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People of class drink alcohol
- harpastum 17y agoThis article seems to be claiming that people with a larger vocabulary (as tested by a vocab test) are more likely to drink, not 'people of class'.
- mtrichardson 17y agohttp://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/05/people-of-class-drink-alcohol/#comment-22560 http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/05/people-of-cla... Summary of that comment: Attitudes towards scripture is the primary predictor, though WORDSUM and education still have significant effects.
- TheBranca18 17y agoInteresting that this correlates with my experience as well. I moved from New England down to North Carolina and the difference in alcohol intake (and religion for that matter) is truly startling.
- J3L2404 17y agoClassy people use small words.
- blogimus 17y agoYes, and they tend not to utilize them.
- rosshudgens 17y agoThis article seems to be claiming that intelligence = class.
- endtime 17y agoActually, it's implicitly claiming that large vocabulary is the same as class.
- yalurker 17y agoWhich may sound shocking, even offensive at first. However, the correlation between vocabulary and socio-economic class is a very concrete result of many other studies, such that it is a reasonable thing to leave implicit in this case.
- mannicken 17y agoPlease note that some of the graphs there start with 50% as original y-axis. It creates an appearance of males drinking twice as much as females, for example.
- tumult 17y agoI guess if you're the kind of person who likes looking at bars instead of reading the text that gives them meaning as well. I think a floor set at number like 0.5 and with a linear scale is pretty reasonable for readability, unless you're a lout and ignore those little letters that tell you what things actually are.
- chancho 17y agoWTF is the point of a graph if you have to read the fine print to avoid misinterpreting it? Why not just use a table? A graph is supposed to convey the relative magnitudes of the data points, not just their ranking. If I just wanted to show who drank more than whom I would just list them in order. Looking at these graphs you'd think that: Almost nobody in the south drinks; The vast majority of blacks do not drink; Catholics are twice as likely to drink as Protestants. And so on, when in fact these are all false conclusions. The real conclusion, which you would easily get from properly scaled graphs, is that the majority of people drink across almost all demographic groups. If you blame me for drawing false conclusions from such graphs I blame the shitty fucking graphs for being misleading. I mean, they don't all even start at 50%. One starts at %40 and one at %0. Seriously, these graphs are garbage.
- jey 17y agoEr, so all graphs of temperature should start at absolute zero? It's absurd to expect all graphs to start at zero -- the point of a bar graph is to show relative comparisons, and the whole point of the labels on the axes is to relate the graph to an absolute scale. You even admit this, "[a] graph is supposed to convey the relative magnitudes of the data points" -- Exactly, and so the graph should be scaled in a way that efficiently conveys the relative information. I apologize for the ad hominem, but this is just serious PEBKAC: you need to learn to read graphs. The mistaken conclusions you arrived at could have been avoided if you paid attention to the labels. Yes, a poorly made graph can make a tiny effect look huge, e.g. if it was the case that 99% of people drank, and the graph was just plotting variation within the remaining 1%, that could be pretty misleading. This is yet another reason that the consumers of information should pay attention to the labels and understand what the real message is from the data. Don't expect the creators of the graph to present the data in the "fairest" way (whatever that is); instead it's our responsibility to think critically and make sure we understand what's really going on. The creator of the graph will naturally act to advance his own interests. tl;dr: It's a mistake to consider the labels to be "fine print".
- mahmud 17y agoIn Australia, people of all classes drink like they have just crossed the Mojave desert, barefoot, after escaping Alcatraz.
- bergkampf 17y agoAccording to this listing, Australia is not even in the top 20: Luxembourg, Ireland and Hungary seem to be the top three. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_alcohol_consumption http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_alcohol_co...
- mahmud 17y agoThat answers it. Half of my social circle in .au are Irishmen ;-)
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- jussij 17y ago> According to this listing, Australia is not even in the top 20: That was back in 2003. These days Australians take their drinking far more seriously: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/foo_alc_con-food-alcohol-consumption-current http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/foo_alc_con-food-alcohol-c...
- nreece 17y agoSOURCE: OECD Health Data 2005 That data set is not very recent as well.
- fnid2 17y agoThat list doesn't account for the type of alcohol. A liter of whiskey would do more than a liter of beer. Point: Australia could be drunker if they drink relatively more hard alcohol than those higher on the list, giving mahmud the win.
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- silentbicycle 17y agoNah, they just score higher on a vocabulary test because they're articulating extra crisply. Working in a public library is a good way to dispel illusions about drinking being classy, by the way. We could always tell when some of the veterans got their monthly checks... Also: Bike thieves do suck, and these graphs would send Tufte on a crying jag.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- claymmm 17y agoPeople always shoot the messenger for pointing this out, so I'll expect about a million downvotes for it, but in case you case didn't know it already GNXP is the cryptoracist camp along with Charles Murray and Steve Sailer. Seriously, check out some of the comments. Okay, now you can downvote me.
- puppetsock 17y agoIn other words, we should dismiss a priori the possibility of any racial correlates?
- psyklic 17y agoFrom another article: "In the 1998 to 2004 data, each point higher on the Wordsum test causes a $1,200 decrease in income." [http://www.halfsigma.com/2006/07/higher_intellig.html http://www.halfsigma.com/2006/07/higher_intellig.html] So where does "smartness" fit in? I hate to imply causation, but maybe: "Wordsat smartness" -> annoying person who uses big words other people don't understand all the time -> social isolation -> less money -> alcohol! Whew!
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- disturbances 17y ago> I knew that blacks were more likely to be teetotalers, and expected that women would be as well. Is there anything scientific about this at all? The whole article sounds fishy.
- tmsh 17y agoIronically, I learned a new word: 'confound' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confounding http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confounding ). And then I realized that the last chart has confounds. Intelligence and vocabulary are correlated, but worth differentiating in this case. A higher vocabulary is pretty strongly correlated with being well-read. I think we can trust that. And being well-read implies being exposed to different things (though it is by no means the only way to be exposed to different things -- i.e., those who are well-read [subset operator] those who are exposed to a wide variety of things. But those who are exposed to a wide variety of things are highly correlated with those who wish to take risks to be exposed to new things. And the latter group seems pretty well correlated with those who drink. Note, intelligence only 'lurks' near vocabulary.
- ramchip 17y agobeing well-read implies being exposed to different things [...] But those who are exposed to a wide variety of things are highly correlated with those who wish to take risks to be exposed to new things I don't follow this reasoning. Being well-read implies being exposed to a lot of different books, not a lot of different activities. In my experience, people that read a lot are not people who take risks to be exposed to new things, precisely because they have rather intellectual hobbies and they have less free time due to reading a lot.
- tmsh 17y agoGood point. And I don't know how the vocabulary test was made. I think the monotonicity can be explained by, in general, people who read marginally more are marginally exposed to more things (even after to discounting for the important fact that there is less free time and they're more intellectual, etc.). But it's a very good point. It seems like there are a lot of different factors.
- amk 17y agoI don't know about the word test scores but the rest of the demographic info doesn't look right. For instance, the second chart. The data suggests that statistically, the odds of a girl drinking are higher than an african-american drinking. By the way, very very misleading graphs. I was totally shocked by going through them. I had to read the comments here to realize what was being shown.
- matrix 17y agoI was curious where the data came from, since the article didn't really explain it. Here's the details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Social_Survey http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Social_Survey
- GFischer 17y agoApparently, here is the vocabulary test used at the GSS and referenced in the last graph: http://inductivist.blogspot.com/2010/04/gss-vocabulary-test.html http://inductivist.blogspot.com/2010/04/gss-vocabulary-test....
- KirinDave 17y agoAt first I was like, “Oh shit how can anyone not get a 10, these words are easy. Society is doomed!” Then I saw how the choices were actually really strange for some of them. For example, “Emanate” is meant to be matched to “come”, but that's a very poor match. Similarly “Space” matching to ”room” is a tricky sense.
- pw0ncakes 17y agoI thought this was a linkbait title, but it actually is the title of the original article. One of many thoughts appropriate to this dubious claim: often, questions like, "Do you smoke pot?" or "Do you drink?" have more to do with identity than with the actual frequency of consumption. I'd bet that people "of class"-- well-to-do, educated, liberal-- are more likely to say "yes" to the question, "Do you smoke pot?" However, a large number of such people are those who haven't smoked for 20 years-- those who wouldn't be averse to smoking pot if it came their way, but haven't looked for it or been near it in a long time. (I have no problem with people who use marijuana, but the fact is that to get regular access often requires association with "unclassy" characters, because most drug dealers are creepy and the process of asking for access is degrading.) If you look at who is actually smoking pot, and weight by frequency of consumption, I'd guess that the correlation goes away. Same with alcohol.