The Democrat Thread

[mr_genius]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44163579

 

Bachmann spoke to hundreds of supporters at the Beacon restaurant in Spartanburg, S.C. Wednesday and began her speech by wishing happy birthday to Elvis Presley.

“Happy birthday,” she screamed to the crowd...Tuesday is not Presley’s birthday, but rather the 34th anniversary of his death.

[mr_genius]

 

i want that shirt

[NorthSideSox72]

i want that shirt

Copy the image file, go to cafepress.com, and make one.

 

[StrangeSox]

Bush's temporary "surplus" tax cuts: absolutely vital to a functioning economy, who cares if they primarily benefit the wealthy?

 

Obama's temporary payroll tax cut: who cares, let it expire, it only really helps those poors, anyway.

 

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/articl...066437dd437299d

 

Buried in the article is an admission that the Laffer Curve, which seems to be GOP dogma these days, is a joke:

That worries Rep. David Camp, R-Mich., chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, and a member of the House-Senate supercommittee tasked with finding new deficit cuts. Tax reductions, "no matter how well-intended," will push the deficit higher, making the panel's task that much harder, Camp's office said.

[StrangeSox]

Over at the National Review, Kevin Williamson, who recently made a completely non-sensical attack on Krugman's criticisms of the "Texas Miracle," makes even more terrible arguments that questioning politicians on their stances on scientific issues are just "gotcha" questions and that liberals don't really care about science anyway.

 

Perry is making an error by approaching these questions as though they were scientific disputes and not political ones. The real question about global warming isn’t whether one computer simulation or another is the better indicator of what our climate will be like a century hence, it is whether such policies as envisioned by the environmentalist-anti-capitalist green coalition are wise. They are not. Evolution is a public question not because politicians have anything intelligent to say about the science, but because the question provides a handy cudgel to those who wish to beat the Judeo-Christian moral tradition into submission in the service of managerial progressivism. Perry should talk about that, not about alleged “gaps” in the scientific evidence, about which neither he nor his questioners nor the great majority of his critics nor the great majority of his supporters knows the first thing.

 

Yglesias responds.

 

I can only assume that Williamson has extremely stupid parents, because this is rank nonsense. How are we supposed to know which environmental policies are wise if we’re not allowed to make reference to scientific evidence about climate change? Does it make sense to treat questions about the implications of different FDA rules for the evolution of antibiotic resistant bacteria as primarily questions about the viability of the Judeo-Christian moral tradition?

[lostfan]

Since liberals' patriotism was allowed to be a valid question and discussed like it actually meant something, you're going to enjoy the hell out of this article:

 

Why Liberals Are Smarter Than Conservatives

[StrangeSox]

Aside from the standard "IQ tests are rough indicators at best and subject to social, economic and environmental effects," there's this WTF? moment in the concluding paragraph:

 

Incidentally, this finding substantiates one of the persistent complaints among conservatives. Conservatives often complain that liberals control the media or the show business or the academia or some other social institutions. The Hypothesis explains why conservatives are correct in their complaints. Liberals do control the media, or the show business, or the academia, among other institutions, because, apart from a few areas in life (such as business) where countervailing circumstances may prevail, liberals control all institutions. They control the institutions because liberals are on average more intelligent than conservatives and thus they are more likely to attain the highest status in any area of (evolutionarily novel) modern life.

 

"aside from where wealth and, therefore, power is controlled, liberals control everything!"

 

Since when is "the media" not a collection of multinational businesses? Since when is show business not a business? The only one that really fits her claim here is academia.

[Soxy]

Since liberals' patriotism was allowed to be a valid question and discussed like it actually meant something, you're going to enjoy the hell out of this article:

 

Why Liberals Are Smarter Than Conservatives

Dude, those differences are like 2/3 of a standard deviation. In those measly 10 points you probably have around 50% of the population. What do those error bars represent?

 

Your article fails the Soxy Peer Review. Rejected outright, please do not resubmit.

 

In related news, I might need a vacation because it is not good that these are my first thoughts upon reading this article. Dear science and statistics, you are ruining my life.

 

On a related note: has anyone on here ever actually taken an IQ test? I never have.

[StrangeSox]

I took a partial one as part of a larger evaluation.

[Balta1701]

Dude, those differences are like 2/3 of a standard deviation. In those measly 10 points you probably have around 50% of the population. What do those error bars represent?

 

Your article fails the Soxy Peer Review. Rejected outright, please do not resubmit.

The standard deviations presented in Figure 1 are on the order of ~1.0 points in IQ or less, while showing 10 points of spread, and the very liberal and very conservative groups are at least 5 error bars apart. Are you bringing outside info here or is there something in the article I'm missing suggesting that the actual error bars in that figure should be 5x larger than presented?

[Soxy]

The standard deviations presented in Figure 1 are on the order of ~1.0 points in IQ or less, while showing 10 points of spread, and the very liberal and very conservative groups are at least 5 error bars apart. Are you bringing outside info here or is there something in the article I'm missing suggesting that the actual error bars in that figure should be 5x larger than presented?

The IQ test is relatively unique because it has been used so extensively that we know the range of scores. Basically, we (psychologists that are not me) know that the test itself has a 15 point standard deviation. So, if we gave the test to everyone in the country 68% would score between 85-115 and 96% between 70-130. (This is actually how the range for mental retardation and "gifted" were determined.) Of course this is only true for individual scores, group means have a much smaller likely range. (I used to know this, but it's crazy rare to have a mean be more than 5 or so points away from 100.) Basically, I find it unlikely that this was due to anything other than chance. Maybe if I read the original peer reviewed article, I would be less skeptical. But this seems to prey on people that don't know a ton about the IQ distribution, statistics, critical thinking, or how not to piss me off.

 

My question was more if those are standard deviation, standard error, or some other type of confidence range.

 

Plus, it's psychology today. Weekly World News : Reality :: Psychology Today : Psychology.

[Balta1701]

To make it a bit clearer what you're saying...when you say "the test itself has a 15 point standard deviation" does that mean that if a single person took the test n number of times, the final distribution of IQ numbers would be normally distributed with a 1σ value of 15?

[Soxy]

To make it a bit clearer what you're saying...when you say "the test itself has a 15 point standard deviation" does that mean that if a single person took the test n number of times, the final distribution of IQ numbers would be normally distributed with a 1σ value of 15?

Single person.

 

So, if they used a small enough sample size, this range of means wouldn't be totally unheard of simply by chance.

[Balta1701]

Single person.

 

So, if they used a small enough sample size, this range of means wouldn't be totally unheard of simply by chance.

If there's a small sample size though I'd have to figure that anything one could reasonably call "Error bars" would be smaller than the ones they present. But if the standard error on the test itself is 15, then it seems like it would require an overwhelmingly large sample to get the error bars that they've reported.

[Soxy]

If there's a small sample size though I'd have to figure that anything one could reasonably call "Error bars" would be smaller than the ones they present. But if the standard error on the test itself is 15, then it seems like it would require an overwhelmingly large sample to get the error bars that they've reported.

I would assume that as well, but since they aren't specifying what the error bars are--I'm not going to give them the benefit of the doubt. (Or much detail about sampling methods which is probably most crucial for IQ distributions.)

 

This may be my bias (as an experimental psychologist), but in general people distort the f*** out of psychological research. I'm sure that's true in Geology too. But everyone thinks they understand Psychology, so any data we put out just gets distorted and messed up beyond belief. I simply don't trust anything I read based on a "psychology" study in the media.

 

Now, if this was in a top tier journal, I'd go for it. But Psychology Today, no way.

[StrangeSox]

If the standard deviation for an individual is 15, how do you determine the error bars for n-individuals? Been a while since stats class.

[Heads22]

The last few posts made my head hurt.

[Soxbadger]

Ive only taken online iq tests, never a real one.

[lostfan]

I took an iq test when I was a kid. It was like 134. I have no idea if that's what my iq still is or how accurate it was.

[lostfan]

Oh and I didn't really post that article for accuracy's sake, I figured if we were allowed to point to "research" to back up bulls*** assertions like in that patriotism thread then this is fair game too, I just find it amusing.

[BigSqwert]

I took an iq test when I was a kid. It was like 134. I have no idea if that's what my iq still is or how accurate it was.

Mad Magazine IQ tests don't count.

[Brian]

I took an iq test when I was a kid. It was like 134. I have no idea if that's what my iq still is or how accurate it was.

 

I scored a 156 but never bragged about it because I guessed on a lot of stuff and got lucky.

[NorthSideSox72]

The Junior High class one year ahead of mine was once a Life Magazine cover story, because in a class of about 60 kids, there were three who had IQ's OVER 200. They were pretty sure nothing like that had ever happened before. A 200 IQ is almost 7 standard deviations from the norm.

 

Interesting to me was, I knew all three... one was sort of normal, but eccentric would be an understatement. Another was a virtual hermit, couldn't cope socially at all. And the final one redefined the term socially awkward, not to mention she was an emotional basket case. I really think being that intelligent in the intellectual sense is probably more harmful than helpful, those kids just had a real hard time related to other human beings.

[southsider2k5]

Any idea whatever happened to them?

[NorthSideSox72]

Any idea whatever happened to them?

The one who could speak normally with other people, went to Carnegie Mellon and finished, I believe, a dual degree in Engineering and some sort of science... in three years. Then was going onto a PhD program. Don't know what happened after that. The girl who was a basket case went to some Ivy League school and was doing music and something like literature, don't know after that. The third guy, no idea.

 

But now I want to go Google them.