{"id":1344,"date":"2008-05-27T14:45:54","date_gmt":"2008-05-27T19:45:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/1344"},"modified":"2008-05-27T14:45:54","modified_gmt":"2008-05-27T19:45:54","slug":"beware-the-data-that-fits-your-preconceptions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/1344","title":{"rendered":"Beware The Data That Fits Your Preconceptions"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Especially <\/em>that data.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/gnxp\/2008\/05\/biblical_literalism_or_low_iq.php\"><strong>Biblical literalism or low IQ: which came first?<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A few <a href=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/gnxp\/2008\/02\/pentecostals_are_stupid_unitar.php\">months ago<\/a> I posted data which showed, unsurprisingly, that Unitarian-Universalists tend to have high IQs and Pentecostals not so much. What about something like Biblical literalism and IQ? Well, I plotted the IQ values from the General Social Survey for selected denominations and plotted them against the proportion <a href=\"http:\/\/books.google.com\/books?id=NyIWwZweW9oC&amp;pg=PA57&amp;dq=Episcopalian++Lutheran++Mormon++Presbyterian++United+Methodist+++Southern+Baptist+++Assembly+of+God+++Pentecostal+literal&amp;ei=1WE6SJ2PLIvAsgP3vPHPDA&amp;sig=261VPywNQAfJ25hhdOoOiutOiEE\">which believed in a literal interpretation<\/a> of the Bible.  Prepare to be greeted by a very banal reality below the fold&#8230;.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>I see the scale.&nbsp; I see the apparent correlation.&nbsp; But there is no &#8216;g&#8217;.&nbsp; And since I haven&#8217;t moved in fundamentalist circles since childhood, most of the stupid I see on a day to day basis doesn&#8217;t involve biblical literalism at all.<\/p>\n<p>Just because you&#8217;ve embraced a theology that relieves you of the necessity of thinking, doesn&#8217;t mean you&#8217;re incapable of it.&nbsp; If you haven&#8217;t ever met someone who hates having to think about life because doing that gets so very painful at times, you haven&#8217;t lived for very long, or talked to people much.&nbsp; The smarter the person, the more vulnerable they are to cults, booze, drugs, and misanthropy.&nbsp; And if fundamentalists are so stupid, then how&#8217;d they come to own the Republican Party?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Especially that data. Biblical literalism or low IQ: which came first? A few months ago I posted data which showed, unsurprisingly, that Unitarian-Universalists tend to have high IQs and Pentecostals not so much. What about something like Biblical literalism and IQ? Well, I plotted the IQ values from the General Social Survey for selected denominations [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,1],"tags":[41,55],"class_list":["post-1344","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","category-uncategorized","tag-prejudice","tag-this-and-that"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1344"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1344\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}