Chyden Finance: profit from hypocrisy

Following up on yesterday’s post, CNN pipes in with a related topic. Apparently, liberalism, atheism, and male monogamy are statistically correlated with higher IQs.

George Washington University leadership professor James Bailey speculates that abnormal preferences might originate with a desire to convey superiority or elitism, which correlates with high IQ. He claims that embracing unconventional philosophies might be “ways to communicate to everyone that you’re pretty smart.”

In the case of autism, unconventionality is part of the overall package. Hyperconformity, then, would be associated with a signal lack of innovativeness (pretty much by definition), ‘mild autism’ with scary-weird smart, and full-on autism with incapacity.

In the surveys cited in the CNN article, ‘liberalism’ is defined “in terms of concern for genetically nonrelated people and support for private resources that help those people.”

This does not imply big-government social welfare programs. As I stressed in a recent post, “When we compress complex issues into one-dimensional spectra — left vs right, religious vs atheist, conservative vs liberal, etc. — we end up talking at cross-purposes, often with ourselves.”

One must be very conventional to succeed in politics, first to find backers and later to woo voters. Similarly, weirdos do not tend to rise to the executive suite in multinational corporations.

Those of us who mistrust big government and big business are not necessarily unconcerned for the plight of the downtrodden; we just don’t trust political and corporate Barbie and Ken dolls to get it right.

Invest accordingly.

CWE