[extropy-chat] The NeoCon Mind-Trick (was letter concerningpresidential growth)

[Joseph Bloch]

Unfortunately, this is also not valid, for the simple reason that you 
are trying to compare two completely different populations.

That is, persons who voted in the 2004 Presidential election are not the 
same as college-bound 18-year-olds from 1998. Maybe this is only clear 
to me because I work with election polls for a living, but that's a 
major no-no. In order for this to be really statistically valid, you 
would need to do some sort of exit polling from representative samples 
throughout the country, get some sort of standardized IQ data for those 
people, and make the correlation from that. Not gonna happen.

Joseph

spike wrote:

>>bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of The Avantguardian
>>    
>>
>
>  
>
>>--- The Avantguardian <avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com>
>>wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>I have attached the results of my quick and dirty study as
>>>an Excel file...The Avantguardian
>>>      
>>>
>
>I am one over my posting limit for today, but two of my
>posts were in the capacity of a moderator, so please
>forgive.
>
>The Avantguardian has created an excellent meme, which
>I have used as a starting point to do some way fun
>calculations.  Earlier he proposed correlating IQ
>with percent Bush voters in 2004.  Of course we don't
>have everyone's IQ in any state, but we do have a lot
>of SAT scores.  
>
>I found a site which gives SAT (in 1998) by state and 
>a most useful datum, the percentage of students taking 
>the test.  I used this one only because it was in a
>form I could cut and paste into microsloth excel:
>
>http://www.sciway.net/statistics/satstates96-98.html
>
>2004 election results here:
>
>http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0922901.html
>
>Now, of course one would expect with a smaller
>percentage of students participating in the SAT,
>the average scores would be higher.  This can be
>seen by plotting average score vs percentage
>participating.  Then you can do a curve fit: linear, 
>a quadratic, a third order, whatever you want.  Then 
>you can take the percentage of participation
>in each state, use the curve fit to determine the
>expected score with that participation level.  Follow
>so far?  Then subtract expected value from each 
>state's average score.  If the result is negative,
>that's a dumb state.  If positive, a smart state.  OK,
>so I did that.  Then I plotted the percent Bush votes
>against the dumbness or smartness of the state.  I
>did this for linear curve fit, quadratic and third
>order.  I found...
>
>Well, see enclosed spreadsheet.  {8^D
>
>spike
>  
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>_______________________________________________
>extropy-chat mailing list
>extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
>http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo/extropy-chat
>  
>