it. You don't want to believe it, so there is no proof that you will accept. The mental gymnastics you've gone through to make this literally unprovable to you are quite hilarious.

First, according to you even if I proved that less educated people tend to vote for Trump and that less educated people are less intelligent, that doesn't mean that less intelligent people tend to vote for Trump. When two things are correlated to a third thing, the correlation of the two things can be deduced (by a rational person). Again, there are probably some rare edge cases we can construct where that wouldn't apply, but it nearly always does. Too bad, says Rich Muny. That's not proof!

So, what is proof? Well according to Rich Muny, the ONLY way to do it is to take a bunch of Harris voters test their IQ, take a bunch of Trump voters test their IQ, and then compare the two. But wait, even that isn't enough. That's only one study. Sorry, not enough says Rich Muny. You really need multiple studies. Ok, lets say we somehow miraculously get the requisite number of studies to satisfy Rich Muny. Sorry still not good enough. You see, the only people who would set out to do such a study are liberals (conservatives would never set out to prove such a thing). And if they are liberals, they are biased and we certainly can't believe any data they generate. After all they have an obvious agenda.

Voila, we've got a completely unfalsifiable belief. It doesn't matter that more intelligent people are more likely. It doesn't matter that we've got evidence that less educated voters tend to vote Trump, which you essentially agreed to a few hours ago, and seem to have second thoughts about. It doesn't matter that voters who self-identify as less informed, tend to vote Trump. As far as Rich Muny is concerned all of this data tells us nothing and can't be trusted.

The cherry on this illogical sundae is that when it comes to the things that Rich Muny claims to have "proven" or "shown" himself in the course of this weeks long AIDSfest of a discussion, he doesn't feel the need to cite data. He doesn't need stats or statistical significance. He barely needs citations. He can dismiss evidence without even reading it ("NBC news survey? Sorry, biased. Who cares what it actually says? Also, here's some other data from NBC news that supports a point I'm trying to make. We should definitely look at that"). He can simply assert things to be true and he has proven his point. Non peer-reviewed articles? No problem when they are on Rich Muny's side.

This is how Rich Muny's mind works. Again, I was certainly aware that some people are this delusional, but it's quite another thing to just see it play out in real time. Fantastic stuff.