I see where the smart money went.
Big Nutter
Dumb Americans!!!
I would rather look at the average level of education for a state rather than its IQ.
There are three kinds of lies. Lies, damned lies, and statistics.
IQ apparently means something, if it can accurately predict which candidate a population voted for.
I have an IQ of 103 (according to the test I took on “Test the Nation”), and I live in New York. The accuracy of these statistics is indeed questionable.
i have an IQ of 126 and i voted bush. yay
Nul gets cookies for quoting Twain. :3
The thing with statistics is that everything averages out. It doesn’t mean that there can’t be people with higher IQs in one statistic, or vice-versa. However…it’s common sense that stupid people always greatly outnumber smarter ones. 
Your IQ will go down with age.
I’ve gotten as high as 171 on online IQ tests. Very reliable…
On another note, my home state is the highest IQ state that voted for bush! GO VA!
Yeah, IQ tests results can be quite subjective. It is one of the more difficult things to measure, ACTURATELY.
Woah Woah Woah. I didnt say that I’m not 171. Im just saying that all of the tests you morons are taking are wrong.
Mine is apparantly 146. Doesn’t say me a lot.
its not in what you have its in how you use it. thats true for most things.
I’ve had IQ test give me 90 and others give me 140. Hate the bloody test.
Because your IQ represents the entire state of New York?
Several things. First of all the thing’s a joke. There’s no factual basis to it at all, except that it correctly identified which state voted for which candidate. Fuck, just a while ago somebody posted a totally different “states ranked by IQ” list, and it was vastly different than this one. An accurate poll would probably have all states closer to 100 IQs, since that is the theoretic mean of all IQs. There’s no logical reason why IQ (which is NOT INFLUENCED IN ANY WAY BY CULTURE) would vary 28 points from the highest state to the lowest. It’s almost a statistical impossiblity (although I’d need to look up the standard deviation for IQ distribution to check HOW unlikely that would be) Theoretically, a tribal man in Africa who has no knowledge of modern technology should have an equal chance in a well-written IQ test as any technologically savvy person in a developed nation.
Second of all, IQ tests are bullshit. As far as I’m concerned they’re just about worthless. They are often full of cultural bias so that minorities and rural communities are at a disadvantage. And I would be even MORE skeptical of an IQ test that was administered to AMERICANS but created by the UK. It was probably full of questions like “If Hugh, a lorry driver, can eat 12 crumpets in 3 minutes and 4 kippers in 5 minutes, how tea can he drinki while taking a lift 15 floors, if the lift’s average speed is 1 meter a second?”
Even if it was possible to create a perfectly bias-free IQ Test, what would that tell us? Well, it would tell us how well (and quickly) a person can process information in their brain. This doesn’t have anything to do with how well-informed a person is in this or any other election. Somebody could have the highest IQ in the world, but be totally uninformed about politics. Likewise, somebody with an average IQ could be very informed about politics. I’d trust the latter person more, since electing officials is not a matter of quickly processing information as much as it is a matter of personal stance on issues, almost all of which have no “right” or “wrong” answer.
Your assertions have no factual basis. Is I.Q. really “NOT INFLUENCED IN ANY WAY BY CULTURE”? Then why is the U.S.'s average I.Q. 93, the U.K.'s 100, and Japan’s 110? Do you mean to say that I.Q. is biologically determined? I think culture is the more likely solution–in which case I.Q. is quite likely to vary by location.
The argument that I.Q. tests don’t work between cultures misses the point. Modern I.Q. tests aren’t meant to measure some abstract ideal of “intelligence”. They measure how well an individual performs, mentally, within a given paradigm. The paradigm is carefully designed, so that the I.Q. test roughly measures how well a person’s mind will work in the average, modern society. So, of course, you can accuse the people who designed the test of making themselves the ideal, but either way, the test is accurate at measuring how well a mind meets certain standards.
Thank you. Although judging from the rest of your post, I’m sure this was a typo on your part. =P
If you’re going to start throwing numbers at me, be kind enough to document where they came from. I don’t know whether you pulled those numbers out of your ass or got them from a credible source (In all due respect, I’m not so sure it’s credible to quote leading news organizations about… …Nevermind). I would attribute any discrepency to the bias of the tests, again. More specifically in this case, I would say that Japan is the most homogeneous of the three countries you mentioned, so race and cultural differences which may affect somebody’s ability to perform well on an IQ test would be minimized. USA is the most varied of the groups culturally, and thus the minorities would bring its score down. It’s not that minorities are stupid, it’s just that the tests administered in America are traditionally designed for middle-class white citizens, not poor black people. The same thing is true for other facets of American society. It’s no coinicidence that minorities tend to acheive less than whites in American schools either. And it’s not because of their race, it’s because of their social situation. I don’t think anybody but a racist Social Darwinist would argue that.
Would being born into a rich white community make you smarter, or just make you “better prepared for modern society”? I would never say the former.
The argument that IQ tests don’t work between cultures is EXACTLY the point. When I’m talking about culture, I’m not talking about dragging somebody from some foreign country to take an American test (although my original example was admittedly misleading. Just pretend the guy I mentioned was an immigrant). I’m talking about different cultures within the same testing group. When a test is standardized and given to kids all over America, there are bound to be problems. Should minorities and the poor be damned to have a “low IQ” haunt them for the rest of their lives unless they assimilate themselves into middle-class white society somehow? Not to mention geographic situations. For example, somebody from the midwest might not know what a pier is (having never encountered them in his life, something like that wouldn’t necessarily be important). There could be a question that mentions a pier on a standardized IQ test. This person might get confused and miss the question, but that has no bearing on his intelligence or his potential to work in society. That’s what I mean by cultural bias.
And I would also challenge your assertion that the IQ is not meant to “measure intelligence”, but it’s difficult to say what its purpose is anymore. When it was originally created, it was designed to see how well students would progress through school. Of course, as time went on, it shifted more toward the “pure intelligence” side of the spectrum, although it was still used as an evaluation device. Test writers have been working frantically to try and remove cultural bias from tests, since IQ tests, by nature, have to be given to various cultures (there are too many cultures in the United States to make a test to accomodate all of them… hence the demand for the “culturally unbiased” test). If pressed to give a response, I’d probably say that “IQ” is designed to be a predictor of our “actual” intelligence (if such a thing exists), and IQ Tests are designed to measure this unacheivable number and from it, deduce how successful we can be. So in a way, I would say that IQ tests go out to acheive both goals, but end up acheiving neither.
But either way, we’re splitting hairs, and WHO GIVES A SHIT? What’s REALLY important is that it has no bearing on political preference. Although I have a feeling that you still are clinging onto the belief that Bush supporters really have low IQs, and are therefore stupid, which would sort of contradict your statements that IQ has no bearing on “real” intelligence.