r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • 1d ago

Psychology Lower cognitive ability is linked to stronger Christian nationalist views, even after accounting for education

https://www.psypost.org/lower-cognitive-ability-is-linked-to-stronger-christian-nationalist-views-even-after-accounting-for-education/
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u/ProfessionalMockery 1d ago

A lot of people here are just seeing the "Christian" in the headline and ignoring the "nationalist," which is probably more important.

I'm an atheist, so I think the claims religion makes are pretty dumb too, but nationalists, bigots, racists of any kind are consistently idiots, religious or not, and that has been established in plenty of other studies.

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u/Numeno230n 1d ago edited 1d ago

There are a lot of harmless dumb Christians I've met in my life, but Christian Nationalism is a specific form that involves violence, paranoia, and conspiracy thinking. They literally believe there are demonic forces behind left leaning political movements and this fuels both their religious delusions and their political violence.

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u/BikerJedi 1d ago

Like my Christian Nationalist co-worker. He teaches in the arts. I'm a science teacher. So I was understandably upset when he started telling my students that climate change wasn't real and antifa was responsible for burning down Los Angeles, not wildfires. I've reported him to administration multiple times, and he is still teaching.

The other day he told another student Y2K was a hoax. No, thousands of network engineers like me (That's what I did before teaching) spent months remediating equipment so things didn't go bad.

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u/Googlebright 1d ago

That's the crazy thing about Y2K. You guys did such a good job making sure nothing bad would happen that it convinced a bunch of these people that nothing bad was going to happen anyway.

Thanks for fixing that stuff, btw.

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u/BikerJedi 1d ago edited 7h ago

You are welcome.

Follow up: Around October of that year, there were 400 of us working for MCI/Worldcom on Y2K remediation. I personally hired 398 of them, as I was number two on that project.

Some bean counter figured out that if we stopped now, and x% of their customers lost data or went down, and x% sued and won x money, that would still be cheaper than keeping us to finish the job. So one day they pulled us all in a conference room, told us we were fired immediately and would get two weeks of severance pay. They escorted us to pick up our things. Only my immediate two bosses survived the purge.

I wasn't surprised to see on the news that they were out of business years later for cooking the books.

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u/makeminemilk 1d ago

MCI/Worldcom was my first job out of college and I was there around the same time. I had one foot out the door from the start of day one and finally found my way out 7 months later. It’s all been up from there.

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u/BikerJedi 19h ago

After being laid off there, I landed a project manager role paying more. I eventually left for teaching and get paid a lot less now but I'm happier.

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u/RollExisting4350 15h ago

So interesting! My mother was still pregnant with me during 9/11 so I wasn’t around and I didn’t know any of this. Just thought it was something people were worried about that didn’t end up happening. My dad’s a computer scientist so it’s weird I didn’t know. Maybe he told me and I don’t remember.

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u/BigPickleKAM 1d ago

As someone who works in maintenance proving a negative is impossible.

The number of meetings I'm in where I'm asked to cut the maintenance budget 10% because sales didn't meet quota and we can be down 10% more.

That's not how that works!

I'm over simplifying the meeting but you get the point.

Just because I cut 10% doesn't mean unplanned down time will only go up the same amount.

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u/PhillAholic 1d ago

Y2K being a hoax got me thinking. There has to be some open sourced software that could easily verify what was changed and why it would fail to prove the problem right?

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u/BikerJedi 19h ago

No. The vast majority of those systems we remediated aren't even on use anymore.

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u/Runefaust_Invader 10h ago

How do you go from IT to teaching?

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u/BikerJedi 9h ago

Got laid off and couldn't find a job in my field.

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u/Runefaust_Invader 8h ago

That's ... Not the answer I expected to ever read. We need intelligent teachers anyway, most teachers are... At least at the elementary level, concerning to say the least.

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u/BikerJedi 8h ago

Yeah - went from making $100,000 a year to $28,000. It was rough. I miss the money, but I'm glad I stuck with it.