Today I Learned (TIL)

Edit: review from adjacent thread

There are some shenanigans in this paper so far, like using regional statistics (conservative places) to generalize about very particular sociopolitical cleavages (conservative ideology) and failure to control for, or even acknowledge, more obvious independent variables such as local economy, infrastructure, and socioeconomics.

This is directly contradictory to other super obvious evidence. Like the fact that conservative states have much lower life expectancy.

https://www.prb.org/resources/liberal-u-s-state-policies-linked-to-longer-lives/#:~:text=People%20in%20U.S.%20states%20with,environment%2C%20according%20to%20new%20research.

I think there's some tomfoolery with this study.

The paper doesn't even prove that they are healthier due to a greater sense of personal responsibility. It only theorizes this sense of personal responsibility is a possible cause. As others have pointed out the study results could be explained simply by picking conservatives that are upperclass and have more time/energy/money to spend on being healthy.

“Personality and Individual Differences”? I wonder who publishes that… aaand it’s Elsevier.

I wonder if conservatives feel personally responsible for persecuting lgbtq folks or their role as staunch defenders of legalized pedophilia in the form of child marraige. Maybe the systemic and pervasive racism they've baked into our country and legal system? Oh that's a feature not a bug?

This is such an amazing premise that seems to have absolutely zero grounding in reality. They should have tested the concept of "ignorance is bliss", because there is a whole of that going around and I could see it as a legitimate reason why they may in a mental health capacity be healthier.

When you are aware of the realities of the world they can take a psychological toll. It does make for a weird combination when you look at their overall "everyone is out to get you so you should hate everyone not like you" mentality, but at least they aren't worried about their countrymen pulling a civil war or any semblance of the realty of global warming or major health crisis like say a pandemic.

The idea that conservatives feel any capacity of responsibility for their political actions is just laughable. They would sooner shift blame than consider their ideology has any cracks. Faith doesn't allow them to consider they might be wrong and any information to the contrary is just fake news.

Now hold on they need to go vote for a guy that used the pandemic to try to kill his political rivals voters and then lied about losing the election to spark a coupt attempt to attempt to overthrow the duely elected government. They feel so responsible for it they are doing everything to play it down and pretend it didnt happen. But also they are the most patriotic people and don't forget that.

Publish date "2019" ya that makes sense. If this was the case before the pandemic it certainly isn't anymore.

The methodology of this study isn't very convincing IMO. Study 1 is irrelevant (self reported subjective data). Study 2 implys that a small sample size picking to use stairs instead of an elevator to go up one floor means one group is more healthy, this is meaningless IMO,. Study 3 just looks at which groups intend on quitting smoking, with the conservative group being more likely to be wanting to quit. I could jump to a number of conclusions from this that have nothing to do with "personal responsibility".

Overall what a waste of my time.

Edit: I just went and looked at the Reddit comments on this post, they also tore it apart with some decent numbers showing how wrong the this is.

Conservative statistics have a higher level of bullshit because they have a greater sense of fabricating correlations not based on fact.