Left vs. right in anti-science
In the comments Chad says:
The Right is not inherently anti-science. Yes there are some morons out there who glorify in their ignorance, but lets recognize them for who they are, extremist idiots. This does not describe the majority of those on the Rig…
Trust in science, 1998 vs. 2008 (no difference)
A weeks ago Robert Wright had a post up, Creationists vs. Evolutionists: An American Story. Here’s the crux:
A few decades ago, Darwinians and creationists had a de facto nonaggression pact: Creationists would let Darwinians reign in biology clas…
Are Hispanics that socially conservative?
I often hear in the media that Hispanics are “socially conservative.” For that sort of thing you do need “quick & dirty” rules-of-thumb, and the assertion seems broadly plausible. On the other hand, the Hispanic attitude tow…
The American Community Survey: mend it, don’t end it!
To my surprise there is apparently a move on the part of the Republicans in the House of Representatives to curtail funding for The American Community Survey. I am not too excited by the idea that you could get fined for not filling out a government su…
Comparing American conservative Protestants & Muslims
A few years ago a book came out, American Taliban: How War, Sex, Sin, and Power Bind Jihadists and the Radical Right. The title clearly was aimed to push copies, but the gist of the title has moderately wide circulation. The rough sketch is that conser…
Iraq: the model that wasn’t
The magazine Foreign Policy recently had a “sex” issue out. This issue is particularly famous for Mona Eltahaway’s jeremiad against Arab male culture, and their attitudes toward women. Over at bloggingheads.tv Charli Carpenter express…
Leaning the wrong way?
Many of the people I socialize with in “real life” have a biological sciences background. That being said, a relatively deep understanding of ncRNA does not give you any better sense of behavior genetics than the person off the street. And …
If you are not too stupid you can be in Mensa
Is 4-Year-Old as Smart as Einstein? Not Quite, Scientists Say:
One of the latest members of the high-IQ club Mensa is a mere 4 years old, with an IQ of 159 — but psychologists warn against pulling out the Albert Einstein comparisons just yet.
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Group selection survey
I don’t have time to do a detailed analysis of my group selection survey right now. So I’ve uploaded the raw results for anyone to play with (there is no personally identifying information obviously). You should be able to convert it into a…
Verbal intelligence by demographic
A few years ago I put up a post, WORDSUM & IQ & the correlation, as a “reference” post. Basically if anyone objected to using WORDSUM, a variable in the General Social Survey, then I would point to that post and observe that the cor…
How income, class, religion, etc. relate to political party
Update: There was a major coding error. I’ve rerun the analysis. No qualitative change.
As is often the case a 10 minute post using the General Social Survey is getting a lot of attention. Apparently circa 1997 web interfaces are so intimidating…
The upper class is more Republican
A few months ago I listened to Frank Newport of Gallup tell Kai Ryssdal of Marketplace that upper class Americans tend to be Democrats. Ryssdal was skeptical, but Newport reiterated himself, and explained that’s just how the numbers shook out. This is important because Newport shows up every now and then to offer up numbers […]
Working class vs. middle class white seculars
Rod Dreher at The American Conservative, White Working-Class ‘Seculars’: What’s interesting to think about is that these working-class non-churchgoers are probably not secular in the same way white intellectual elites are secular. I bet if you polled them, 999 out of 1,000 would say they believed in God and considered themselves to be Christians. It’s […]
Classicists are smart!
The post below on teachers elicited some strange responses. Its ultimate aim was to show that teachers are not as dull as the average education major may imply to you. Instead many people were highly offended at the idea that physical education teachers may not be the sharpest tools in the shed due to their […]
Catching up to Argentina
You may not have noticed, but Google has been spiffing up its Data Explorer. Poking around you see nice illustrations of phenomena which you otherwise may just read about. For example, Argentina has been one of the classic illustrations in economic history of stagnation. To a great extent it peaked around 1900, and development has […]
How many minorities are there in the USA?
Prompted by Andrea Mitchell’s complaint that Iowa is not representative of America in racial terms the Audacious Epigone probed an American state’s typicality in terms of racial demographics, using the overall American population as a measure. One of the major issues with judging the typicality of a given state is that there is a great […]
Iraq: not as bad as Yemen
You probably know that the USA has officially withdrawn from Iraq. And you probably also know that in many ways Iraq became the de facto 51st American state for nearly a decade (I remember that my phone’s news app had an “Iraq” section back in 2007). Looking back 10 years ago I recall my attitude […]
Population around the Mediterranean
With the collapse various North African regimes there has been a great concern about the migration of people from the southern shore of the Mediterranean to the northern. The of the reasons for this concern is that there is an imbalance in population growth. So I thought I’d review some of the data on Mediterranean […]
Vocab by ethnicity, region, and education
A questioner below was curious if vocabulary test differences by ethnic and region persist across income. There’s a problem with this. First, the INCOME variable isn’t very fine-grained (there is a catchall $30,000 or greater category). Second, it doesn’t seem to control for inflation. But, there is a variable, DEGREE, which asks the highest level of […]
Vocabulary score by race, ethnicity, and region
Mike the Mad Biologist has a post up, A Modest Proposal: Alabama Whites Are Genetically Inferior to Massachusetts Whites (FOR REALZ!). The post is obviously tongue-in-cheek, but it’s actually an interesting question: what’s the difference between whites in various regions of the United States? I’ve looked at this before, but I thought I’d revisit it […]