Trump supporters and intelligence

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superrific

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There was a discussion on the other thread about the perennial question: are MAGA voters unintelligent? And the answer is indisputably, "not really." Maybe on average they have lower IQs and SAT scores, but lots of people I know have MAGA co-workers. Those co-workers do their jobs just fine. They are lawyers, engineers, programmers, software engineers -- and then when it comes to politics, their brain switches off. Their political beliefs, in the majority of cases, are objectively stupid. And why? What happens? I was talking with my son about this last night and I think I have an analogy. Unfortunately, it's a bit complicated but anyway . . .

In quantum mechanics, there's a phenomenon known as electron tunneling. Basically, it's this weird effect where an electron can travel through an electric field even when it doesn't have enough energy to do so. It's more easily understood if you think about a ball rolling up and down a hill. If the ball starts at the bottom of the hill with a high enough velocity, it can make to the top of the hill and then roll down the other side, but it it doesn't have enough velocity, it will get near the top but fall back down. And electrons are the same way, except the force to overcome is electromagnetic. Except that in quantum mechanics, sometimes the electron "tunnels" through the hill and ends up on the other side even though it didn't have enough energy.

So here's the analogy. Think of the hill as intelligence. There's an outcome on the other side of the hill or barrier that you want. I don't know, it could be a Christian nation or a communist paradise. Point is, you want to get there. But you are also smart, and so you're trying to push the electron through the field but it doesn't have enough energy. The communist paradise just doesn't make sense. You can try and try to make justifications or theoretical arguments about how it will work, and dismiss all the failed attempts as "not real communism" or "not true to the Marxist paradigm of historical stages," but they don't work. When you think about it deeply, carefully and without bias, the hill is too steep.

But MAGAs have the ability to tunnel the electron through the hill. It's a shortcut. It lets them get where they want to go, without all that pesky critical reasoning. And when they are in the tunnel, they are being objectively stupid. It's the only way they can get there. So when we say they are dumb, that's what we are referring to -- it's the process by which they short circuit their own intelligence to get them to a conclusion that they can't get to with their rational mind.

This doesn't only apply to MAGAs. It commonly happens with Supreme Court justices, which is why sometimes their opinions just seem so ridiculous. In the Trump immunity decision, John Roberts looked at the facts of the case and literally wrote that biggest danger we face is the prospect of serial persecution of outgoing presidents for political purposes, not criminal behavior by presidents. And he wrote that despite also noting that it's never happened before in the history of the Republic, whereas criminal behavior by presidents is known and at least something of a problem, and the case before them involved a defendant ex-president who absolutely did commit crimes, which we know from public information. So how did he get to "we must give the president immunity to save the Republic from something that never happened before." He mentally tunneled through his own intelligence.

Or the gerrymandering case. Roberts wrote, joined by all the conservative justices, that gerrymandering is a problem that only the legislature can solve. Courts are ill-equipped to draw lines (in this case, somewhat literally). Which isn't entirely wrong about the courts and their equipment, but anyone with half a brain realizes that gerrymandering is one of the few problems that the legislature CAN'T solve. It's a problem that the legislature creates. It's the effect of the decision to give district drawing power to the people elected from those districts. The problem exists because legislators have all the incentive to gerrymander. Saying that only the legislature can fix it is baffling. Again, he tunneled through his own intelligence to get where he wanted to go.

What do you think? Helpful analogy? Empirically accurate?
 
I think the IQ range of Democratic and Republican voters is likely equally spread. I know Harris supporters all over the IQ scale and same for Trump supporters.
 
It's a difference in viewpoints more than intelligence. Conservatives seem to feel like knowledge is almost a sacrament and has to be screened, sifted sorted and spoon fed to the masses. They believe that cause and effect should have a supernatural element and they know what it requires. They do all they can to preserve that heritage and literally view it as the white man's burden. Leads to a society of exclusion.

The liberal (not leftists. They can speak for themselves) element treats that same knowledge as a foundation to build on. They are open to more variety, more ideas , and are more inclusive of differences in general. For the most part, they are less doctrinaire in their stances.

None of this is really about intelligence . It seems to me to be a lot more about culture and education. I hate to sound like Johnny One Note but as long as the philosophical/ religious answer is even considered in the answer to a concrete problem, we are going to have this issue.
 
Intelligence is a tricky word to define and a tricky thing to measure. Things like IQ tests have always been problematic for a number of reasons. I tend to agree that by some generalized definition, both sides' supporters run the gamut from intelligent to unintelligent.

It is clear that, on average, Trump does disproportionately well among less-educated voters. Increasingly, level of education, not race or gender or income level, is the best way to predict how someone will vote. But there are still plenty of well-educated Trump voters and plenty of uneducated people who will vote against him.
 
It's a difference in viewpoints more than intelligence. Conservatives seem to feel like knowledge is almost a sacrament and has to be screened, sifted sorted and spoon fed to the masses. They believe that cause and effect should have a supernatural element and they know what it requires. They do all they can to preserve that heritage and literally view it as the white man's burden. Leads to a society of exclusion.

The liberal (not leftists. They can speak for themselves) element treats that same knowledge as a foundation to build on. They are open to more variety, more ideas , and are more inclusive of differences in general. For the most part, they are less doctrinaire in their stances.

None of this is really about intelligence . It seems to me to be a lot more about culture and education. I hate to sound like Johnny One Note but as long as the philosophical/ religious answer is even considered in the answer to a concrete problem, we are going to have this issue.
That's not wrong per se, but it also doesn't explain a) Trumpers who aren't religious (e.g. the fuck your feelings crowd), nor b) why Trump supporters seem like idiots when you converse with them. And I say this as someone who believes the idea that different models of understanding -- i.e. discovery versus revelation -- is politically salient.

We have such ample evidence of the idiot Trumper on our board. It's a cliche by now -- liberal posters use facts and links, and conservative posters rely on disinformation. Conservative posters' logic is often confused. They often have trouble understanding the meanings of words. None of this is unique to conservatives, but it's absolutely way more common there. Some of that can be explained as self-selection, perhaps, but not all of it?

So if we agree that it's not really about intelligence, why does it present so firmly in the sphere of intelligence? Like the people who took ivermectin because they don't trust pharma, as if pharma doesn't make ivermectin. That's just stupid. If they were saying, "don't take the vaccine, eat these mushrooms instead" at least they would be consistent. Natural = good, pharma = bad. It's a silly view, but it's at least something. What we saw instead, (one pharma product = hopelessly corrupt; another pharma product = great) is illogical and ridiculous.
 
That's not wrong per se, but it also doesn't explain a) Trumpers who aren't religious (e.g. the fuck your feelings crowd), nor b) why Trump supporters seem like idiots when you converse with them. And I say this as someone who believes the idea that different models of understanding -- i.e. discovery versus revelation -- is politically salient.

We have such ample evidence of the idiot Trumper on our board. It's a cliche by now -- liberal posters use facts and links, and conservative posters rely on disinformation. Conservative posters' logic is often confused. They often have trouble understanding the meanings of words. None of this is unique to conservatives, but it's absolutely way more common there. Some of that can be explained as self-selection, perhaps, but not all of it?

So if we agree that it's not really about intelligence, why does it present so firmly in the sphere of intelligence? Like the people who took ivermectin because they don't trust pharma, as if pharma doesn't make ivermectin. That's just stupid. If they were saying, "don't take the vaccine, eat these mushrooms instead" at least they would be consistent. Natural = good, pharma = bad. It's a silly view, but it's at least something. What we saw instead, (one pharma product = hopelessly corrupt; another pharma product = great) is illogical and ridiculous.
A lot of the screw your feelings crowd will also tell you they are good church going Christians. They're just hypocrites.
 
Intelligence is a tricky word to define and a tricky thing to measure. Things like IQ tests have always been problematic for a number of reasons. I tend to agree that by some generalized definition, both sides' supporters run the gamut from intelligent to unintelligent.

It is clear that, on average, Trump does disproportionately well among less-educated voters. Increasingly, level of education, not race or gender or income level, is the best way to predict how someone will vote. But there are still plenty of well-educated Trump voters and plenty of uneducated people who will vote against him.
Yeah, you can be intelligent but credulous, intelligent but intolerant, intelligent but prejudiced, intelligent but disinformed, intelligent but willfully ignorant.

You can be intelligent individually but get roped into a mob. You can be intelligent but susceptible to tribal influence. It's complex and multifaceted.

Oh, and you can be all these things while also being stupid.
 
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Intelligence is a tricky word to define and a tricky thing to measure. Things like IQ tests have always been problematic for a number of reasons. I tend to agree that by some generalized definition, both sides' supporters run the gamut from intelligent to unintelligent.

It is clear that, on average, Trump does disproportionately well among less-educated voters. Increasingly, level of education, not race or gender or income level, is the best way to predict how someone will vote. But there are still plenty of well-educated Trump voters and plenty of uneducated people who will vote against him.
"It is clear that, on average, Trump does disproportionately well among less-educated voters."

But do they vote for Trump because they are less educated or is it the case that religious people, in general, tend to not seek higher education?

There are educated and successful engineers who leave their cushy life to join ISIS or some other Jihadist terrorist group. Why?

Some of the most intelligent people in the world believe in bad economic ideas like communism or, in the case of Brett (or maybe one of his brothers) Weinstein, gave into some really odd conspiracy theory-type of idea as it relates to Covid.

Explaining why we are how we are, why we believe the things we believe and why we do what we do is far to complex to narrow down to intelligence and is ultimately out of our control.
 
They aren’t unintelligent necessarily, but they are often politically ignorant. They frequently don’t know basic facts about political issues, such as that J6 rioters used bear spray on police and beat police with flagpoles while trying to breach the Capitol.
A big part for some folks really is right-wing media. If all you watch/listen to is Fox News, Newsmax, OAN, Tucker Carlson, etc then you really will believe that the world is going to hell in a handbasket and that Dems are leading the parade to get there. And you will almost certainly never hear almost anything negative about Trump or Republicans unless those Pubs have either wronged Trump or done something so absolutely heinous that the party is done with them (e.g. George Santos).

And once you believe that everything really is going to hell, all the time, then you will overlook almost anything to oppose what Dems are doing to "ruin" the country and the world. It's easy to overlook a lot of bad things when you think that the other side is far, far worse. So no matter how bad Trump is, he's still better than Harris because Harris is trying to bring about the end of America as it has stood for nearly 250 years.
 
At this point, you are a Trump voter entirely based on your media bubble. I was talking to a good friend the other day. He was going on and on about Kamala wanting to tax unrealized gains. As I looked into it further, she is only proposing that for people worth more than $100mil. Of course, my buddy had never heard that part of the proposal. He just assumed it was for everyone because the talking heads he listens to were telling him how awful a proposal it is.

Just reading the post by @SnoopRob above and agree entirely

Until the media landscape changes, there will be no convincing MAGA that they are wrong. Their brains have been completely filled with nonsense and their perception of reality warpped.
 
Can very intelligent people be very gullible? They can certainly be susceptible to confirmation bias. Are they less or more susceptible to tribalism?
 
My stepmother is an attorney who went to Cornell. My father is a retired mechanical engineer with additional bachelors and masters degrees in mathematics from U of Michigan. She's a lifelong evangelical and my dad - though he was never religious at any time previously - is too, since they married back in 1983. Guessing it's because he wanted to stay married and perhaps from his POV, so far, so good.

Even with all that brainpower, a steady diet of some flavor of evangelical Jesus and Fox News (plus Fox Nation) for 30 - 40 years (Fox went live ~1995) does certain damage. Despite all of Trump's bullshit and horrific behavior and what he aspires to do if elected again, which they would NEVER tolerate from any other non-Republican candidate, they're both voting for Trump. For the 3rd time, no less. No other views are considered, and believe me, I've tried.
 
Bias is a big factor. Whether it's racial bias, gender bias, religious bias, media bias, confirmation bias, etc., they are unable to overcome these biases. Oh, and the right wing disinformation apparatus serves MAGA mountains of bullshit to harden existing perspectives.
 
My belief is simple, it is a cult.

We've all read about and see how cults take on members across the spectrum of intelligence. From the outside we are astonished that they are being sucked in, but they are, and it happens over and over and over again.
 
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