2024 ELECTION THREAD
The next presidential race will be here soon! Please see current Bovada odds. Thoughts?
STEM also skews male more than other degrees and that by itself will have it skew a lot for Trump (compared to other degrees) because of the men-women political divide.
Problem with ecriture is that he does give STEM a higher inherent moral value than other degrees (for good reason: it's more real knowledge) but he can't accept STEM degree holders have obviously voted for Trump more than other degree holders (we just don't know how much more).
No. The problem is you made a straight math mistake in your previous post. If STEM degree holders are small in terms of % of college grads your whole argument falls apart (using overall college % as an upper bound) as D2 explained. I'm not saying any of the other stuff you said. I think STEM degree holders skew younger and towards better schools and are slightly more left than college degree holders overall. That's all that lead to my 2:1 guess at this point. And that's more for 2020, we don't have good demo data yet for 2024.
STEM also skews male more than other degrees and that by itself will have it skew a lot for Trump (compared to other degrees) because of the men-women political divide.
This assumes that the male-female split is constant across all subgroups, which I assume it isn't. If you gave me a random voter and told me nothing about them other than their gender and whether or not they hold a STEM degree, and asked me to predict how they voted, I would give a lot more weight to "holding a STEM degree" than I would to "being male" or "being female". So much so in fact, that I'd think "holding a STEM degree" almost completely overrides gender as a consideration.
Have any of you math people ever actually met a mechanical engineer? If not then you'll just have to take my word for the fact that there are few groups of people who give a crap less about things like identity politics and would thus be more inclined to vote Trump than them
^Agree that engineers tend to be more right wing than other STEMs, with many leaning towards libertarianism, as if society were but a giant machine with predictable outputs.
This assumes that the male-female split is constant across all subgroups, which I assume it isn't. If you gave me a random voter and told me nothing about them other than their gender and whether or not they hold a STEM degree, and asked me to predict how they voted, I would give a lot more weight to "holding a STEM degree" than I would to "being male" or "being female". So much so in fact, that I'd think "holding a STEM degree" almost completely overrides gender as a consideration.
Yeah, stuff like assuming the male-female split still applies to very small highly non random subsets of men and women is a stats 101 type mistake.
Yup, it's the same basic error that Elrazor repeatedly makes when he states that because men commit more crime than women and immigrants contain a higher density of young men than the host population, immigration causes crime to rise.
Lol
Have any of you math people ever actually met a mechanical engineer? If not then you'll just have to take my word for the fact that there are few groups of people who give a crap less about things like identity politics and would thus be more inclined to vote Trump than them
I mean, this assumes a). that everyone votes Harris does so due to identity politics and b). everyone who votes Trump does so because they don't give a **** about identity politics. You're going to have to show some work here.
Case in point - I don't give a **** about identity politics and would never in a million years vote Trump.
I mean, this assumes a). that everyone votes Harris does so due to identity politics and b). everyone who votes Trump does so because they don't give a **** about identity politics. You're going to have to show some work here.
Case in point - I don't give a **** about identity politics and would never in a million years vote Trump.
Why would would I said assume that everyone has to think a certain way for my point to be valid?
*I used the word "inclined" in my post fwiw.
Why would would I said assume that everyone has to think a certain way for my point to be valid?
*I used the word "inclined" in my post fwiw.
Fair enough. I'll rephrase my objection as: I think smart people have reasons to be disinclined to vote for Trump which are stronger than whether or not they care about identity politics, like understanding why voting for Trump is an all round bad idea even if they are of conservative bent and would naturally vote for some other republican presidential candidate.
I mean I dont think anyone would argue with a straight face that white men with a STEM degree from Harvard/Princeton/MIT would skew more Trumpy than the average college grad so it’s just a question of how bad those people are as a stand in for STEM grads overall.
I mean I dont think anyone would argue with a straight face that white men with a STEM degree from Harvard/Princeton/MIT would skew more Trumpy than the average college grad so it’s just a question of how bad those people are as a stand in for STEM grads overall.
I actually think that's obviously something that happened. Being a white man already pushes you far to the right of the average college graduate. STEM does as well for the obvious logical reasons listed.
I don't know why you believe being admitted to Harvard/Princeton/MIT would select for leftism so much as to overcome those 2 massive rightwing skews.
Maybe you are confusing being an academic from those institutions and being a graduate from those institutions. Maybe you are for some reason thinking too much about young people?
Really why do you have as a prior that getting an engineering degree as a white man in 1997 at MIT would make you a Harris voter more often than the average college graduate in the country? wtf?
The pool of graduates increased recently by a lot but not at top elite institutions as much. You have droves of millennial and z gen women getting a degree (often a trash one, but not exclusively) at a low tier college (far more than ever before) and if they aren't married, voting Harris 85-15 or 90-10.
If the overall skew is 56-44 or something similar among all college graduates, you understand that the massive amount of under 40 women with a college degree voting almost always for Harris can easily mean everyone else on average WITH A DEGREE skewed trump?
It wouldn't be surprising at all to have Trump + 15/20 in STEM degree holder white men over 60, INCLUDING from elite institutions.
Which would be low and compatible with Trump being considered a bad candidate for college holders, as in a natural state of things with normal candidates on both sides they would be 90-10 for the republican one.
You still have not understood the basic point D2 and I tried to explain to you about small non random samples. There is no right wing bias for white men in STEM programs at elite schools to overcome. All the data we have (STEM professors, stem jobs where elite degrees are common) skew against Trump. You can’t really use white rurals that barely have high school level knowledge even if they have a college degree to extrapolate MIT grads. And I’ve spent time in these places and would bet everything I have that white men in elite stem institutions are not skewing trump.
The only interesting or controversial question is whether you not understanding this or a Gaussian makes you more likely to favor Trump. I honestly think it does.
I'm pretty weak at stats so don't want to sound too sure of myself, but common sense does dictate that you can't just take an arbitrarily defined subgroup of a larger group and assume that it exhibits the same trends as the larger group and that there is therefore an a priori bias to overcome. For example, if I took the subgroup of "female STEM grads who voted Trump", the number of women voting Trump in my subgroup would be 100% and the number of STEM grads who voted Trump in my subgroup would be 100%, regardless of the trend in the larger group. Now, you might say I cheated, because I added "voted Trump" to the definition of my subgroup. But that's really no different to adding any other criteria, it just makes the effect more pronounced.
In guess what I am saying is that you can't just say "in the general population x% of men voted Trump and y% of women voted Trump and x>y, therefore there is a general male predisposition to vote Trump in any subgroup I care to define". Or can you?
You still have not understood the basic point D2 and I tried to explain to you about small non random samples. There is no right wing bias for white men in STEM programs at elite schools to overcome. All the data we have (STEM professors, stem jobs where elite degrees are common) skew against Trump. You can’t really use white rurals that barely have high school level knowledge even if they have a college degree to extrapolate MIT grads. And I’ve spent time in these places and would
See your problem? IN ELITE STEM INSTITUTIONS means in academia. I agree that the risk averse people who like a placid rent seeking job skew democrat.
People that graduate and go elsewhere aren't "in elite stem institutions", they are in the real world.
Source for the "stem jobs where elite degrees are common" skewing democrat?
Right. That’s extreme and obvious, but is the issue. Highly non random samples don’t behave like the population they were selected from.
See your problem? IN ELITE STEM INSTITUTIONS means in academia. I agree that the risk averse people who like a placid rent seeking job skew democrat.
People that graduate and go elsewhere aren't "in elite stem institutions", they are in the real world.
Source for the "stem jobs where elite degrees are common" skewing democrat?
Yes. You are talking about me and all my friends from college. Non of us stayed in academia.
Nice how we moved from ecriture defending the indefensible claim that STEM degree holders don't skew republican more than the rest of degree holders, to stem degree holders from elite institutions.
That implies ecriture admits that STEM degree holders skew republican more than the rest but he hopes there is no way to ever adjudicate the claim that if they get a degree at elite institutions, that makes them more democrat-leaning (absolutely no basis at all to have that as your prior).
Are we using skew republican = vote Trump? I'd suspect the number of "never Trumpers" amongst particularly intelligent and successful people would be higher than the number of "never Trumpers" amongst Republicans as a whole.
Liberals moved on bluesky and are now reporting each other for what i can only presume are minutiae at very high rates
Anyway, Nature has this to say
Abstract
Scientists in the United States are more politically liberal than the general population. This fact has fed charges of political bias. To learn more about scientists’ political behavior, we analyze publicly available Federal Election Commission data. We find that scientists who donate to federal candidates and parties are far more likely to support Democrats than Republicans, with less than 10 percent of donations going to Republicans in recent years. The same pattern holds true for employees of the academic sector generally, and for scientists employed in the energy sector. This was not always the case: Before 2000, political contributions were more evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. We argue that these observed changes are more readily explained by changes in Republican Party attitudes toward science than by changes in American scientists. We reason that greater public involvement by centrist and conservative scientists could help increase trust in science among Republicans.
Are we using skew republican = vote Trump? I'd suspect the number of "never Trumpers" amongst particularly intelligent and successful people would be higher than the number of "never Trumpers" amongst Republicans as a whole.
republican this election, so voted for trump and other republicans downballot yes.
Keep in mind there are MANY ecriture and the like, so a ton of people will claim in public to be at most a never trumper even when they are just happy with rightwing judicial nominations, tax cuts, and deportation of illegals and will vote their mind even if they can't speak it because the left horrific censorship and stultifying social "rules" make it still impossible to tell ecriture to his face that yes Trump and current day republicans aren't perfect but they are still better than democrats.
While for lower status people the "shy trump voter" phenomenon is almost disappearing, the same isn't true (yet?) in the upper middle class in many areas. They still want their wifes not to be harrassed by leftist witches, they still want to get their kids in the good prep schools and so on.
So they will shake they head when talking about trump saying he is bad terrible and a threat to democracy while voting him.
