Orac once again takes down Vox Day. Day read a study and misinterpreted it, which isn’t too surprising — Day is not particularly bright. In this case, the study was looking for correlations with Personal Belief Exemptions (PBEs). That is, they were trying to figure out what kind of traits underlie anti-vaccination attitudes. What wasn’t surprising is that they found a lot of well-off white people who oppose vaccination.
That played right into Vox Day’s biases. He opposes vaccination, so smart people oppose vaccination; he’s white and well-off, which to him is synonymous with being intelligent and right, so it turns into a regular orgy of confirmation bias.
The news that anti-vaxxers are whiter, wealthier, and better-educated than those who place blind faith in vaccines won’t surprise anyone who has actually engaged a vaccine enthusiast on the subject. None of them know anything about history, few of them know anything about science, and all of them are prone to simply repeating the usual vaccine scare rhetoric
Unfortunately for his thesis that the smarter (and whiter!) you are, the more likely you are to oppose vaccination, the truly smart people are the ones who figured out how to prime the immune system to fight off disease…that is, the scientists who work on vaccines. But the particularly ironic part of this story is that the study didn’t even say what he claims it says: a close look at the data reveals that it actually found that education has a negative effect on Personal Belief Exemptions.
Basically, the study did not show that higher educational attainment predicts the likelihood of PBE percentage. Quite the opposite, in fact. The authors, in describing their model predicting change in PBEs over time, report:
Educational attainment did not independently predict 2013 PBEs. More educated populations had slower rates of change in PBE percentages from 2007 to 2013 (P ≤ .01). For example, in the school-level block group model, a 10% increase in the percentage of the population with a college degree was associated with a 0.025% decrease in the annual rate of growth from 2007 to 2013.
In other words, there was a negative correlation between the percentage of the population with a college degree and the rate of PBE growth from 2007 to 2013. Or, as the authors explain:
We found that areas of California with higher household income and proportion White population are associated with higher overall PBE percentages as well as greater increases in PBEs from 2007 to 2013. In contrast to some previous studies, we did not find an independent predictive effect of educational attainment level once we controlled for those characteristics. Although the marginal effects of income and race were modest in magnitude, the overall PBE percentage doubled from 2007 to 2013, and more than 17 000 PBEs were issued in California in 2013.
In other words, although there might be a correlation in the raw data between educational level of the population and percentage of PBEs, it’s not an independent predictor. Control for other socioeconomic factors, and it the correlation between education and PBEs goes away. To be honest, I was rather surprised by this result, not so much because I think antivaccinationists are more intelligent, but rather based on my personal experience of constantly hearing antivaccine activists proclaim how educated and intelligent they are I rather expected there to be a correlation. I also rather expected there to be a correlation because more educated people tend to be much better at motivated reasoning; namely constructing arguments and cherry picking data to protect their pre-existing beliefs. Of course, this is just one study, and the authors note that their results don’t agree with some previous studies. Even so, I can’t help but feel a bit of amusement at how quick Vox was to latch on to this study as confirming his self-image of being oh-so-much more intelligent than everyone else.
That’s a result that doesn’t surprise me at all. I suspect that the real root of these kinds of anti-vaccination beliefs is a word that Vox Day will snigger at: privilege. Being prosperous and secure tends to beguile one into being both overly confident in one’s personal beliefs, and being less likely to have those beliefs challenged by risk. Hollywood stars, for instance, living in coddling pillows of wealth and insulated from real dangers tend to swallow silly ideas without repercussions. But they’re not necessarily particularly intelligent.
Nothing will penetrate a cranium of pure dunningkruegerite, as Vox Day has, though. His reaction to Orac’s smackdown is hilarious.
.@EpiRen @oracknows You're dishonest, Orac. More educated does not mean more intelligent. Look at us. You have more education. I'm smarter.
— Vox Day (@voxday) December 30, 2015
You’re dishonest, Orac. More educated does not mean more intelligent. Look at us. You have more education. I’m smarter.
I’ve never seen Day write anything particularly smart, while Orac has a demonstrated track record.
The membership of Mensa is the best evidence that IQ is a flawed measure of intelligence.
To militantagnostic
Or self selection bias. Do you really think that it’s a reliable assumption that Mensa members are randomly chosen from the population of people with high IQ scores?
Having a diploma to wave about only proves that somewhere there’s a dead sheep.
Probably not – One of the commenters on Orac’s post said that Mensa appeals to people who have not achieved much. She Joined Mensa when she was at a low point in her life. I think Mensa members tend to self-select people who do well on IQ tests but are deficient in areas of “intelligence” that are not measured by IQ tests.
militantagnostic @ 4:
Mensa actively courts anyone with a high IQ, and spends a bit of time pursuing any one individual. Or at least they used to do so, ages ago. They came after me when I was quite young, and still fairly isolated, having barely extracted myself from my dysfunctional and abusive family, and trying to get myself and my life together. From quite a few others I knew who Mensa was trying to recruit (none of us accepted), they are often attractive to those who have had a difficult time in life, and who weren’t helped by being known as one of those “smart” nerds, and don’t have much self esteem. In those cases, Mensa helped with a sense of belonging somewhere. On the other side, Mensa was attractive to those who had a considerable overload of self esteem, pinning a shitload of bragging points on their high IQ, while not being terribly good at little things like, oh, thinking.
I thought about joining Mensa when I was a lot younger. Part of it was because it was recommended by Asimov, and partly because it was an age when I felt a much greater need for external validation. I’m glad I never did join, because now I think of it as a club for tall people, or people with extra digits or some such. It’s really quite meaningless to join a club for high IQ. If you want smart conversation, it’s much better to join a club based on a shared interest, like the local art gallery, or indie movie house, or contract bridge, or whatever.
Being highly educated shows a certain kind of intelligence, not necessarily one that works well in the real world. One of my mom’s favorite expressions was to call someone an “educated fool,” though I think she meant it mainly for politicians on TV who spouted things she disagreed with (like Reagan). I’ve yet to find a reasonable definition of “intelligence” that encompasses all the ways humans are good at knowing or doing things.
I was invited to speak at the MENSA national meeting once, and I did.
I shared my session with an intelligent design creationist. Sort of says it all right there.
As far as I can tell, the only thing that IQ tests reliably measure is the ability to score well on IQ tests.
Is that “Vox Day” as in “Vox Dei”? Damn.
So here is a person who imagines himself to be the Voice of God. I think that is a few levels above standard dunningkrugerism.
re 10:
I’m sure Voxy thinks it is a super-clever pun. “Voice of the Day” phonetically similar to “Voice of God” (in Latin).
I’m sure he has a smirk on his face when reading people’s confusion about it and thinking him being so arrogant that he misspelled his self-aggrandizement moniker.
Laugh all you want Vox, be super smug, while I (being smarter than you) refuse confusion and conclude you are an egotistical brat. {aka Vax Dum}
That doesn’t really match my experience, but I do not think it incorrect. I suspect multiple tactics were(? are?) used. In my case — this was back in the days when “home computers” were exceptionally rare (the PC was still years away) and “the Internet” was still called ARPAnet and used IMPs — I got at least one snail-mail letter from them (along with a load of other bumpf from others), all of it clearly in response to graduating with a high GPA(and/or related). At the time, they were running ads in one or more of the (mostly-monthly) magazines I read. Those ads had already made me suspicious of them, in a “follow the money” sense.
The mail-shot moved me from suspicious to distrusting, and a later encounter with a member at University “confirmed” my intention to not go near them even with a barge-pole. Looking back at it now, I realize that “confirmation” was more a case of re-enforcing my own opinion that than anything evidence-based.
The member in question fit many of the sterotytpes, from obviously intelligent to poor social skills (initially, the person got better) to a surprising lack of pragmatism and related understanding, including a distinct “spherical cow” mentality. One incident still sticks in my mind.
The individual’s family was wealthy, and were having a house(? vacation home?) custom-built. The individual was astonished the prefabricated window-frames did not neatly snap into place in the wooden framing, the carpenters had to use hammers (and probably other tools, such as files or saws) when fitting the window-frames.