Differences between Liberal and Conservative brain structure

[Quantum Windbag]

Oh give it a rest.

I don't mind an ad-hoc swipe at Conservatives now and then..I do it all the time.

But heck..least come up with something new.

OK, how about Paul Ryan's budget? Slashes education and medicaid and medicare. Saves the country 5 trillion. Gives a 4 trillion tax cut to the top 5%. Costs at least a million jobs right off the bat. Doesn't really save 5 trillion because it's "given away" to the wealthy. And he thinks jobs are "magically created" by tax cuts. Only we all know jobs are created, in a capitalist society through "supply and demand". Republicans have swallowed so much "swill", they don't understand that if no one has any money except rich people, there is no demand, hence "no jobs".

The problem is this goes all they way back to "stupid".

Hey, just curious. After attacking gays, Hispanics, women's rights and Muslims during the last year, who's next?

I look at Paul Ryan's blueprint (which is what he calls it) as doing the same thing the Democrats did with the first draft of a health care bill. Put fat in at the beginning (knowing you won't get it all, or even half of it, but eventually you'll settle on what counts most). That's actually a business model used for years and years whenever a costly new product, process, or policy was about to be pitched to owners and/or managers. I used the concept myself when I proposed establishing a word processing pool and moving away from one-on-one secretaries to only two per department, with WP doing all the document production for the whole firm. Nobody got laid off because the secretaries were offered a chance to train on the new computer setup. The first anticipated repercussion came from the people who would lose their personal secretaries; the second from the ones who paid the bills and the up-front costs necessary at the outset. But since I "put fat in at the beginning," the computer/word processing system I presented was the most expensive, so once they were convinced the new arrangement would be a time-saver and cost less in the long run, it was easy to get them to approve the system I really wanted in the first place!

Accepting that would require rdean to admit that Republicans are smart enough to think ahead.

 

[Sallow]

Hilarious. A measly 6% of scientists are Republican. Red state colleges and universities are mostly the worst in the nation. Red states are funded by Blue states. Republicans slash eduction. The majority of Republicans believe evolution and science are "faiths".

There are no Republican government policies that work. Republicans fail at every single thing they do except "trick" the American people.

And yet, right wingers on this site are calling Democrats names. Good. The "ever shrinking" Republican party needs to remind Americans where racism, ignorance and intolerance comes from. I remember.

Republican Party, 90% white, most Christian. 6%, pathetic.

Oh give it a rest.

I don't mind an ad-hoc swipe at Conservatives now and then..I do it all the time.

But heck..least come up with something new.

OK, how about Paul Ryan's budget? Slashes education and medicaid and medicare. Saves the country 5 trillion. Gives a 4 trillion tax cut to the top 5%. Costs at least a million jobs right off the bat. Doesn't really save 5 trillion because it's "given away" to the wealthy. And he thinks jobs are "magically created" by tax cuts. Only we all know jobs are created, in a capitalist society through "supply and demand". Republicans have swallowed so much "swill", they don't understand that if no one has any money except rich people, there is no demand, hence "no jobs".

The problem is this goes all they way back to "stupid".

Hey, just curious. After attacking gays, Hispanics, women's rights and Muslims during the last year, who's next?

This isn't a thread about that. Not in the least. It's a thread about nature vs. nurture. And it's been used to justify some very racist theories. I don't care if it's knocking conservatives, it's a load of hooey. I've seen people over the course of my life change their political leanings as well. Heck..I've seen people take viscious dogs..and socialize them. The brain is a very, very, very complex organ. And it's amazing too. You process enormous amounts of information and make decisions about it in milliseconds. Your brain can make sense of 3 dimensional environments very quickly. The act of walking is completely mind boggling if you think about it. You are in a constant state of flux..making decisions about balance and the world around you.

My sig says "It really is that simple". It doesn't mean "It's really that simplistic."

 

[Wry Catcher]

Oh give it a rest.

I don't mind an ad-hoc swipe at Conservatives now and then..I do it all the time.

But heck..least come up with something new.

OK, how about Paul Ryan's budget? Slashes education and medicaid and medicare. Saves the country 5 trillion. Gives a 4 trillion tax cut to the top 5%. Costs at least a million jobs right off the bat. Doesn't really save 5 trillion because it's "given away" to the wealthy. And he thinks jobs are "magically created" by tax cuts. Only we all know jobs are created, in a capitalist society through "supply and demand". Republicans have swallowed so much "swill", they don't understand that if no one has any money except rich people, there is no demand, hence "no jobs".

The problem is this goes all they way back to "stupid".

Hey, just curious. After attacking gays, Hispanics, women's rights and Muslims during the last year, who's next?

This isn't a thread about that. Not in the least. It's a thread about nature vs. nurture. And it's been used to justify some very racist theories. I don't care if it's knocking conservatives, it's a load of hooey. I've seen people over the course of my life change their political leanings as well. Heck..I've seen people take viscious dogs..and socialize them. The brain is a very, very, very complex organ. And it's amazing too. You process enormous amounts of information and make decisions about it in milliseconds. Your brain can make sense of 3 dimensional environments very quickly. The act of walking is completely mind boggling if you think about it. You are in a constant state of flux..making decisions about balance and the world around you.

My sig says "It really is that simple". It doesn't mean "It's really that simplistic."

What you say is undoubtably true, the brain is a very complex organ and most people evolve over time. The operative word is most, there are the willfully ignorant who adopt an ideology, a dogma, as an immutable truth and no amount of evidence will ever diabuse them.

 

[Quantum Windbag]

Oh give it a rest.

I don't mind an ad-hoc swipe at Conservatives now and then..I do it all the time.

But heck..least come up with something new.

OK, how about Paul Ryan's budget? Slashes education and medicaid and medicare. Saves the country 5 trillion. Gives a 4 trillion tax cut to the top 5%. Costs at least a million jobs right off the bat. Doesn't really save 5 trillion because it's "given away" to the wealthy. And he thinks jobs are "magically created" by tax cuts. Only we all know jobs are created, in a capitalist society through "supply and demand". Republicans have swallowed so much "swill", they don't understand that if no one has any money except rich people, there is no demand, hence "no jobs".

The problem is this goes all they way back to "stupid".

Hey, just curious. After attacking gays, Hispanics, women's rights and Muslims during the last year, who's next?

This isn't a thread about that. Not in the least. It's a thread about nature vs. nurture. And it's been used to justify some very racist theories. I don't care if it's knocking conservatives, it's a load of hooey. I've seen people over the course of my life change their political leanings as well. Heck..I've seen people take viscious dogs..and socialize them. The brain is a very, very, very complex organ. And it's amazing too. You process enormous amounts of information and make decisions about it in milliseconds. Your brain can make sense of 3 dimensional environments very quickly. The act of walking is completely mind boggling if you think about it. You are in a constant state of flux..making decisions about balance and the world around you.

My sig says "It really is that simple". It doesn't mean "It's really that simplistic."

The brain is capable of solving complex equations faster than most people believe. Sit down sometime and try to predict where a ball thrown at over 90 mph will land after it hits a bat swung at around 60 mph. It will take you longer to figure out the variables that it does to run to where it is going to land. That actually makes walking look simple.

 

[Quantum Windbag]

OK, how about Paul Ryan's budget? Slashes education and medicaid and medicare. Saves the country 5 trillion. Gives a 4 trillion tax cut to the top 5%. Costs at least a million jobs right off the bat. Doesn't really save 5 trillion because it's "given away" to the wealthy. And he thinks jobs are "magically created" by tax cuts. Only we all know jobs are created, in a capitalist society through "supply and demand". Republicans have swallowed so much "swill", they don't understand that if no one has any money except rich people, there is no demand, hence "no jobs".

The problem is this goes all they way back to "stupid".

Hey, just curious. After attacking gays, Hispanics, women's rights and Muslims during the last year, who's next?

This isn't a thread about that. Not in the least. It's a thread about nature vs. nurture. And it's been used to justify some very racist theories. I don't care if it's knocking conservatives, it's a load of hooey. I've seen people over the course of my life change their political leanings as well. Heck..I've seen people take viscious dogs..and socialize them. The brain is a very, very, very complex organ. And it's amazing too. You process enormous amounts of information and make decisions about it in milliseconds. Your brain can make sense of 3 dimensional environments very quickly. The act of walking is completely mind boggling if you think about it. You are in a constant state of flux..making decisions about balance and the world around you.

My sig says "It really is that simple". It doesn't mean "It's really that simplistic."

What you say is undoubtably true, the brain is a very complex organ and most people evolve over time. The operative word is most, there are the willfully ignorant who adopt an ideology, a dogma, as an immutable truth and no amount of evidence will ever diabuse them.

You shouldn't give up on yourself like that.

 

[geauxtohell]

This? Again?

Can't..............

stop..............

laughing!

While that might be an over-simplification of the functions of the cingulate cortex and amygdala, why is it a radical notion that neurophysiology drives behavior?

I suspect the original study was more cut and dry and the press inserted their own OPED into the findings.

 

[geauxtohell]

More idiocy in the name of science. How stupid are you to even post this?

Uh because it has to do with Science? Which is where the thread was placed? Ironically, your comment reflects "fear" that it's true, thereby making the scientific conclusion credible.

What does this have to do with science? Is it because they used the word science in the article?

It could be that it was published in "Current Biology".

Oh, and your earlier question about "peer review"?

Received 11 January 2011;
revised 10 February 2011;
accepted 4 March 2011.
Published online: April 7, 2011.
Available online 7 April 2011.

ScienceDirect - Current Biology : Political Orientations Are Correlated with Brain Structure in Young Adults

I keep seeing people claim this was some sort of hoax or joke. I can't find any information to support that. When you look at the article, it seems pretty cut and dry. Self identified conservatives and liberals had differences in brain structure as quantified by MRI.

As I said before, the larger implications, to include pejoratives, seem to have been inserted by the press.

 

[Ragnar]

Leery About Liberal, Conservative Research Findings | Therapy Soup

PsychCentral’s founder, Dr. John Grohol, suggests that research studies be put to the test themselves. He discusses how and why flawed research happens.

And what is the overarching cause? Bias.

Dr. Grohol writes: ”…here’s the real troubling aspect — these kinds of biased studies appear in all sorts of journals. JAMA, NEJM and the BMJ are not immune from publishing crappy, flawed studies in medicine and psychology. We think of “respectability” of a journal as some sort of sign of a gatekeeping role — that studies appearing in the most prestigious journals must be fundamentally sound.

“But that’s simply not true. The emperor is not only naked — his subjects have hidden his clothes in order to further their own careers.”

And except for religion and perhaps in some circles, race/ethnicity, what topic is more loaded, spiced, and seasoned, with a cherry-on-top with heated, passionate bias than politics?

 

[Ragnar]

What Research Can You Believe? | World of Psychology

John Ioannidis, a professor at the University of Ioannina, became interested in this question in medical research. So he put together an expert team of researchers and statisticians to dig deeper and see how bad the problem was. What he found didn’t surprise researchers, but will come as a surprise to most laypeople –

Baffled, he started looking for the specific ways in which studies were going wrong. And before long he discovered that the range of errors being committed was astonishing: from what questions researchers posed, to how they set up the studies, to which patients they recruited for the studies, to which measurements they took, to how they analyzed the data, to how they presented their results, to how particular studies came to be published in medical journals. [...]

“The studies were biased,” he says. “Sometimes they were overtly biased. Sometimes it was difficult to see the bias, but it was there.” Researchers headed into their studies wanting certain results—and, lo and behold, they were getting them. We think of the scientific process as being objective, rigorous, and even ruthless in separating out what is true from what we merely wish to be true, but in fact it’s easy to manipulate results, even unintentionally or unconsciously.

“At every step in the process, there is room to distort results, a way to make a stronger claim or to select what is going to be concluded,” says Ioannidis. “There is an intellectual conflict of interest that pressures researchers to find whatever it is that is most likely to get them funded.”

Ioannadis put together a complex mathematical model that would predict how much research may be flawed, based upon all of these variables. His model predicted that “80 percent of non-randomized studies (by far the most common type [-- especially in psychological research]) [will] turn out to be wrong, as do 25 percent of supposedly gold-standard randomized trials, and as much as 10 percent of the platinum-standard large randomized trials.”

Then he put that model to the test on 49 studies that held the most highly regarded research findings in medical research in the past 13 years. These were in the most cited medical journals, and were themselves the most cited articles.

Of the 49 articles, 45 claimed to have uncovered effective interventions. Thirty-four of these claims had been retested, and 14 of these, or 41 percent, had been convincingly shown to be wrong or significantly exaggerated. If between a third and a half of the most acclaimed research in medicine was proving untrustworthy, the scope and impact of the problem were undeniable. [...]

Of those 45 super-cited studies that Ioannidis focused on, 11 had never been retested. Perhaps worse, Ioannidis found that even when a research error is outed, it typically persists for years or even decades. He looked at three prominent health studies from the 1980s and 1990s that were each later soundly refuted, and discovered that researchers continued to cite the original results as correct more often than as flawed—in one case for at least 12 years after the results were discredited.

 

[geauxtohell]

Leery About Liberal, Conservative Research Findings | Therapy Soup

PsychCentral’s founder, Dr. John Grohol, suggests that research studies be put to the test themselves. He discusses how and why flawed research happens.

And what is the overarching cause? Bias.

Dr. Grohol writes: ”…here’s the real troubling aspect — these kinds of biased studies appear in all sorts of journals. JAMA, NEJM and the BMJ are not immune from publishing crappy, flawed studies in medicine and psychology. We think of “respectability” of a journal as some sort of sign of a gatekeeping role — that studies appearing in the most prestigious journals must be fundamentally sound.

“But that’s simply not true. The emperor is not only naked — his subjects have hidden his clothes in order to further their own careers.”

And except for religion and perhaps in some circles, race/ethnicity, what topic is more loaded, spiced, and seasoned, with a cherry-on-top with heated, passionate bias than politics?

I found it interesting that your article was written in response to the study, yet didn't really directly question the study itself.

The best it could do was some vague language about bias in the peer review system. It did not even attempt to address the methods, data, or conclusions of the study.

Even with that, it didn't say how and why bias directly assisted this article.

 

[Samson]

I agree. There's a veil of ignorance when we're first born. Unfortunately, it doesn't take long to adapt to Mom & Dad's lifestyle. Climbing out of the mold and into independent thought is a long journey, however.

And Nobody should know that like you.

You're Still Climbing, and have a long way to go.

You're never too old to learn, child. Something you stopped doing at around 12 I'm guessing.

Poor Maggie.

Always has been a poor guesser in every fucking post she pulls out of her ass.

 

[Samson]

This? Again?

Can't..............

stop..............

laughing!

While that might be an over-simplification of the functions of the cingulate cortex and amygdala, why is it a radical notion that neurophysiology drives behavior?

I suspect the original study was more cut and dry and the press inserted their own OPED into the findings.

Ya Think?

Hey, How about that sun rising in the East thingy? Think it might happen again tomorrow morning?

 

[Wry Catcher]

This isn't a thread about that. Not in the least. It's a thread about nature vs. nurture. And it's been used to justify some very racist theories. I don't care if it's knocking conservatives, it's a load of hooey. I've seen people over the course of my life change their political leanings as well. Heck..I've seen people take viscious dogs..and socialize them. The brain is a very, very, very complex organ. And it's amazing too. You process enormous amounts of information and make decisions about it in milliseconds. Your brain can make sense of 3 dimensional environments very quickly. The act of walking is completely mind boggling if you think about it. You are in a constant state of flux..making decisions about balance and the world around you.

My sig says "It really is that simple". It doesn't mean "It's really that simplistic."

What you say is undoubtably true, the brain is a very complex organ and most people evolve over time. The operative word is most, there are the willfully ignorant who adopt an ideology, a dogma, as an immutable truth and no amount of evidence will ever diabuse them.

You shouldn't give up on yourself like that.

Cute. What ideology or dogma can you offer that I accept as immutable? Don't be shy, you said i have so you must know. If you don't I must assume you lied.

 

[Wry Catcher]

And Nobody should know that like you.

You're Still Climbing, and have a long way to go.

You're never too old to learn, child. Something you stopped doing at around 12 I'm guessing.

Poor Maggie.

Always has been a poor guesser in every fucking post she pulls out of her ass.

sammie boy, a profane ad hominem attack makes your appear bitter and stupid. You wouldn't want everyone to see you as I do, now would you?

 

[Samson]

You're never too old to learn, child. Something you stopped doing at around 12 I'm guessing.

Poor Maggie.

Always has been a poor guesser in every fucking post she pulls out of her ass.

sammie boy, a profane ad hominem attack makes your appear bitter and stupid. You wouldn't want everyone to see you as I do, now would you?

Yeah, that's a big worry of mine: How Idiots Might See Me.

I'll try not to lose any sleep.

 

[Wry Catcher]

Poor Maggie.

Always has been a poor guesser in every fucking post she pulls out of her ass.

sammie boy, a profane ad hominem attack makes your appear bitter and stupid. You wouldn't want everyone to see you as I do, now would you?

Yeah, that's a big worry of mine: How Idiots Might See Me.

I'll try not to lose any sleep.

Is that the best you've got?

 

[Zander]

This whole thread scares me!!

 

[Ragnar]

Leery About Liberal, Conservative Research Findings | Therapy Soup

PsychCentral’s founder, Dr. John Grohol, suggests that research studies be put to the test themselves. He discusses how and why flawed research happens.

And what is the overarching cause? Bias.

Dr. Grohol writes: ”…here’s the real troubling aspect — these kinds of biased studies appear in all sorts of journals. JAMA, NEJM and the BMJ are not immune from publishing crappy, flawed studies in medicine and psychology. We think of “respectability” of a journal as some sort of sign of a gatekeeping role — that studies appearing in the most prestigious journals must be fundamentally sound.

“But that’s simply not true. The emperor is not only naked — his subjects have hidden his clothes in order to further their own careers.”

And except for religion and perhaps in some circles, race/ethnicity, what topic is more loaded, spiced, and seasoned, with a cherry-on-top with heated, passionate bias than politics?

I found it interesting that your article was written in response to the study, yet didn't really directly question the study itself.

The best it could do was some vague language about bias in the peer review system. It did not even attempt to address the methods, data, or conclusions of the study.

Even with that, it didn't say how and why bias directly assisted this article.

Thinking critically about the issues when you’ve been raised to believe/think there is only one right way (and taught to believe that those who believe/think differently are inferior), is no mean feat. I guess that’s why studies about about the psychological/physiological differences between Liberals and Conservatives leave me leery and dare I say it? Suspicious. Sure, the brain differences might very well be real. But I’d love to know more about the sample of individuals tested as well as the political persuasion of the researcher!

We should note that the study was done with student subjects. I would find it more convincing if the test subjects were from a variety of age and professional backgrounds.

You would have had to read the whole thing to catch the above.

The articles I brought links for only note the very limited methods used in the study and/or ask questions not addressed or broadly show how common bias can corrupt even good and well meaning scientific endeavors. Something that is not common knowledge among laypeople. (such as myself)

 

[geauxtohell]

This? Again?

Can't..............

stop..............

laughing!

While that might be an over-simplification of the functions of the cingulate cortex and amygdala, why is it a radical notion that neurophysiology drives behavior?

I suspect the original study was more cut and dry and the press inserted their own OPED into the findings.

Ya Think?

Hey, How about that sun rising in the East thingy? Think it might happen again tomorrow morning?

If that were so obvious, then why are so many conservatives on this thread throwing bitch fits about the study?

 

[Samson]

sammie boy, a profane ad hominem attack makes your appear bitter and stupid. You wouldn't want everyone to see you as I do, now would you?

Yeah, that's a big worry of mine: How Idiots Might See Me.

I'll try not to lose any sleep.

Is that the best you've got?

No, but it's the reply I thought you'd be able to understand.

Sorry if it went over your head.