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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 1219386" data-attributes="member: 2205">No, causation is merely:Your argument seems to hinge on the assumption that gamers are more intelligent than average rather than make any attempt to empirically prove that to be the case.I doubt it.  Most professionally constructed polls and market research are designed to not introduce the risk of misplaced causation.  They isolate factors against a control group, so to speak, as much as possible.  Your argument is assuming intelligence is the self-selecting factor, but that's just an assumption.  Your model then attempts to demonstrate this, but it's a circular argument since the assumption must be true for your model to work.  As Umbran says, other self-selecting factors, including education, social class, etc. would give you the same results.  Your model, in other words, is flawed, because it doesn't isolate causality, it merely assumes causality.I think Umbran was very clear that he was using IQ as a substitute for intelligence.  Forgetting for the moment that it may or may not really be a good indicator of such.Because if you don't, you haven't proven anything.  You've proven results but said nothing about what causes those results to appear.  And that's his point as well; you haven't modelled gamers having higher intelligence, at least not necessarily, you could easily have simply modelled gamers being predominantly middle class.That's faulty for the same reason.  While I'd not deny that you're likely to select for whiteness when you select for Republican, that's incidental, not causal.  Black, hispanic or people or Asian descent of similar education and social class as white Republicans are also likely to be Republican (this is anecdotal and a bit speculative, but I believe it to be true) so you haven't essentially said anything at all by noting the correlation.</blockquote>

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