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Why Are the Highly Educated So Liberal?

nytimes.com

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Re: Why Are the Highly Educated So Liberal?

#61

Post by sandworm101 »

gaius wrote: post #28
petewailes wrote: post #3

Pithy answer: because you aren't going to be afraid of something when you understand that it's not something you need to fear. When you have a simple world view, nuance is always going to escape you. An educated person can understand that the world isn't simple, which will lead to a more liberal view, as liberal views tend to be based on the assumption that angry, narrow world view responses aren't a good thing. Some…

because you aren't going to be afraid of something when you understand that it's not something you need to fear Such as a highly educated media worker, has no fear of the factory closing because the company has found somewhere with lower taxes and relaxed pollution laws? This is the appeal of Trump: he is the only candidate who doesn't want to send his demographics jobs offshore. It absolutely makes perfect sense for…

>> Trump: he is the only candidate who doesn't want to send his demographics jobs offshore.

Doesn't want too, but he'll muddle through and do it anyway. Just google "trump clothing china". In his world profit trumps all.

Re: Why Are the Highly Educated So Liberal?

#63

Post by pete_b »

Pithy answer 2: because they are economically privileged.

The headline is a broad generalisation, and as another broad generalisation poorer people are more religious and more conservative because they have harder lives, bleaker temporal outlooks and hope for a better life 'beyond'.

Re: Why Are the Highly Educated So Liberal?

#65

Post by _yosefk »

petewailes wrote: post #23
random_upvoter wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps the real answer is closer to "it's easy to be tolerant and broad-minded if you don't feel threatened". You're answer boils down to "because liberals are right and the others are wrong". But there isn't really such a thing as a wrong political opinion. People's political choices are based on their experience of the world. The whole premise of democracy is that if you take the mean of everybody's personal exper…

Pretty much. And you're generally not threatened of things you understand. Most things in the world aren't actually scary. That's not to say there's nothing to be scared of out there - obviously there is. But there's a difference between knowing something is worth worrying about, and being badly informed or not informed at all, and thus being scared of it. * Thing not to be scared of: vaccinations for your kids * Thi…

Erm... I wouldn't say that the average liberal feels that there's much they don't know, and that they might be wrong about a lot of things. (I wouldn't say that the average conservative is like that, either.)

I believe that academia is the perfect place for the formation of cliques which over time exclude non-believers. Right now there's a powerful liberal clique in academia - but over time it could be replaced by anything, really. At some point eugenics were all the rage, today it's taboo, etc. And since educated people pass through the academia, and receive a lot of information filtered through the leading clique, they're likely to share the clique's views. (Whether, on top of that, educated people also simply exhibit less critical thinking and original opinions based on their own experience than the average person I don't know; I wouldn't be surprised by it being either true or false, I can certainly construct a believable narrative explaining both possibilities.)

Speaking of eugenics and such... how do I put this, in hindsight people reevaluate their ideas wrt what's scary, and the British Labor and Liberal parties' insistence that Nazi Germany wasn't particularly scary seems to me to be a pretty good example. I think this shows that "you're generally not threatened of things you understand" sometimes is less accurate than "you're not threatened of things that you completely misunderstand, while those who do understand them are right to be scared shitless about them." And sometimes, like in this case, "you" are more liberal than "them", and sometimes it's the reverse.

Re: Why Are the Highly Educated So Liberal?

#66

Post by zxcvcxz »

psychometry wrote: post #43
zxcvcxz wrote: post #33

Just like to point out the members of the T9 lean libertarian. https://web.archive.org/web/20150226234712/http://www.triple... T9 (Triple 9) is a high IQ society similar to Mensa, but which only accepts members whose IQ is in the .999 percentile. It's a non-scientific poll, but in my experience while lots of my college friends were liberal, lots of my professors and the smartest people I know lean libertarian.

IQ societies aren't representative of the IQ range they require. I have a feeling people who feel the need to join one of those groups are more socially disaffected and have lower empathy than the their non-member IQ peers, which certainly correlates with a libertarian outlook. And I haven't found your comment about libertarianism being rampant among professors to be true at all . Where did you go to school? That wou…

>IQ societies aren't representative of the IQ range they require.

And having an advanced degree doesn't mean you have a high IQ or are even particularly smart.

>I have a feeling people who feel the need to join one of those groups are more socially disaffected and have lower empathy than the their non-member IQ peers

Have a source? Anyway a lot of people are invited to join these groups when they're young, and I'd argue liberals are more likely to seek out the approval of others.

>And I haven't found your comment about libertarianism being rampant among professors to be true at all. Where did you go to school? That would be very much outside the norm.

I went to a mildly prestigious university. I have a Masters in CS and a Bachelors in Mathematics. I think it's likely that my teachers were more libertarian because I took very few liberal-arts classes, where I noticed the more liberal professors were.

Usually the ones that lean libertarian are old white guys. My Asian professors didn't seem into politics at all and the few female professors I had also didn't seem politically oriented.

I had one chemistry professor though who would go on and on about how much he hated the government and regulations and how good things were back when he could obtain [illegal chemical] easily.

Honestly the only time politics seem to come up is when the professor has some issue with some government regulation.

I can see how it might seem like many professors are liberal though, they believe in global warming, vaccines, human rights, but it turns out that many libertarians believe in all that stuff too.

Re: Why Are the Highly Educated So Liberal?

#67

Post by vixen99 »

sandworm101 wrote: post #25
gallonofmilk wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> GOP is the party of creationists and climate deniers... how is this statement different than e.g. "the democratic party is the party of socialists and communists"? they're both bold assertions on a large group of people that are unlikely to be true for the majority... to be honest it just sounds smug

Except that you do not see democrats stumping about the benefits of communism. You do see GOP candidates openly denying climate change and denouncing Darwinism as a left-wing plot. One has decided to become more extreme than the other.

Climate change? What does that mean? It used to be global warming but the facts were so blatantly unsupportive that the sly shift to 'climate change' was adopted. Now it's a mantra for unthinking people. But it works because heads I win, tails you lose. The climate is always changing. Temperature changes are slight and hedged with ifs and buts. Now if you mean that the CO2 level in the atmosphere has increased from the pre-industrial levels of around 270 parts per million to 400 parts per million today then I'm with you. Recalling that life on earth would be impossible were the level to reduce to less than around 120 ppm, let's get this into perspective. Meanwhile Arctic Greenland is indeed turning green (NASA study). https://youtu.be/Yi8SFOJffFA while the temperature in that area has remained unchanged over the past 16 years prior to this year's El Nino.

Anyway, I'm sure that the greening of the Arctic and of many places elsewhere as evidenced by satellite imagery is a disastrous phenomenon we should discourage.

“An ancient forest has thawed from under a melting glacier in Alaska and is now exposed to the world for the first time in more than 1,000 years.". An observation probably invented by some imaginative climate denier?

As Judith Curry has said: "Efforts to link dangerous impacts of extreme weather events to human-caused warming are misleading and unsupported by evidence. Climate change is a ‘wicked problem’ and ill-suited to a ‘command and control’ solution. It has been estimated that the U.S. national commitments to the UN to reduce emissions by 28% will prevent three hundredths of a degree centigrade in warming by 2100...".

Re: Why Are the Highly Educated So Liberal?

#68

Post by gjulianm »

petewailes wrote: post #3

Pithy answer: because you aren't going to be afraid of something when you understand that it's not something you need to fear. When you have a simple world view, nuance is always going to escape you. An educated person can understand that the world isn't simple, which will lead to a more liberal view, as liberal views tend to be based on the assumption that angry, narrow world view responses aren't a good thing. Some…

I find this comment to be borderline insulting, even when my political views are very liberal. Basically, what I read in your comment (maybe I'm misreading it) is that not having a liberal view means that the person does not understand the world, has an angry response, ignores the complexities of life and does not understand anything.

So, instead of just trying to understand what do these people think, feel and fear we just assume we're superior and think they're ignorant? Of course, there are ignorant conservatives, just as there are ignorant liberals. There are also really smart conservatives who have a really strong foundation and understand how the world works. They just have another view of which are the solutions to our problems, but it's really hard to say which is the "right" and which is the "wrong" view.

I also find surprising that religion is in the same bucket as climate change denial or anti-vaccinations. I've meet a lot of religious people who have already tried to understand things and have found that they believe in a god, or whatever, and that does not make them more or less intelligent, it's just a personal belief.

Finally, the correlation "higher education => magic knowledge of everything" is plainly not true, not even "in some cases". A degree just gives you knowledge in a specific area, and does not make anyone more intelligent just by having it. It is not a badge of superiority.

As someone said in another reply, this is just an attitude of "liberals are right, conservatives are not", but there's no right political view as of now.

Re: Why Are the Highly Educated So Liberal?

#69

Post by realusername »

Unpopular opinion on HN, but people are mostly liberals when the current system works for them and it's even more visible as observe the political spectrum outside the US. It's easier to say "the market solves everything" when it works for you. When it does not work for them, they turn either to the right or the left side. As the current system is mostly falling apart for the middle class, you then have a raising far-left and far-right as a consequence. That's also why the vast majority of rich people are liberals.

Re: Why Are the Highly Educated So Liberal?

#70

Post by joncrocks »

bobwaycott wrote: post #49
edanm wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this actually true? Plenty of former Russians are very anti socialist, because of their experience with communism. They would say that their larger experience causes them to fear things that sound good in theory, but are terrible in practice. Either way, I doubt you could get away with saying they have a simple worldview without nuance. I think your view really boils down to "i'm right they're wrong, so of course…

How can one be a "former Russian"? Also, socialism != communism. Also, Stalinism != communism.

By becoming a true Scotsman?
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