Emil O W Kirkegaard

In US, moderates mostly means people who are not so interested in politics, not people who considered the options and considered them all dodgy by themselves. Try adding political interest as covariate in regression and see (e.g. in ANES/GSS).

In general I think it's telling that scientists in highly g-loaded fields and people at elite universities that sort by SAT scores are wildly disproportionately leftist. I'm not saying it's an argument that leftists are right about things, but the pattern is pretty clear.

It'd be really weird if smart people *weren't* more leftist, given how g-loaded openness is.https://twitter.com/davidshor/status/980238259954515973 …

I used to think it was more telling until I realized how fucked up academics are in general, and which kind of persons academia attracts. After that, I was a lot less impressed by this argument. Now a days, the political climate causes the result almost itself...

Of course it has. Who goes to Harvard? People who don't care about academic stuff just pick a local university. Indeed, this is the smart choice if you're not pursuing something further down that line.

The idea that there are smart kids who are deciding to go to a local university instead of applying to elite schools because they just want to make money and don't care about academia is the most adorable European thing I've ever heard anybody say on twitter.

The "local university" for smart kids is also generally going to be the more selective public unis in the state (source: one of the 40+ people in my HS cohort who went to UNC)