Wednesday, July 28, 2010

The drinkerer I am the smarterer I get

This is fascinating: the more intelligent one is, the more one is likely to drink alcohol. It would be interesting to do a similar study for Marijuana and other illegal drugs. Taken with the evidence that moderate drinkers live longer, it's quite a challenge to how we've traditionally thought about booze and mind altering substances in general. Caveat liquor: correlation is not causation and there may be factors associated with higher verbal intelligence that increase susceptibility to alcohol addiction. But whatever it is, it is obvious that across our society drinking booze does not make you stupid.

As noted alcoholic Ernest Hemingway would have said:  "Have a Drink!"

Hat tip Tyler Cowen:

People of class drink alcohol | Gene Expression | Discover Magazine: "This chart pretty much floored me.
drinkwordsum
I was expecting it. That is, that the more intelligent, who scored high on a vocabulary test, would drink more than the dumb, who scored low. Look at the other correlates above. But I’ve rarely seen such a stark near-monotonic trend with Wordsum."

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