Undead Astronauts

Huffpo has an article on the subject of Asian American voting tendencies. It’s nothing groundbreaking as we’ve known since 2004 that Asian Americans vote Democratic in presidential campaigns. The question is why, as Asians tend to be more family oriented and a significant number of them own their own businesses. The Huffpo author pronounces immigration issues and high education as the driving force for the trend, but there’s another important component he’s missing: religiosity. According to ARIS and the US Religious Landscape survey, somewhere around 23-27% of Asians are “Nones” unaffiliated with any organized religion (Irish and Jews are other groups with significant number of Nones). Another 21-30% are affiliated with Eastern religions like Hinduism and Buddhism. Also, the surveys show that those with no religion have different political affiliations than the rest of the population. In particular, there are many more Independent Nones than Republicans, while Democrats remain the same (as of 2008).

If Asian Nones are anything like the other Nones, then they’ll be more independent and less Republican. A key fact here, however, is that the percentage of Democrats is exactly the same between the US population and Nones. Nones are more likely to be swing voters than a base either one of the parties can rely on. I don’t have specific data on it, but it’s possible that those who follow Eastern religions are also less likely to be Republican simply because of the party’s strong identification with Christianity.

The 2004 vote was an important marker. That’s the first election after Bush Jr came to office, and it’s possible that his overtly religious political agenda turned a number of otherwise sympathetic Asian voters away from the Republican party.

(Sources: AAA, Asian-nation, ARIS)

1. should u attend an ivy? a post at gnxp shows a graph of mean earnings at age 28 vs US News rankings. this more than ever reinforces my opinion that colleges need to drop their unofficial asian quotas. i knew results from law school earnings resembled this graph, but didn’t know that it applied to the general college population so starkly.

2. some of you may have heard the recent news that atheists/agnostics tend to know more about religion than the ppl that actually believe. here’s the quiz they gave. of course this news should come as no surprise b/c religion correlates negatively w/ iq.

3. “it is pointless to ask whether a model is real, only whether it agrees with observation.” – stephen hawking in a particularly “there is no spoon” zen moment. he says there may never be a theory of everything. further reason to think today’s theoretical physicists are full of it.

satoshi kanazawa came out w/ a study last week that finds liberals, atheists, and male sexual exclusivity are linked to IQ. kanazawa is an evo psych guy and has some pretty kooky ideas, but his kookiness in this case only extends to how he thinks this came about and not the numbers indicating who has higher IQ.

frankly, i don’t understand the stated evo psych reasoning which says that these views would have hurt our ancestors in the past but now serve to “move the species forward” and are “evolutionarily novel.” well wtf does that mean? just b/c something is new, it’s mostly smarter ppl that will do it? eh, i suppose so, but not a strong argument. so i’m skipping over that. the important thing here is the numbers.

Very liberal IQ (socially, not economically) = 106
Very conservative IQ = 95

Not at all religious IQ = 103
Very religious IQ = 97

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