[extropy-chat] morons in office

[Damien Broderick]

At 07:32 PM 10/27/2004 +0200, Patrick.Wilken wrote:

>Perhaps Samantha has already sat down and carefully weighed up all the 
>evidence and decided that Bush is a moron.

Or perhaps that he holds very silly and dangerous ideas, and is under the 
sway of smarter people with very silly and dangerous ideas who are 
ideologically constrained from modifying those ideas under empirical test.

I was surprised by the recent NYT report on the comparative IQs of Bush and 
Kerry (and startled that the NYT used as its source the racist site 
Vdare.com, but that's another story). Using SATs and the like, it was 
decided that Bush's IQ is c. 125 (SAT 1206), and Kerry's c. 120. Gore's 
allegedly is around 135. This is a bit disturbing; I wouldn't imagine many 
of the frequent posters on this list would clock in under 135, and many 
would be one or two sigma higher, with several higher still. But as the old 
British saw had it, pollies (and a fortiori the general population, I 
should think) want clever people `on tap, not on top'.

As a visitor to the States, I still don't really understand how much raw 
power an elected POTUS has. Finger on the nuke button, right? Power to 
declare war or go to war without declaring it or something? Unless he's 
genuinely a compliant puppet under the control of a clever cabal, or truly 
smart himself, this seems a recipe for doom.

Damien Broderick