Dr Ben Carson is a moron. Also would never win the republican nomination.

Also anyone that votes on someone just on the color of their skin is automatically a racist.

I agree. But that is survivor bias. He got good at a subject where his religion didn't interfere. If it did interfere we wouldn't have heard about him. But what about new subjects that would come up if he was president?

It is entirely possible to be a genius while still being completely ignorant about certain fields and holding some whacky views. I am guessing Dr Ben Carson has almost no knowledge of geology or he wouldn't hold his young earth views. The fact that he chooses to remain ignorant about such basic things as carbon dating calls his judgement into question. He is a genius at neurosurgery, but he does not have the wisdom to be a good leader. I wouldn't trust him to be a good president any more than I would trust Bobby Fischer or John Nash.

The idea behind rational irrationality is that a belief that does start to seriously interfere often finds itself conveniently discarded. Although the caveat with politics is that a lot of the time mistaken political beliefs don't have much of a cost either. It's a lot higher if you're President than a random person, but there's still quite a bit of room to indulge in ideology at the expense of rationality.

I'm pretty sure Rs get this, and that's why they won't even try. Best to try with Hispanics and hope the rest of the party doesn't get too grumpy about their tans or wtfever

100% agree.

I'd guess 25%.

Again, I realize that WM2/Rika/Sklansky probably don't talk with a lot of black people about their political views, but sit down for this one:

They are people. They vote for the same reasons you do.

They vote for Democrats because the Republican party has been aggressively broadcasting that they are the party of white people and are actively hostile to black interests. Nominating Carson doesn't solve that.

True, Carson figures to score higher than average in his field. But it's not like Clinton was some trust fund/legacy surfer either though, himself coming from modest beginnings. I think Sklansky (and people at large) tend to under estimate verbal ability as an indication of intelligence and over estimate math/science ability as an indicator.

And I said Clinton "as a dog". I would probably take Carson getting odds too. Two people of established very high intelligence, hard to justify anything other than a flip without past scores to go on.

Then again, we know more about Clinton, such as his ability to analogize and the produce compelling logic very quickly in free form debates. It always seemed like even smart people with preplanned attacks couldn't out maneuver his defenses, formed and articulated on the spot. In contrast Carson, whose opinions are borderline ridiculous (doesn't believe in evolution), seems to form an impression of guy who has an immense talent for something but who hasn't shown any broad intellectual chops. Some people, like a good auto mechanic, have excellent spatial intelligence (like that required for a surgeon) but aren't considered intellects on that basis.

And we've all heard about Clinton solving the NYT crossword puzzle in minutes while debating with world leaders on the phone. Getting odds I'll take that, a Rhodes scholarship, a 97th+ percentile LSAT score (I'm guessing) and what else I have seen from Clinton versus just about anyone shy of Nobel Laureates in science or top physicists.

English not your first language, I take it?

This makes me wonder what Sklansky vs the Sunday NYT crossword looks like.

I was never talking about Bill.

I've spoken to many black people about politics. And when Obama was contesting Clinton they at first would tell me that they hadn't made up their minds. I would reply "Cmon. Your grandmother would never speak to you again if you chose Hillary". They would invariably laugh, not be offended at all, and admit that I was right and that their vote would go to Obama.

Of course the Carson situation is quite different. His views are much further away from Clinton's than Obama's was. (But not as far away as some black conservatives). More importantly we are no longer talking about electing the first black president (although some black people might make a distinction between half black and fully black). If this was 2008 he would get more than half of the black vote in my opinion.

Still as long as almost all black people would have swung their vote from Clinton to Obama, which those I talked to admitted that they would, even if they thought Clinton was better qualified, it justifies my thinking that some would make the switch to Carson. But that doesn't mean I think that they would blindly do this without thought. Rather I think that they would weigh the pros and cons and decide that the upsides, in their opinion outweighed the downsides.

I would have tended to agree with them until I found out he was a YEC.

DS- I will be honest, I do not think you know how far Ben Carson's views are away from anyone's, which makes this entire exercise an object lesson in the value of research. You weren't aware he was a Young Earth Creationist.

Yeah, but we just went over why that's wrong? Like literally in this post you walk yourself through why it's wrong.

This might actually be easy to settle through the following lookupable statistics.

Of those in the 95 percentile in the verbal SAT what is their average percentile in the math SAT?

Of those in the 95 percentile in the math SAT what is their average percentile in the verbal SAT.

I use percentiles rather than scores because they don't line up perfectly.

I think the second number will be higher. But even if its not I think I am justified in thinking math ability trumps verbal ability. Because the latter is more related to knowledge as opposed to thinking ability than the former.

Notice though that I am speaking of ability rather than knowledge as far as math is concerned. There are a few posters here who are very knowledgeable about advanced math but never answer a probability or poker theory question that doesn't allow them to spout off esoteric jargon that might help them hide the fact that they aren't as smart as some of the less educated posters who do answer them. But that's a digression.

And even if one were to stipulate that verbal ability is as good a measure of intelligence as math ability we need to remember that we are talking about the attributes needed to be president. Presidents often have to strategize. And that is more related to math ability (actually I prefer logic ability including logic puzzle ability) than verbal ability.

Many people are now saying that Obama's verbal ability masked a lesser ability in decision making. Could this be a symptom of Harvard Law School? If so, remember that Hillary went there too.

If you think Ben Carson would get half the black vote over Hilary in 2008, you are seriously delusional and you need heavy medication.

Black people vote democrat for a reason.

IIRC, when they calculate the National Merit Scholars, they doubled Verbal and added Math, i.e., 2V + M = Score.

Why do you think that is?

At least that's how they did it when I was in HS, iirc.

I have no problem admitting that I thought that Carson was a fairly moderate Republican based only on watching a few interviews. If the reason people are so strongly disagreeing with my 27% guess is that I had him pegged wrong then my original OP was erroneous for that reason. But that didn't seem to be the reason people were disagreeing with me.

I still think that half of THINKING black people would have voted for a moderate black Republican in 2008.

Let's pretend it isn't. Connect the dots for me. I'm not even asking you to explain "prima-facie factual things about race are written off as being 'racist' in spite of being true", which is one hell of an eyebrow raiser seeing as how race isn't even a real thing. I'll let that slide for now.

Just take me from there to Guns, Germs, and Steel.

That didn't keep me from being one.

If they had such tests for the last 10,000 years and if on every January 1st, God came down and swooped away the top 5% based on this scoring; and if on an identical twin planet he swooped away the top 5% based on the reverse scoring I think the first planet would be at least 100 years more advanced.

That's assuming Carson is a moderate. In any case I'm glad you called me delusional rather than a racist.

(I think part of the disagreement stems from the fact that most of you posters are young. You don't realize the epic significance of a black president in the minds of people who lived through men/woman/ colored restrooms and all the events that followed. To pass up an opportunity to elect a black president when another chance may not come along in decades would be very difficult.)

Without Wells, there may have been no Goddard.

Actually these stats likely won't tell us much because so many foreign students take the SAT.

Against HRC? Almost certainly not given that 2008 was a huge wave election for Democrats. Yes, "first black president" would have been a huge incentive, but it's not like they would forget 8 years of Bush and the economic collapse.

Maybe you'd get a better answer by seeing how many Republican African-Americans voted for Obama. Small sample size, tho.

I really do not understand how you could be made aware of Ben Carson's political situation and think he's a moderate. Pretty much the only time he gets in the news is when he says some awful **** about gay people.

Which would skew the results against my position.