Education, Intelligence, and Attitude Extremity (2012)

I notice that of the 8 economic questions, three are essentially the same question rephrased (labeled "eqwlth", "eqincome" and "goveqinc") and two additional questions are very closely related ("helpsick" and "helpoor"). It's not clear how these 8 questions do a very good job of measuring attitude extremity along the economic axis.

Questions along the other axis also seem too nuanced for a simple 1-5 answer (agree-strongly to disagree-strongly). For example are nuclear power stations "extremely dangerous" to the environment. Well, in my mind, of course they pose some danger, but less so than the coal plants they often replace. I'd have to disagree strongly that they are "extremely" dangerous (i.e. be classified as having an extreme attitude). I'm not trying to start an argument over the pros and cons of nuclear power here, but just wanted to point out that the questions selected by the researchers introduce their own bias where shallower answers seem more centrist.

Perhaps I'm too sensitive about these kinds of classifications. I consider myself a libertarian and usually feel poorly categorized by surveys.

First of all, using min and max values is not very smart because of outliers and complete disregard of the "coherence" of the opinions, i.e., if standard deviation is small or big (comparatively).

Secondly, the formula is not symmetric. Maybe that's ok because the distributions aren't but using the maximum in the denominator of the attitude extremity formula just increases the effect my first point.

I think a definition in terms of percentiles would have been probably much better. This would implicitly define attribute extremity in terms of non-conformity but that's IMO exactly what it is, it would just sound less dangerous and more 'revolutionarish'.

> Evidence that professionals are not independent thinkers has been around for a long time but has generally been ignored, in part because people don't know how to make sense of it. The Vietnam War produced some revealing examples, which are worth looking back at.

> On 12 January 1971, the federal government indicted Philip Berrigan and other East Coast antiwar activists on felony charges of plotting to impede the Vietnam War through violent action. The activists' agenda supposedly included blowing up underground heating pipes in Washington to shut down government buildings, kidnapping presidential advisor Henry Kissinger to ransom him for concessions in the war and raiding drafting boards to destroy records and slow down the draft.

> The Justice Department prosecutors chose to hold the conspiracy trial in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a conservative area where a randomly chosen jury would be heavily against the defendants. However, before the jury was selected at what came to be known as the Harrisburg-7 trial, a group of left-leaning social scientists supporting the defendants interviewed a large number of registered voters in the area to try to figure out how to get a sympathetic jury there. They discovered, amongst other things, that college-educated people were more likely than others to be conservative and trust the government. Thus, in court, during the three weeks that it took to examine 465 potential jurors and pick a panel of 12, lawyers for the defense quietly favoured skilled blue-collar workers and white-collar workers without a lot of formal education -- nonprofessionals, although the sociologists and lawyers never used that term.

> The lawyers were uneasy about doing this, however, because it went against their intuition. The notion of closed-minded hard hats and open-minded intellectuals is widespread and is reinforced by mass-media characters like dock-loading worker Archie Bunker and his college-student son-in-law, "pinko" Mike. In fact, All in the Family made its television debut the very day of the Harrisburg indictments, 12 January 1971; by the time the trial and jury selection started, it had been on air for over a year.

> Ignoring these false stereotypes paid off. The government put on a month long, $2 million extravaganza featuring 64 witnesses, including 21 FBI agents and 9 police officers. The defense called no one to the witness stand. After seven days of deliberation, the jury was not able to reach a unanimous decision, and the judge declared a mistrial; but with 10 of the 12 carefully selected jurors arguing for a not-guilty verdict, the government dropped the case.

It is a book worth reading.

[1] http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/

Wait- what? The authors' credentials on the abstract page are different from their credentials in the pdf (which the site won't let me re-open). Hmmm.

Also, early on the authors fail to include an apostrophe that is needed to make the word 'individuals' a possessive plural. A detector is starting to go off in my mind.