A new study of the cognitive elite, this time relative to the NY Times & Wall St Journal. Is it unseemly for me to say that The Bell Curve absolutely freaking nailed it a quarter of a century ago? I suppose so. https://t.co/6SGRITdFz7 pic.twitter.com/uSW7T21y7u
— Charles Murray (@charlesmurray) April 20, 2018
* Steve: Generally speaking, New York Times and Wall Street Journal writers seem quite smart, smarter on average than, say, Washington Post or NPR writers. NYT articles will therefore often get around to the obvious counter-explanation undermining the impression the article is supposed to give toward the end of the article, while lower IQ media sources tend to be oblivious to the obvious.
* The very high-IQ Isaac Newton spent a lot of time obsessed with childish religious claptrap instead of doing science. The more detached from reality you are, the more likely your brains will end up running around in a hamster wheel of nonsense. Liberals waste years of their lives ensnared by their barking mad ideology because they’ve never so much as walked down the streets of a ghetto, or gone to a public school instead of a private school, or lived outside their expensive neighborhoods.
Reality sharpens your wits and helps your brain take in and adjust to new information so you’re not overwhelmed when you run into reality like an elbow in the face.
Liberals only become more maladjusted and denying with age. If you have an elderly liberal in your family, what they say can be downright alarming, and you worry that they’ll be taken advantage of by the first hustler who comes along.
* I recall reading that during the 2003 Iraq war the WSJ editorial page hired outside reporters after concluding that the paper’s staff reporters weren’t telling them what they wanted to hear. I agree, the WSJ is the last national paper doing any actual reporting.
I also agree with commenter Krastos. The methodology here seems more about credentials than intelligence. Elite journalists have high verbal IQ but seem incapable of any critical thinking. More clever than smart. As I put it, journalists don’t report; they Narrate.
Journalism used to be considered a good career choice for bookish men from prole or petit bourgeois backgrounds. It’s not an arcane skillset and doesn’t require four years of credentialing. Walt Whitman left school at age 11. Rudyard Kipling attended a nouveau military college and couldn’t get into Oxford. Pete Dexter got a degree from U. of South Dakota.
No more Whitmans or Kiplings or Dexters.
* In 1965 the NY Times was pitched to people in NY City because that’s where 99% of their readership was. Today it is pitched to the global elite.
* WSJ writers as an elite I accept without dispute. WSJ has an excellent, refreshingly neutral, and pithily factual early morning radio program that is probably the best of its kind.
NYT writers however just illustrates the corruption of our institutions. Do the researchers account for legacy, money, or fluff degrees, or is a Harvard degree in medicine weighted the same as a degree in journalism? How many pure math majors become journalists?
How many more economy-crashing regionally destabilizing bright ideas will we suffer before we reform our rampant credentialism?
* High IQ correlates best to Openness to New Experience, which is why they just love the idea of a multicultural, open borders society. Well, that and the occasional memo from Mr. Salim Haddad at the NYTimes.
* Stuart Richie wrote the book Intelligence: All That Matters in the British “All that Matters” series (sort of a “For Dummies” series), a short, 160-page summary of intelligence science that skirts race but is otherwise dead honest and up to date, and smart people will fill in the blanks. He was on Razib Khan’s podcast recently. He seems to have Stephen Pinker’s instinct for not crossing the line, but getting very, very close, so I think his career is safe.
* The Washington Post went downhill fast when it decided that it was a local paper in an overwhelmingly black city and decided to hire an enormous number of black journalists over a short period of time.
The New York Times is in a minority white community, but it seems to consider itself a national paper. Same for the Wall Street Journal.
