Did any of the studies get subjects to do dexterity tasks with their left vs right hands or did they just ask them whether they're ambidextrous? Maybe all the ambidextrous liberals never figured out that they're ambidextrous.
Psychologists at their meaningless work, correlating stuff with other stuff. And the stuff is questionnaires. A lesbian friend once showed me their hand, and told me something about the length of her index and the ring finger. IIRC she said that this proves something, I don't remember what it was.
Just to be absolutely sure about a couple of things, this isn't an april fool's, right? And we can say all the words in the comments that you used in the post?
What's the baseline rate of ambidextrous people in the population? Also, is the standard being able to write with both hands equally well? Because that seems like it would be super rare. I have a tendency to distrust self-reports because small children have been telling me they're ambidextrous when they're clearly not.
I've heard stories of ambidexterous people being forced to choose one in class by their teachers at a young age. While we're speculating, we may as well speculate reverse causality here.
Maybe being forced to pick a hand is more common in areas where support for auth is high, and that's why the original study found what it found.
Maybe because your data doesn't have so many people from those areas, you can't detect the effect and instead are just getting lizardmanned.
"The paper didn't say exactly where it did the study, but some minimal detective work suggests three sites: the University of Louisville Kentucky, a second university in Louisville Kentucky I couldn't identify, and Schreiner University, a private Christian college in Texas."
"The survey was administered to a total of 297 undergraduates who participated in return for course credit. Most (N = 271) attended one of two Midwestern public universities located within ten miles of each other. We made an effort to also sample from a private university in the Southwest but, ultimately, few individuals participated (N = 26 total) and fewer still (N = 17) provided data that met criteria for inclusion outlined later in this paragraph. We, therefore, opted not to include their data in the analysis reported in this paper."
I would imagine the University of Louisville, Kentucky is one of the Midwestern public universities and Schreiner University is the private university in the Southwest. Another public university within ten miles of UL gives Jefferson Community and Technical College (it could also be Indiana University Southeast, but that's fourteen miles away) https://www.collegesimply.com/colleges/kentucky/louisville/public-colleges/
So how redneck are they? Well, going by their websites:
(1) UL - hard to say. Sporty? Seem to have a rivalry going on with University of Kentucky?
(2) Schreiner - founded by a Texas Ranger and run by Presbyterians, I guess that answers that? 😁
(3) Jefferson Community and Technical College - seems diverse. Probably mostly practical minded and geared towards "education to get you into a specific job" as well as remedial courses for the less academically-able.
I've long been fascinated by handedness and its surprising correlates. For a while I thought about learning to use my left hand more to reap the "benefits," but now I'm pretty sure the causation goes the other way. People with abnormal hemispheric dominance are more likely to have abnormal handedness, but using a particular hand probably doesn't significantly affect the brain.
I'm rubbish at biology though, so I'd love to hear others' thoughts on whether any of this research is actionable.
I remember reading a paper years ago about the link between ambidexterity and schizophrenia. On how schizophrenics where statistically more likely to be ambidextrous. The reasoning presented in the paper was that both brain hemispheres were more connected in ambidextrous people and lead to a higher amount of cross-talk between brain hemispheres which leads to cognition disorders.
However recent googling around is showing that left handed people tend to be more likely to be schizophrenic, not ambidextrous people.
"more likely to support authoritarian governments, demonstrate prejudice against "immigrants, homosexuals, Muslims, Mexicans, atheists, and liberals", and support violations of the Geneva Conventions in hypothetical scenarios."
Ah yes, the well known authoritarian position of...... opposition to the Geneva Conventions.
Do the same test but with the authoritarian answers being support for hate speech laws and gun control plus opposition to nuking fascist cities in WW2.
regarding the trans vs nonbinary thing: sure, in a vacuum, nonbinary more purely corresponds to "failure to choose". But this is confounded by the trans identity being high commitment, while a nonbinary identity can be much lower commitment. Thus you get more people who are only a little bit nonbinary identifying as such, while only those who are really really sure they're trans go through the whole ordeal associated with it (HRT etc).
- I think it's dubious to identify libertarianism as the opposite of authoritarianism. Libertarianism means a desire for less government (unless we redefine words the way Scott did in a recent post... which is fine, but I think most people understand the term this way). Some people want less government because they support the repeal of anti-discrimination laws and the freedom to live in communities defined on racial and religious lines.
- Eye dominance might be a better choice of variable than hand dominance, because it's not easily observable and not subject to social pressure. (I was never encouraged to write with my right hand, but I'm right-handed and left-eyed.)
- My jaw dropped when I saw the post title "Why Are Transgender People Immune To Optical Illusions?" But Scott bounced this off Zinnia Jones, who writes the wonderful GenderAnalysis.net blog, so it's cool.
Ambidexterity is used to include folks who are cross dominant (prefer a specific hand for different functions.) Given that this category is never noted, we don't know how many ambidextrous identifying people are actually cross dominant, which seems to me relevant to the possible correlations posed here.
"Need for cognitive closure" sounds like a more specific/complicated version of "satisfaction with/tendency towards local maxima", and a bit too anthropomorphic at that.
Trans (incl non-binary, which is generally also trans. Bisexual isn't 'can't choose', but rather 'won't choose') today requires high activation energy to overcome a strong local-maxima of "probably cis". This matches the observation that trans (indeed all LGBTQ) identification is increasing in cultures that are reducing the gradient for escaping the "you're cis/straight/etc" local-maxima. If people remain ambidextrous despite the general gradient towards favoring development of one side over the other, we should expect them to similarly be more resilient to being boxed into the gender they were assigned at birth. With the same activation energy, someone resilient to gradients would be more likely to transition.
I think it's the same for any heterodox exploration/development, including the self-actualized authoritarians within largely non-authoritarian demographics.
Maybe it's an interesting speculation that tendency to follow gradients is protective against mental illness. Follow the gradients that everyone else follows, and maybe you won't hit the activation energy for something bad like "maybe the voices in my head are real and dire warnings".
I am however concerned that my model here seems to answer these questions *too* readily, which is always suspicious.
But I wonder if what's actually being found here is a general factor of *self-identification* as weird, unique, non-conforming, etc.
Imagine two people who are both above averagely dexterous with their non-dominant hand, both moderately gender non-conforming, and both nerdy and socially awkward, but one is the type of person who likes to think of themselves as weird and unique, and the other isn't. The first will describe themselves as ambidextrous, transgender, and autistic, while the second will describe themselves as none of the above; hence the correlations.
"Second, a question asking respondents to rank their support for more open immigration, on a 1 - 5 scale. I figured that was a fair proxy for prejudice against immigrants, Mexicans, and Muslims."
I have a problem with applying the label "prejudice" to an opposition to open borders that is often based on lots of relevant evidence, such the awareness of racial disparities in IQ, FBI crime statistics, income, taxes paid, welfare consumed, propensity for scientific achievement, etc. It reminds me of creationists calling scientists' aversion to creationism a "prejudice" as if the scientists hadn't come across any evidence against it.
I'd like to see a pro-immigration guy sit down and calculate how many utilons more open immigration would provide for the existing inhabitants of the US and their posterity, taking into account the decline of average IQ, reduced per capita tax receipts, increase in crime for the 2nd+ generation, and so forth.
I'd guess from international HDI and IQ comparisons that life is at least 10% worse for each 5 point drop in the national average IQ, so if a country with a population of 330M and an average IQ of 100 brings in an extra 20M people with an average IQ of 85, the new average IQ is 99 and life is 2% worse for the 330M and their posterity indefinitely. Total cost over the first century is 660 million QALYs. Maybe it's partially a one-way ratchet where a high national average IQ can set up institutions that the country can continue to benefit from after the IQ drops, up to a point, but if it goes even lower those institutions break down.
This reminds me of project prevention, which is a charity that's probably even more cost-effective than malaria prevention, because it pays underclass drug addicts to partake of long-term contraception, to prevent low IQ unwanted children from being born. The math above works out such that preventing an IQ 70 kid from being born is worth about 60% of a QALY per year forever for everyone else, assuming he would have reproduced at about replacement. If there's no discount rate because future people's lives are as important as our own, then the positive utility of preventing that birth is infinite, if we ignore the singularity or other hypothetical discontinuities. Infinite utility for $1000 seems like a good deal. It probably ought to be discounted by the probability of some kind of future discontinuity in the utility of the national average IQ, though. Strong AI might make it irrelevant in 40 years. But as a precaution we should be reluctant to rely on some hypothetical future discontinuity. The uncertainty around when strong AI will happen is very large. It might be a century or two. Or we might never even get there due to an idiocracy scenario. Dysgenics is an existential risk to our potential to invent strong AI and colonize the galaxy. If we get dumber we'll continue using up the earth's resources without accomplishing any technological progress.
Not sure why the effective altruism community doesn't put more effort into eugenics, other than the taboo.
Out of an abundance of caution I will slightly obfuscate a certain word, beginning with N, which was filtered on the old site. The thing about this speculative analysis is that Novoreactionaries are not homogeneous, and those who post here or who posted on SSC are less likely to conform to the stereotype of "need for cognitive closure". You have the Blut und Boden adjacents, who don't post here (or who post until banned, I guess?). You have the amerikaners, who are off doing amerikaner things. And then you have the other guys. I know for a fact that Curtis "M*ldb*g" Yarvin reads this stack, because he posted about it a few weeks ago. I take it that everyone agrees that he is comprehended under the "N" word at issue? Here's a bright idea of his that he recently advocated: monarchy with adoptive trans-Salic succession. That is, every monarch must be a Queen, every Queen must be a transwoman, and each Queen *adopts* Her successor. Say what you like about this, but I don't think it bespeaks a "need for cognitive closure". And even if you think he was just joshing your shorts, that per se shows a certain ambiguity that could easily correlate to hemispheric non-dominance, ambidexterity, blah-de-blah. Bottom line: novoreactionaries who post here are just like other TRUE weirdos: they screw with your statistics. On a personal note, I consider myself strongly right-hand dominant, but a few weeks ago I started learning guitar. What struck me was how well my non-dominant hand can master things – it's just a matter of practice. I suspect that a considerable part of ambidexterity is determined by willingness to practice with the so-called non-dominant hand, and that eventually this may even lead to gross changes in brain morphology. The causation is just too complicated to tease out with blunt instruments like the political ones used here.
Greg Cochran used to suggest schizophrenia was pathogenic due to clustering of births in certain months, but now he thinks it's like low IQ: lots of rare deleterious genes of very small effect presumably due to mutational load and not any kind of alternate "strategy".
Being persistently nonbinary might be linked to lower need for cognitive closure than being trans, but it's widely observed that trans people tend to don a nonbinary identity before deciding that they're trans, as a kind of stepping stone. Without looking at any data, I bet there there's more of these people who are nonbinary as a stepping stone to being trans than there are persistently nonbinary people, and that that genre of nonbinary person is likely to have greater need for cognitive closure than someone who jumps into being trans right away, while someone who ends up persistently nonbinary has less need for gcognitive closure than either of the other categories.
I am really tired of these "measurements of authoritarianism". I'm going to try and avoid politics, as much as possible, and just criticize these methods. For example, they say that supporting Trump = supporting authoritarianism.
Now I've written a couple of posts saying Trump was better than those opposing him. For example, that H.C. bringing back Kissinger, friend of tyrants all over the planet, made her utterly unacceptable. And that the deep state - the American national security apparatus - had done worse things that Trump was capable of, such as ratting out Nelson Mandela to the Afrikaner cops, murdering Patrice Lumumba and supporting the overthrow of democratic regimes all over the planet. Does that qualify as support for authoritarianism?
(Yes, yes, I support Trump out of my respect for Mandela - trust me the irony, no, insanity, of that statement is not lost on me)
And what about all those who supported him out of 4chan style nihilism - 'for the lulz' or simply out of a visceral desire to 'burn it all down'? (Incidentally, the one promise he came damn close to fulfilling). That's anarchism, literally the opposite of authoritarianism.
I just want to highlight the problems of these polls and this measurement.
I don't understand why you're trying to draw conclusions from unconditional means. If you throw in some controls, then you'll quickly find how unreliable your results are and how problematic endogeneity is.
For example, control for sex, age, IQ, income, race, and sexuality. Then handedness is not statistically significant for Trump support with a p-value of 0.153; and Bayesian regression gives 95% credibility interval [-.4686263 .0350478]. No good.
Do the same with immigration and you find a p-value of 0.098; a credibility interval of [-.1053942 .523476]. No good.
Libertarian is insignificant with p-value 0.784; and credibility interval of [-.101917 .0652768].
Neoreactionary gives a p-value of 0.129; but finally a credibility interval that doesn't contain zero: [-.1340025 -.0127485].
All in all, there doesn't seem to be much here. Even the proxies for authoritarianism are only weakly correlated. (I'm also skeptical of the reliability of data set that purports to have a mean respondent IQ of 138. Yeah, sure.)
Stupid question: what's their definition of ambidextrous? For strength I use my right hand. For detail work, I use my left hand. I bat right-handed, but write left-handed. Am I considered to be ambidextrous? Or am I only ambidextrous if can do all my strength and detail things with both hands?
Interesting story. I worked for network engineering company, and they shipped 35 of us to Hong Kong to work on the then new HK Airport. They put us up in nice hotel for the duration. In fact the hotel was packed with contractors from all over the world who were working on the airport. One night I went down and signed into the gym. The checkin hostess said, "Oh you must work for <my company's name>." There were lots of us gwai lo staying at the hotel, so I asked her how she knew which company I worked for. She said, "You're all left-handed."
The next day at work, I took a quick survey of which people on my team were left-handed. 20 out of 35 were! There must be something about data network engineering that attracts left-handers...
I spent this whole article wonder how the original paper had a large enough n to find anything at all, because they would only have had 2 or 3—maybe 6 if they had the same kind of population as Slate Star Codex—ambidextrous people.
Well, it turns out the original paper uses an extremely loose definition of ambidexterity based on what hand you use for various tasks, and they required a score of 80/100 or higher on hand consistency to count as monodextrous. This resulted in them counting 36.6% of their participants as ambidextrous!
Probably the difference in results can be entirely accounted for by the fact that you were looking at completely different definitions of ambidexterity.
"Why would evolution want anything other than the maximum need for cognitive closure?"
Maybe some evolutionary biologists can comment on this. But I strongly suspect at least for human societies - groups - that society is more stable if there are enough people who can a) disagree somewhat with a leader but b) also follow that leader. There's a suspension of disbelief in there, maybe it reflects a lower level of need for cognitive closure. Having an impulse to cooperate that is stronger than the need to be sure is a beneficial way to be for some fraction of a society. Another part of the society contains people who need cognitive closure and therefore argue to determine where the closure is. If society has only those people, nothing gets done. A solid balance of leaders and followers makes things happen. Maybe?
It would be interesting to dig a little more into what respondents thought was ambidextrous behavior. I'm sorta-kinda ambidextrous, but what that means in my case is that I do small-motor tasks with my left hand and large-motor ones with my right hand. I suspect that there are lot more people like this than those who are genuinely ambidextrous, i.e., able to do some set of tasks with either hand.
As a matter of epistemic hygiene, please do write down your preregistration next time. A piece of paper only you look at is fine, I don't mind trusting you. But false memories are a thing, particularly regarding fidgety details and confirmation bias.
I'm right-hand dominant. In 2013, I broke my right wrist and was forced into using my left wrist. I became reasonably proficient in writing with my left hand. The experience was painful and I'd rather it never happened, but I believe it had a permanent - and beneficial - effect on my brain and general coordination. I even became a bit more flexible on my left side.
Libertarian is a problem. The "Libertarian Party" does not support libertarian ideas, except a very narrow range of them that support those currently wealthy and powerful. So I don't think that's a good proxy. Supporting "those currently wealthy and powerful" is a reasonable surrogate for "authoritarian", so you're going to get a very mixed set of responses when you interpret it that way.
"Self-identification" as ambidextrous seems problematic as a definition. Hard to tell whether the people answering this question are really answering the same question. I would probably call myself right-handed because I throw and write with my right hand, but I eat with my left hand. More interestingly, I jump and hurdle leading with my left leg, which I wouldn't even have known if not for the fact I competed as a hurdler and long jumper in high school. I also can throw reasonably well with my left hand, but I can't see any point in developing the ability equally with both.
This also hits at a general problem I see with social science research. I can't even imagine how to formulate a coherent theory why this correlation should mean anything even if it exists that isn't some just so story with no basic grounding in accepted principles of thinking and behavior. No matter how well some writers can convince themselves this has to do with need for cognitive closure, how on earth do I distinguish that as a reader from someone fishing through the literature for every possible cognitive trait before finding out that kinda sorta fits statistically with whatever tiny bit of research? Not to mention the research is never representative of humanity as a whole, as you just found out by comparing with your readership. This is the common critique of psychology that it isn't really studying humans so much as American university students with enough free time to volunteer for a study. The results may or may not generalize to everyone else.
For the record, I thought there would be an obvious explanation: being ambidextrous is rather not something that you are born with, it is rather something that
1) you are raised to be (or in most case, raised not to be). Depending on parents and culture, children are strongly encouraged to write with the right hand, and do other things with the right hand as well.
2) you identify with. Ambidexterity is a spectrum -- more than half of the people also use the non-dominant hand for simple tasks like brooming or brushing their teeths. But the number drops sharply when tasks become more complex. So where you draw the line and whether you call yourself "ambidextrous" is highly culture-dependent.
So I decided to test it by looking at the fraction of ambidextrous people in the US, UK, and Germany. (I wanted to include France as well, but it had too few participants). Other than handedness, the country of living is birth-specific. (Only a small fraction of people change their country of living after birth.) I expected to see clear differences, which would be one of many other hidden common factors with political opinions etc.
Yeah, turns out it rather wasn't that. The fractions were 2.6%, 1.9%, 2.3%, respectively. Far from the differences I expected. I didn't even bother to check, I am pretty sure that it's not significant.
Of course, it's still possible that I was unfortunate with the countries (or rather, the statistical power was too low, because the number of UK/GER participants were too small), or that there are other cofounders that would show it clearly. Actually, my prior was so high that I still believe that, but I am less confident now. Anyway, I did an experiment and it surprised me, so I thought I should share it.
Quite a few comments here discussing what we actually mean when we say someone is "ambidextrous". I myself have very mixed handedness (I do half of all things lefty and half of all things righty, and CANNOT switch for any of them). I've never self-identified as ambidextrous - when I was growing up I always heard the word used in reference to the concept of someone who can skillfully do any task and switch hands interchangeably. It always struck me as being in the realm of science fiction, and I'm not sure if I've ever seen anyone truly demonstrate it (although I suppose a decent number of professional baseball players have shown it on my TV screen).
I'm a little hung up on the "failure to choose" model of nonbinary people. If at least some masculine and feminine behaviors are a natural product of hormonal and brain traits, is it not conceivable that some people may be born with a particular set of hormones and brain traits that don't produce a clearly masculine or feminine outcome? This obviously can happen in children who are physically intersex.
As for those who aren't physically intersex, the existence of transgender people supports the notion that a brain can exhibit opposite-gendered patterning and behavior in someone who physically appears consistent with their chromosomes. This model seems to allow for some people to fall in between, as neurologically intersex despite being physically consistent with their chromosomes. In which case, the need-for-cognitive-closure might not correlate with their reported gender identity.
I could imagine someone with a very strong need for cognitive closure insisting:
"No really, I'm neither masculine nor feminine, it's a simple fact and this is not a semantics debate. I know exactly where I stand and there is no gray area here. This is my brain, plain and simple. I hate ambiguity and I need closure. Let's settle this right now so I don't have to answer 'neither' to the m/f question. What's a nice clear word for that? Nonbinary." ...and they would be right.
Still not sure how seriously I should take the above post, considering the date.
"ANOVA says the differences here are statistically significant, p = 0.01, which is also the impression I get just looking at the table."
Typically you'd use a chi squared test for this, not an ANOVA. I don't know enough about this to say whether the ANOVA works for proportions given certain assumptions (it certainly might). But why not just use a chi squared test?
Second, an ANOVA only tells you that there is a difference between *some* of the 7 groups you compared. There are 21 comparisons you can make with 7 groups. We don't know which comparisons are significant, let alone after you correct for multiple comparisons.
If survey respondents provided info on e.g. their US state or zip code, then you could create an additional column in your dataset consisting of the most common political orientation in their area, then use that column to create yet another column for whether they are normal or abnormal relative to the politics that are common in their area. Then you could see how ambidexterity is related to that.
Most professional athletes are to the right of where their demographics would suggest, so I didn't get much from the article.
It looks like the most ambidextrous President was the broadly talented James Garfield. Supposedly, he could write Greek with one hand while writing Latin with the other, but his son said he'd never seen him do that. 19th Century Americans enjoyed making up tall tales, so I figure that was a stretcher. But Garfield was definitely ambidextrous.
"Seven other left-handers have occupied the Oval Office since Garfield, including Herbert Hoover, Harry S. Truman, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Though Reagan wrote with his right hand, he is believed to be a natural lefty who was trained to write with his right hand early in life, as was common in schools before the last 60 years."
At some point, Americans stopped trying to force lefthanders to write righthanded. While Reagan was a lefty switched over to righty during his school years, in the 1992 Presidential debate, you could watch all three candidates (Bush the Elder, Clinton, and Perot) take notes lefthanded.
As a cat, I find it very hard to answer questions along the lines of "do you support candidate X?"
I don't support candidates, I support policies, and then prioritize, taking in account a variety of factors and then vote for the candidate most likely to get elected and implement those policies. That said, I usually end up voting for fringe candidates, simply because I find mainstream candidates so odious.
This is probably why cats are not allowed to vote in most locations.
I'm thinking that you are mostly picking up an effect whether or not you deem yourself ambidextrous. There is going to be a large grey area where individual psychology and sense of being different and looking for an explanation is going to play a substantial role.
As I understand it, there's ambidextrous and "mixed handedness". I usually answer that I'm right handed, as I use that for writing. I think I took that survey and probably would have answered that because I'm definitely not ambidextrous. But I eat left-handed, use my phone lefthanded, and my dominant eye used to be the left, but that appears to have changed. So technically I'm mixed. In most other ways, I test as "more open" as well (J instead of P, high Openness score on Big 5). Voted Trump, believe in restrictive immigration, and the idea that either of those is authoritarian or signifies need for cognitive closure is flat out goofy.
You may think that self-identified libertarians stand in opposition to authoritarianism based on what libertarianism should mean, but in practice that relationship is much murkier, enough so that as someone with a lot of appreciation for libertarian philosophy, I can't self-identify as libertarian lest I be completely misunderstood/miscategorized.
You did four tests; did you do Bonferroni correction?
Can you PLEASE switch to Bayesian analysis? This p-statistics stuff is pure crap.
Did any of the studies get subjects to do dexterity tasks with their left vs right hands or did they just ask them whether they're ambidextrous? Maybe all the ambidextrous liberals never figured out that they're ambidextrous.
Psychologists at their meaningless work, correlating stuff with other stuff. And the stuff is questionnaires. A lesbian friend once showed me their hand, and told me something about the length of her index and the ring finger. IIRC she said that this proves something, I don't remember what it was.
Money quote: The more likely you are to choose "nonstandard" answers, the more mentally ill you will be.
Seems very Foucaultian innit?
Just to be absolutely sure about a couple of things, this isn't an april fool's, right? And we can say all the words in the comments that you used in the post?
What's the baseline rate of ambidextrous people in the population? Also, is the standard being able to write with both hands equally well? Because that seems like it would be super rare. I have a tendency to distrust self-reports because small children have been telling me they're ambidextrous when they're clearly not.
Did they really need a study to prove that ambidextrous people are more even-handed?
> consistently-handed people (ie people who are not ambidextrous)
But what about the ambisinistrous? :D
I've heard stories of ambidexterous people being forced to choose one in class by their teachers at a young age. While we're speculating, we may as well speculate reverse causality here.
Maybe being forced to pick a hand is more common in areas where support for auth is high, and that's why the original study found what it found.
Maybe because your data doesn't have so many people from those areas, you can't detect the effect and instead are just getting lizardmanned.
Maybe none of this.
"The paper didn't say exactly where it did the study, but some minimal detective work suggests three sites: the University of Louisville Kentucky, a second university in Louisville Kentucky I couldn't identify, and Schreiner University, a private Christian college in Texas."
Given my consistent-handed authoritarian need for cognitive closure, I'm betting you're correct. Another version of this study https://louisville.edu/psychology/lyle/lab/lyle-grillo-2020 states that:
"The survey was administered to a total of 297 undergraduates who participated in return for course credit. Most (N = 271) attended one of two Midwestern public universities located within ten miles of each other. We made an effort to also sample from a private university in the Southwest but, ultimately, few individuals participated (N = 26 total) and fewer still (N = 17) provided data that met criteria for inclusion outlined later in this paragraph. We, therefore, opted not to include their data in the analysis reported in this paper."
I would imagine the University of Louisville, Kentucky is one of the Midwestern public universities and Schreiner University is the private university in the Southwest. Another public university within ten miles of UL gives Jefferson Community and Technical College (it could also be Indiana University Southeast, but that's fourteen miles away) https://www.collegesimply.com/colleges/kentucky/louisville/public-colleges/
So how redneck are they? Well, going by their websites:
(1) UL - hard to say. Sporty? Seem to have a rivalry going on with University of Kentucky?
(2) Schreiner - founded by a Texas Ranger and run by Presbyterians, I guess that answers that? 😁
(3) Jefferson Community and Technical College - seems diverse. Probably mostly practical minded and geared towards "education to get you into a specific job" as well as remedial courses for the less academically-able.
I think the scihub link may be out of date or something, I get redirected to scam sites when trying to visit it.
Regarding the lizardman explanation of your results - did anyone claim to be both Marxist and pro-Trump?
Do we even know where handedness comes from and why it exists?
I've long been fascinated by handedness and its surprising correlates. For a while I thought about learning to use my left hand more to reap the "benefits," but now I'm pretty sure the causation goes the other way. People with abnormal hemispheric dominance are more likely to have abnormal handedness, but using a particular hand probably doesn't significantly affect the brain.
I'm rubbish at biology though, so I'd love to hear others' thoughts on whether any of this research is actionable.
I remember reading a paper years ago about the link between ambidexterity and schizophrenia. On how schizophrenics where statistically more likely to be ambidextrous. The reasoning presented in the paper was that both brain hemispheres were more connected in ambidextrous people and lead to a higher amount of cross-talk between brain hemispheres which leads to cognition disorders.
However recent googling around is showing that left handed people tend to be more likely to be schizophrenic, not ambidextrous people.
"more likely to support authoritarian governments, demonstrate prejudice against "immigrants, homosexuals, Muslims, Mexicans, atheists, and liberals", and support violations of the Geneva Conventions in hypothetical scenarios."
Ah yes, the well known authoritarian position of...... opposition to the Geneva Conventions.
Do the same test but with the authoritarian answers being support for hate speech laws and gun control plus opposition to nuking fascist cities in WW2.
regarding the trans vs nonbinary thing: sure, in a vacuum, nonbinary more purely corresponds to "failure to choose". But this is confounded by the trans identity being high commitment, while a nonbinary identity can be much lower commitment. Thus you get more people who are only a little bit nonbinary identifying as such, while only those who are really really sure they're trans go through the whole ordeal associated with it (HRT etc).
A few random observations:
- I think it's dubious to identify libertarianism as the opposite of authoritarianism. Libertarianism means a desire for less government (unless we redefine words the way Scott did in a recent post... which is fine, but I think most people understand the term this way). Some people want less government because they support the repeal of anti-discrimination laws and the freedom to live in communities defined on racial and religious lines.
- Eye dominance might be a better choice of variable than hand dominance, because it's not easily observable and not subject to social pressure. (I was never encouraged to write with my right hand, but I'm right-handed and left-eyed.)
- My jaw dropped when I saw the post title "Why Are Transgender People Immune To Optical Illusions?" But Scott bounced this off Zinnia Jones, who writes the wonderful GenderAnalysis.net blog, so it's cool.
Ambidexterity is used to include folks who are cross dominant (prefer a specific hand for different functions.) Given that this category is never noted, we don't know how many ambidextrous identifying people are actually cross dominant, which seems to me relevant to the possible correlations posed here.
Anybody know if there are relevant correlations with cross dominance (ie left handed, right footed, and vice versa) and ambidexterity?
"Need for cognitive closure" sounds like a more specific/complicated version of "satisfaction with/tendency towards local maxima", and a bit too anthropomorphic at that.
Trans (incl non-binary, which is generally also trans. Bisexual isn't 'can't choose', but rather 'won't choose') today requires high activation energy to overcome a strong local-maxima of "probably cis". This matches the observation that trans (indeed all LGBTQ) identification is increasing in cultures that are reducing the gradient for escaping the "you're cis/straight/etc" local-maxima. If people remain ambidextrous despite the general gradient towards favoring development of one side over the other, we should expect them to similarly be more resilient to being boxed into the gender they were assigned at birth. With the same activation energy, someone resilient to gradients would be more likely to transition.
I think it's the same for any heterodox exploration/development, including the self-actualized authoritarians within largely non-authoritarian demographics.
Maybe it's an interesting speculation that tendency to follow gradients is protective against mental illness. Follow the gradients that everyone else follows, and maybe you won't hit the activation energy for something bad like "maybe the voices in my head are real and dire warnings".
I am however concerned that my model here seems to answer these questions *too* readily, which is always suspicious.
Fascinating - I love these kinds of posts.
But I wonder if what's actually being found here is a general factor of *self-identification* as weird, unique, non-conforming, etc.
Imagine two people who are both above averagely dexterous with their non-dominant hand, both moderately gender non-conforming, and both nerdy and socially awkward, but one is the type of person who likes to think of themselves as weird and unique, and the other isn't. The first will describe themselves as ambidextrous, transgender, and autistic, while the second will describe themselves as none of the above; hence the correlations.
So ambidexters are Trump-supporting Marxist neoreactionaries. I always suspected it...
"Second, a question asking respondents to rank their support for more open immigration, on a 1 - 5 scale. I figured that was a fair proxy for prejudice against immigrants, Mexicans, and Muslims."
I have a problem with applying the label "prejudice" to an opposition to open borders that is often based on lots of relevant evidence, such the awareness of racial disparities in IQ, FBI crime statistics, income, taxes paid, welfare consumed, propensity for scientific achievement, etc. It reminds me of creationists calling scientists' aversion to creationism a "prejudice" as if the scientists hadn't come across any evidence against it.
I'd like to see a pro-immigration guy sit down and calculate how many utilons more open immigration would provide for the existing inhabitants of the US and their posterity, taking into account the decline of average IQ, reduced per capita tax receipts, increase in crime for the 2nd+ generation, and so forth.
I'd guess from international HDI and IQ comparisons that life is at least 10% worse for each 5 point drop in the national average IQ, so if a country with a population of 330M and an average IQ of 100 brings in an extra 20M people with an average IQ of 85, the new average IQ is 99 and life is 2% worse for the 330M and their posterity indefinitely. Total cost over the first century is 660 million QALYs. Maybe it's partially a one-way ratchet where a high national average IQ can set up institutions that the country can continue to benefit from after the IQ drops, up to a point, but if it goes even lower those institutions break down.
This reminds me of project prevention, which is a charity that's probably even more cost-effective than malaria prevention, because it pays underclass drug addicts to partake of long-term contraception, to prevent low IQ unwanted children from being born. The math above works out such that preventing an IQ 70 kid from being born is worth about 60% of a QALY per year forever for everyone else, assuming he would have reproduced at about replacement. If there's no discount rate because future people's lives are as important as our own, then the positive utility of preventing that birth is infinite, if we ignore the singularity or other hypothetical discontinuities. Infinite utility for $1000 seems like a good deal. It probably ought to be discounted by the probability of some kind of future discontinuity in the utility of the national average IQ, though. Strong AI might make it irrelevant in 40 years. But as a precaution we should be reluctant to rely on some hypothetical future discontinuity. The uncertainty around when strong AI will happen is very large. It might be a century or two. Or we might never even get there due to an idiocracy scenario. Dysgenics is an existential risk to our potential to invent strong AI and colonize the galaxy. If we get dumber we'll continue using up the earth's resources without accomplishing any technological progress.
Not sure why the effective altruism community doesn't put more effort into eugenics, other than the taboo.
Typo: "If you have high need for cognitive closure, you seek out information that disagrees with you." -- "high" should be "low"
Fun fact: since "dexter" just means "on the right" and "ambi" means "both" "ambidextrous" means "right handed with both hands."
The 2020 SSC also had all of these questions, so you can check if it replicated.
Out of an abundance of caution I will slightly obfuscate a certain word, beginning with N, which was filtered on the old site. The thing about this speculative analysis is that Novoreactionaries are not homogeneous, and those who post here or who posted on SSC are less likely to conform to the stereotype of "need for cognitive closure". You have the Blut und Boden adjacents, who don't post here (or who post until banned, I guess?). You have the amerikaners, who are off doing amerikaner things. And then you have the other guys. I know for a fact that Curtis "M*ldb*g" Yarvin reads this stack, because he posted about it a few weeks ago. I take it that everyone agrees that he is comprehended under the "N" word at issue? Here's a bright idea of his that he recently advocated: monarchy with adoptive trans-Salic succession. That is, every monarch must be a Queen, every Queen must be a transwoman, and each Queen *adopts* Her successor. Say what you like about this, but I don't think it bespeaks a "need for cognitive closure". And even if you think he was just joshing your shorts, that per se shows a certain ambiguity that could easily correlate to hemispheric non-dominance, ambidexterity, blah-de-blah. Bottom line: novoreactionaries who post here are just like other TRUE weirdos: they screw with your statistics. On a personal note, I consider myself strongly right-hand dominant, but a few weeks ago I started learning guitar. What struck me was how well my non-dominant hand can master things – it's just a matter of practice. I suspect that a considerable part of ambidexterity is determined by willingness to practice with the so-called non-dominant hand, and that eventually this may even lead to gross changes in brain morphology. The causation is just too complicated to tease out with blunt instruments like the political ones used here.
Greg Cochran used to suggest schizophrenia was pathogenic due to clustering of births in certain months, but now he thinks it's like low IQ: lots of rare deleterious genes of very small effect presumably due to mutational load and not any kind of alternate "strategy".
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2017/12/27/strategies/
Being persistently nonbinary might be linked to lower need for cognitive closure than being trans, but it's widely observed that trans people tend to don a nonbinary identity before deciding that they're trans, as a kind of stepping stone. Without looking at any data, I bet there there's more of these people who are nonbinary as a stepping stone to being trans than there are persistently nonbinary people, and that that genre of nonbinary person is likely to have greater need for cognitive closure than someone who jumps into being trans right away, while someone who ends up persistently nonbinary has less need for gcognitive closure than either of the other categories.
I am really tired of these "measurements of authoritarianism". I'm going to try and avoid politics, as much as possible, and just criticize these methods. For example, they say that supporting Trump = supporting authoritarianism.
Now I've written a couple of posts saying Trump was better than those opposing him. For example, that H.C. bringing back Kissinger, friend of tyrants all over the planet, made her utterly unacceptable. And that the deep state - the American national security apparatus - had done worse things that Trump was capable of, such as ratting out Nelson Mandela to the Afrikaner cops, murdering Patrice Lumumba and supporting the overthrow of democratic regimes all over the planet. Does that qualify as support for authoritarianism?
(Yes, yes, I support Trump out of my respect for Mandela - trust me the irony, no, insanity, of that statement is not lost on me)
And what about all those who supported him out of 4chan style nihilism - 'for the lulz' or simply out of a visceral desire to 'burn it all down'? (Incidentally, the one promise he came damn close to fulfilling). That's anarchism, literally the opposite of authoritarianism.
I just want to highlight the problems of these polls and this measurement.
I don't understand why you're trying to draw conclusions from unconditional means. If you throw in some controls, then you'll quickly find how unreliable your results are and how problematic endogeneity is.
For example, control for sex, age, IQ, income, race, and sexuality. Then handedness is not statistically significant for Trump support with a p-value of 0.153; and Bayesian regression gives 95% credibility interval [-.4686263 .0350478]. No good.
Do the same with immigration and you find a p-value of 0.098; a credibility interval of [-.1053942 .523476]. No good.
Libertarian is insignificant with p-value 0.784; and credibility interval of [-.101917 .0652768].
Neoreactionary gives a p-value of 0.129; but finally a credibility interval that doesn't contain zero: [-.1340025 -.0127485].
All in all, there doesn't seem to be much here. Even the proxies for authoritarianism are only weakly correlated. (I'm also skeptical of the reliability of data set that purports to have a mean respondent IQ of 138. Yeah, sure.)
Stupid question: what's their definition of ambidextrous? For strength I use my right hand. For detail work, I use my left hand. I bat right-handed, but write left-handed. Am I considered to be ambidextrous? Or am I only ambidextrous if can do all my strength and detail things with both hands?
Interesting story. I worked for network engineering company, and they shipped 35 of us to Hong Kong to work on the then new HK Airport. They put us up in nice hotel for the duration. In fact the hotel was packed with contractors from all over the world who were working on the airport. One night I went down and signed into the gym. The checkin hostess said, "Oh you must work for <my company's name>." There were lots of us gwai lo staying at the hotel, so I asked her how she knew which company I worked for. She said, "You're all left-handed."
The next day at work, I took a quick survey of which people on my team were left-handed. 20 out of 35 were! There must be something about data network engineering that attracts left-handers...
I spent this whole article wonder how the original paper had a large enough n to find anything at all, because they would only have had 2 or 3—maybe 6 if they had the same kind of population as Slate Star Codex—ambidextrous people.
Well, it turns out the original paper uses an extremely loose definition of ambidexterity based on what hand you use for various tasks, and they required a score of 80/100 or higher on hand consistency to count as monodextrous. This resulted in them counting 36.6% of their participants as ambidextrous!
Probably the difference in results can be entirely accounted for by the fact that you were looking at completely different definitions of ambidexterity.
Did you observe differences between left-handed and right-handed people? Were these bigger or smaller than the difference from ambidextrous people?
You should also consider children that grow up in bilingual households.
"Why would evolution want anything other than the maximum need for cognitive closure?"
Maybe some evolutionary biologists can comment on this. But I strongly suspect at least for human societies - groups - that society is more stable if there are enough people who can a) disagree somewhat with a leader but b) also follow that leader. There's a suspension of disbelief in there, maybe it reflects a lower level of need for cognitive closure. Having an impulse to cooperate that is stronger than the need to be sure is a beneficial way to be for some fraction of a society. Another part of the society contains people who need cognitive closure and therefore argue to determine where the closure is. If society has only those people, nothing gets done. A solid balance of leaders and followers makes things happen. Maybe?
It would be interesting to dig a little more into what respondents thought was ambidextrous behavior. I'm sorta-kinda ambidextrous, but what that means in my case is that I do small-motor tasks with my left hand and large-motor ones with my right hand. I suspect that there are lot more people like this than those who are genuinely ambidextrous, i.e., able to do some set of tasks with either hand.
Comment on this post if you're one of the 144 Marxists. We need to build up a positive community here.
Scott, you might be interested in a new preprint arguing for left-wing authoritarianism: https://psyarxiv.com/3nprq
Been loving the increased rate of posts
As a matter of epistemic hygiene, please do write down your preregistration next time. A piece of paper only you look at is fine, I don't mind trusting you. But false memories are a thing, particularly regarding fidgety details and confirmation bias.
I'm right-hand dominant. In 2013, I broke my right wrist and was forced into using my left wrist. I became reasonably proficient in writing with my left hand. The experience was painful and I'd rather it never happened, but I believe it had a permanent - and beneficial - effect on my brain and general coordination. I even became a bit more flexible on my left side.
From this it sounds like "need for cognitive closure" is pretty tightly correlated by "openness" from the ocean model.
Also, pardon the joke, but do the ambidextrous abstain from coffee? Because I hear that "coffee is for closers"
Libertarian is a problem. The "Libertarian Party" does not support libertarian ideas, except a very narrow range of them that support those currently wealthy and powerful. So I don't think that's a good proxy. Supporting "those currently wealthy and powerful" is a reasonable surrogate for "authoritarian", so you're going to get a very mixed set of responses when you interpret it that way.
"Self-identification" as ambidextrous seems problematic as a definition. Hard to tell whether the people answering this question are really answering the same question. I would probably call myself right-handed because I throw and write with my right hand, but I eat with my left hand. More interestingly, I jump and hurdle leading with my left leg, which I wouldn't even have known if not for the fact I competed as a hurdler and long jumper in high school. I also can throw reasonably well with my left hand, but I can't see any point in developing the ability equally with both.
This also hits at a general problem I see with social science research. I can't even imagine how to formulate a coherent theory why this correlation should mean anything even if it exists that isn't some just so story with no basic grounding in accepted principles of thinking and behavior. No matter how well some writers can convince themselves this has to do with need for cognitive closure, how on earth do I distinguish that as a reader from someone fishing through the literature for every possible cognitive trait before finding out that kinda sorta fits statistically with whatever tiny bit of research? Not to mention the research is never representative of humanity as a whole, as you just found out by comparing with your readership. This is the common critique of psychology that it isn't really studying humans so much as American university students with enough free time to volunteer for a study. The results may or may not generalize to everyone else.
Louisville, culturally and politically, may be closer to San Francisco than it is to rural Kentucky.
For the record, I thought there would be an obvious explanation: being ambidextrous is rather not something that you are born with, it is rather something that
1) you are raised to be (or in most case, raised not to be). Depending on parents and culture, children are strongly encouraged to write with the right hand, and do other things with the right hand as well.
2) you identify with. Ambidexterity is a spectrum -- more than half of the people also use the non-dominant hand for simple tasks like brooming or brushing their teeths. But the number drops sharply when tasks become more complex. So where you draw the line and whether you call yourself "ambidextrous" is highly culture-dependent.
So I decided to test it by looking at the fraction of ambidextrous people in the US, UK, and Germany. (I wanted to include France as well, but it had too few participants). Other than handedness, the country of living is birth-specific. (Only a small fraction of people change their country of living after birth.) I expected to see clear differences, which would be one of many other hidden common factors with political opinions etc.
Yeah, turns out it rather wasn't that. The fractions were 2.6%, 1.9%, 2.3%, respectively. Far from the differences I expected. I didn't even bother to check, I am pretty sure that it's not significant.
Of course, it's still possible that I was unfortunate with the countries (or rather, the statistical power was too low, because the number of UK/GER participants were too small), or that there are other cofounders that would show it clearly. Actually, my prior was so high that I still believe that, but I am less confident now. Anyway, I did an experiment and it surprised me, so I thought I should share it.
Quite a few comments here discussing what we actually mean when we say someone is "ambidextrous". I myself have very mixed handedness (I do half of all things lefty and half of all things righty, and CANNOT switch for any of them). I've never self-identified as ambidextrous - when I was growing up I always heard the word used in reference to the concept of someone who can skillfully do any task and switch hands interchangeably. It always struck me as being in the realm of science fiction, and I'm not sure if I've ever seen anyone truly demonstrate it (although I suppose a decent number of professional baseball players have shown it on my TV screen).
Typo: "than yes" should be "then yes".
I'm a little hung up on the "failure to choose" model of nonbinary people. If at least some masculine and feminine behaviors are a natural product of hormonal and brain traits, is it not conceivable that some people may be born with a particular set of hormones and brain traits that don't produce a clearly masculine or feminine outcome? This obviously can happen in children who are physically intersex.
As for those who aren't physically intersex, the existence of transgender people supports the notion that a brain can exhibit opposite-gendered patterning and behavior in someone who physically appears consistent with their chromosomes. This model seems to allow for some people to fall in between, as neurologically intersex despite being physically consistent with their chromosomes. In which case, the need-for-cognitive-closure might not correlate with their reported gender identity.
I could imagine someone with a very strong need for cognitive closure insisting:
"No really, I'm neither masculine nor feminine, it's a simple fact and this is not a semantics debate. I know exactly where I stand and there is no gray area here. This is my brain, plain and simple. I hate ambiguity and I need closure. Let's settle this right now so I don't have to answer 'neither' to the m/f question. What's a nice clear word for that? Nonbinary." ...and they would be right.
Still not sure how seriously I should take the above post, considering the date.
"ANOVA says the differences here are statistically significant, p = 0.01, which is also the impression I get just looking at the table."
Typically you'd use a chi squared test for this, not an ANOVA. I don't know enough about this to say whether the ANOVA works for proportions given certain assumptions (it certainly might). But why not just use a chi squared test?
Second, an ANOVA only tells you that there is a difference between *some* of the 7 groups you compared. There are 21 comparisons you can make with 7 groups. We don't know which comparisons are significant, let alone after you correct for multiple comparisons.
If survey respondents provided info on e.g. their US state or zip code, then you could create an additional column in your dataset consisting of the most common political orientation in their area, then use that column to create yet another column for whether they are normal or abnormal relative to the politics that are common in their area. Then you could see how ambidexterity is related to that.
https://twitter.com/ericrweinstein/status/1004363916397277189
https://twitter.com/EricRWeinstein/status/791071702432096256
Do we have any well-documented lists of ambidextrous people, such as ambidextrous politicians? Wikipedia's article mostly mentions athletes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambidexterity
Most professional athletes are to the right of where their demographics would suggest, so I didn't get much from the article.
It looks like the most ambidextrous President was the broadly talented James Garfield. Supposedly, he could write Greek with one hand while writing Latin with the other, but his son said he'd never seen him do that. 19th Century Americans enjoyed making up tall tales, so I figure that was a stretcher. But Garfield was definitely ambidextrous.
"Seven other left-handers have occupied the Oval Office since Garfield, including Herbert Hoover, Harry S. Truman, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Though Reagan wrote with his right hand, he is believed to be a natural lefty who was trained to write with his right hand early in life, as was common in schools before the last 60 years."
At some point, Americans stopped trying to force lefthanders to write righthanded. While Reagan was a lefty switched over to righty during his school years, in the 1992 Presidential debate, you could watch all three candidates (Bush the Elder, Clinton, and Perot) take notes lefthanded.
As a cat, I find it very hard to answer questions along the lines of "do you support candidate X?"
I don't support candidates, I support policies, and then prioritize, taking in account a variety of factors and then vote for the candidate most likely to get elected and implement those policies. That said, I usually end up voting for fringe candidates, simply because I find mainstream candidates so odious.
This is probably why cats are not allowed to vote in most locations.
I'm thinking that you are mostly picking up an effect whether or not you deem yourself ambidextrous. There is going to be a large grey area where individual psychology and sense of being different and looking for an explanation is going to play a substantial role.
As I understand it, there's ambidextrous and "mixed handedness". I usually answer that I'm right handed, as I use that for writing. I think I took that survey and probably would have answered that because I'm definitely not ambidextrous. But I eat left-handed, use my phone lefthanded, and my dominant eye used to be the left, but that appears to have changed. So technically I'm mixed. In most other ways, I test as "more open" as well (J instead of P, high Openness score on Big 5). Voted Trump, believe in restrictive immigration, and the idea that either of those is authoritarian or signifies need for cognitive closure is flat out goofy.
I think you swapped the p-values for Trump and Immigration :)
Have you considered that some very religious Christians try to discourage left-handedness?
You may think that self-identified libertarians stand in opposition to authoritarianism based on what libertarianism should mean, but in practice that relationship is much murkier, enough so that as someone with a lot of appreciation for libertarian philosophy, I can't self-identify as libertarian lest I be completely misunderstood/miscategorized.