{"id":42518,"date":"2014-03-20T08:00:26","date_gmt":"2014-03-20T13:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=42518"},"modified":"2014-03-20T09:03:48","modified_gmt":"2014-03-20T14:03:48","slug":"smack-unsmacked","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=42518","title":{"rendered":"Smack, Unsmacked"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s been a staple of leftybloggers for the better part of a decade, now; every so often, some social “science” organization or another will release a “study” showing some variant “liberals are smarter than conservatives”.<\/p>\n

This blog has made a decade-long romp out of trashing these “studies” – which are inevitably junk science.<\/p>\n

The latest to the table in debunking this little lefty conceit is that noted conservative tool…<\/p>\n

…Will Saletan<\/a>? \u00a0 At Slate?<\/p>\n

Huh.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Saletan writes about a recent “study” that measured respondents’ speed at changing patterns in…punching buttons. \u00a0Basically a glorified game of “Simon<\/a>“.<\/p>\n

The study’s lead author, NYU professor David Amodio, told London’s Daily Telegraph that “liberals tended to be more sensitive and responsive to information that might conflict with their habitual way of thinking.”<\/span><\/p>\n

Habitual way of thinking. Informational complexity. Need to change. Those are sweeping terms. They imply that conservatives, on average, are adaptively weaker at thinking, not just button-pushing. And that implication has permeated the press. The Los Angeles Times told readers that the study “suggests that liberals are more adaptable than conservatives” and “might be better judges of the facts.” Agence France Presse reported that conservatives in the study “were less flexible, refusing to deviate from old habits ‘despite signals that this … should be changed.’ ” The Guardian asserted, “Scientists have found that the brains of people calling themselves liberals are more able to handle conflicting and unexpected information.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It is, of course, baked wind.<\/p>\n

Since I’m already pushing the bounds of fair use – the upshot of this study, and most other such “social science”, is to turn a key trait of conservatism (we accept the status quo and question change and reform) into a bad thing, by constructing a study where adherence to the status quo can be amplified into “bad” or “dumb”. \u00a0 But not all change is “good” for change’s own sake; questioning change can also be a “good” thing…<\/p>\n

…although in these “studies” it never, ever is.<\/p>\n

I’ll urge you to read the whole thing (here’s the link again<\/a>), and keep it in mind next time some liberal bobblehead tries to play the science card.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s been a staple of leftybloggers for the better part of a decade, now; every so often, some social “science” organization or another will release a “study” showing some variant “liberals are smarter than conservatives”. This blog has made a decade-long romp out of trashing these “studies” – which are inevitably junk science. The latest […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,49,79],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conservatism","category-science","category-slander-files"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=42518"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42518\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42544,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42518\/revisions\/42544"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}