Saturday February 27, 2010

HONORS ARE EASY. The study purporting to show that Liberals R Smarter is disputed by PZ Myers and that's good enough for me. (Myers is also referred by a blind link from -- and has chunks of his writing taken without attribution by -- No Sheeples Here, who probably doesn't want his readers to know he's relying on liberals to dispute liberal superiority.)

In general I take these things no more seriously than I take Charles Murray's insistences that black people are stupid -- or similar claims that conservatives R smarter, or happier, and such like.

This may in part be due to my utter ignorance of the cognitive sciences, but it also has to do with my experience of actual human beings, whom I have found fascinatingly varied in their abilities whatever their respective races, ideologies, etc.

Sometimes I talk as if I think conservatives are stupid or crazy or both, but I know from experience they aren't all like that. Many of the ones I write about seem to be, but maybe they're just putting it on for the public -- I notice that such behavior often gets them a lot of traffic.

And that might not even say anything about their readers, either; I don't think people who go to horror movies are necessarily monsters or serial killers.