This is the sort of Steveosphere dumbfuckery that drives me up a wall:
In the comments of a post at Half Sigma, a perspicacious commenter named Peter (unsure whether or not it’s Mr. Iron Rails and Weights) writes:
Veganism is a way for decently educated but lower income people to distinguish themselves from proles. If you’re a teacher or an occupational therapist or a social worker making $50K a year being vegan makes a statement that you’re not a prole despite the fact that many proles earn more money than you do.
And what else do the underpaid teaching, therapy and social-worker professions have in common? Maybe the idealistic wish to help other people, even if it means making less money? You know, making personal sacrifices to help others?
Would that perspective have anything, anything at all, in common with the concern for the welfare of animals and for the environment that drives many of the “conversions” to vegetarianism? You know, might the career choices and the diet choices be driven by a common psychological force, rather than by two different forces? (For myself, I had already decided that I should go vegetarian at age nineteen, for animal-rights reasons; but only actually did it when I started following my erstwhile fraud-guru, Yogananda. So you see, I did it for the best of all possible reasons, which had nothing to do with signaling my superiority to others, and which any conservative could and should approve of: I did it for God. And by the way, although I grew up in a very conservative Christian community, I’ve never believed anything in my life that’s even half as ridiculous as what every Christian believes, as their articles of salvation. Frankly, in all seriousness, I’m not even capable of being that gullible.)
What else do the three professions above have in common? They’re all (i) easy degrees, and (ii) dominated (AFAIK) by women. Likewise, more than 60% of vegetarians are women.
The other thing is, if you’re going to go vegetarian, that typically happens (as it did with me) in your teenage years, i.e., before you’ve completed your degree or diploma, and often when you’re still in high school. For a dietary choice you made while still living with your parents to have “really” been made with the intention of “distinguishing yourself from proles” as a thirty- or forty-something, you’d need to have a fucking time machine.
But of course, that’s all lost on the male-dominated, SWPL-bashing Steveosphere. None of whom, it must be noted, possess even a small dick time machine.
Veganism can even be a way for an academic or professional in the $100K realm to make a statement that they’re superior to the frat boys who went to B school and are now pulling down $300K as sales reps. I wonder how many vegans there are among the overclass? My sense is not that many.
Well, then your sense needs some adjusting, Doughboy.
Among former frat boys with alpha-male sales/bullshit skills, no, you wouldn’t expect to find that level of sensitivity to the welfare of others. Duh. I mean, really: Duh. Among the successful artistic overclass—e.g., musicians and actors/actresses—however, vegetarianism (and veganism) are widespread.
Do they think that rock stars like Tom Petty or Thom Yorke, too, are vegetarian just to signal that they’re not proles? (Or even better, do you think, like a paranoid-conspiracy-theorist friend of mine does, that they’re being led to eat inadequate diets by devil-inspired handlers, with the [woefully ironic] satanic intent of preventing them from thinking clearly?)
Have these bloggers ever even fucking heard of Occam’s Razor? I mean, they must have, ’cause Sailor has his Occam’s Butterknife; but when do they ever try to apply it, without oversimplifying things in accord with their Stuff White People Like fixation? Which bashing, you know, although they don’t seem to realize it, is just a way for them to make themselves feel superior. Heh. But really, it is. And really, they don’t see that at all.
And really also, eating a vegetarian diet (like caring enough about other beings to make at least small sacrifices to your own wealth, to help them) does make you morally superior, at least on that point. (That same caring made Mother Teresa morally superior, too … or at least it would have, if she wasn’t just a P.R.-created myth.) Part of being a “rational animal” is being able to at least admit that, even if you’re too stuck in inertia to do anything about it at the time. But if you can’t even admit to yourself that sparing animals from needless suffering is a morally superior choice to making them suffer unnecessarily just for your own pleasure, don’t try and claim to be rational. The Steveosphere is full of know-it-all people, with basic stats knowledge (yes, I took a course too, back in the day) but completely ignorant of even the basics of moral philosophy, to whom all of that would be most unwelcome news, worthy of wailing and the gnashing of canine teeth.
And because these people are so dismally uninformed, yet are “experts on everything,” Peter’s ham-handed, embarrassingly pop-psych analysis gets elevated to the status of “perspicacious,” when it is anything but that. What it really reminds me of is Ken Wilber complimenting Deepak Chopra on having a “searching intellect,” when (in practice) neither of them actually have the first fucking clue about anything, even in their supposed fields of expertise, in which they are truly world-leaders. Or Jared Diamond pulling the wool over the eyes of anyone who isn’t an expert in the broad range of topics he covers. It’s “Ray Charles leading the blind,” but with race-realism and scientifically/morally illiterate SWPL-trashing instead.
And, if they’re so utterly clueless and yet wildly overconfident on this point, you can bet dollars to Krispy Kreme donuts that they’re exhibiting exactly the same nasty combination of traits on many other points, too.
Finally, I was quite surprised to see (from a very small sample size of 42) the GSS data (from the same blog post quoting Peter, above) showing that vegetarians have a lower IQ than meat-eaters. But then I did a little Googling. And guess what? High IQ link to being vegetarian:
A Southampton University team found those who were vegetarian by 30 had recorded five IQ points more on average at the age of 10.
Researchers said it could explain why people with higher IQ were healthier as a vegetarian diet was linked to lower heart disease and obesity rates.
The study of 8,179 [which, I will point out for those of you whose brains are sluggish from eating too much meat, is somewhat greater than 42] was reported in the British Medical Journal.
Twenty years after the IQ tests were carried out in 1970, 366 of the participants said they were vegetarian—although more than 100 reported eating either fish or chicken.
Men who were vegetarian had an IQ score of 106, compared with 101 for non-vegetarians; while female vegetarians averaged 104, compared with 99 for non-vegetarians.
That’s the same five-point gap which Audacious Epigone found in his number-crunching, but in exactly the opposite direction. From a sample size nearly 200 times larger. Plus, while AE’s numbers are from the 1993-4 GSS, the news item is from December of 2006. So there’s no contest at all about which study to take more seriously. It’s fucking hands down.
Of course, neither study shows which direction the cause-effect arrow goes, i.e., whether eating a vegetarian diet makes people smarter, or whether smarter people just tend to become vegetarian (or whether there’s a third cause, driving both vegetarianism and IQ). But it does at least show that the 42 people in the GSS who provided the “low IQ” result are not in any way a definitive sample, eh?
It took me literally five seconds to run that Google query, and find that news item. Which is obviously five seconds more than the typical Steveosphere “expert” puts in, to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Or the vegetables from the meat, in this case.
Or the higher-IQ vegetarians from the HBD-meatheads, if you prefer. (And why wouldn’t you?)
Honestly, I don’t normally preach about all this morality and health-related stuff. But the Steveosphere is just so absolutely, fucking brutally ignorant, arrogant, and self-congratulatory on this topic, that somebody has to say something.
Awhile back, I went out on a limb, and wrote this:
The “Steveosphere” (i.e., Sailer’s commenters) tends to attract people like Mangan, who theorize wildly and paleolithically without bothering to test their ideas beyond the realm of anecdotes, and with no idea about how to take a skeptical/debunking approach even toward obviously dodgy ideas. Sailer can get away with doing the same sort of thing largely because he’s got such an amazing feel for human nature, and is working in “soft” fields where that approach can produce insights which are obviously correct, and where double-blind, randomized studies and math would be very hard to apply indeed, so you’re arguably better off doing things merely qualitatively anyway.
I was even more spot-on than I realized at the time. Because in more than a year of reading HBD-related blogs on a regular basis, I have seen a grand total of one reference to the work of real skeptics. The rest can theorize wildly, and occasionally even apply basic stats; but they have not even the first clue of how to think and research from a skeptical perspective, much less of how to face data which conflicts with what they most want to believe. You know, like a real man would do.
Sailer can get away with “feeling his way” through similar topics because he truly does have an amazing, intuitive feel for human nature. B-listers like Half Sigma and AE don’t have the same skills. But they see Sailer doing it successfully (after decades of experience in marketing), and they think, “Hey, I can be an expert on everything too, just by making it up as I go along!” Except they can’t. Not even close.
Higher-than-average-IQ people pulling “theories” out of their asses, and not doing even basic (Google) research to back up their own numbers. Behold, the Steveosphere … and the Wilbersphere. As they used to say back on the farm, “Same shit, different pile.” (I have yet to see that “Iron Rails, Iron Weights” guy post an insightful comment on any topic. I am serious.)
