Can it it really be true that Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton are all left handed. Four out of the last six presidents? With lefties representing such a tiny proportion of the overall population. Is there some kind of crazy conspiracy out there? Of course, I suppose George W. Bush isn't making a very strong case for right-handed leadership.
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The Dexterity Issue
16 Jan 2008 09:21 am
Comments (33)
It gets weirder: Ross Perot's a lefty, and, as a result of his injuries, so was Bob Dole.
Neither does Jimmy Carter.
A sinister conspiracy. . .
We lefties aren't dexterous. We're sinister.
Having neither the information nor the inclination to explain this phenomenon, I blame the media.
It's a hidden check and balance. Right-handed legislators have more trouble passing bills against left-handed Presidents. It is also harder for them to steal.
I'm not an Obama fan, but I believe I noticed at the New Hampshire debate that he was writing notes with his left hand. So that's something that may be in his favor -- maybe he's even ambidextrous!
This doesn't come as a surprise to me. Speaking purely anecdotally, my general experience has been that among the highest achievers in any field (we're talking 2 or 3 standard deviations above the mean), lefties are very overrepresented vs. the population as a whole.
In the fields where I've had a fair amount of personal exposure to such types, physics and chemistry, this is absolutely true. One of my coworkers says that, back in its heyday in the 80's, Bell Labs' scientific staff was over 40% left-handed. I know that, in the institute where I did my PhD work, the rate was around 1 in 4.
Studies have never been able to show a link between handedness and cognitive abilities, and I'm certainly no psychologist, so all I can offer is anecdotes. Nonetheless, this fact does not surprise me. I bet if you find the rate of left-handedness in, say, the Senate, you will find that it is higher than the general populace, although not as high as the rate in the presidency...
As a full-flegded member of the Vast Left-Handed Conspiracy I wish you wouldn't mention this. If you keep it up I might have to call you an anti-Lefty.
BTW: I think Obama is Lefty. I saw him writing with his Left-Hand during the ABC debate.
Reagan was right-handed
Further, population research suggests that left-handedness is somehow advantageous for men (as measured by the number of grandchildren they produce), but disadvantageous for women. So it seems pretty clear that there's some sort of edge it gives, even if it's hard to pin down what it might be. I would be interested to know whether human facial expressions and microexpressions have a 'handedness' (that might follow the regular handedness), and whether this affects people's perceptions of someone's emotions and/or sincerity...
Lisa: Sorry I missed your post before I posted.
I just looked it up. The NY Times mentions it here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/01/us/politics/01hoops.html?_r=2&hp&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
And it seems my brothers and sisters in the Vast Left-Handed Conspiracy are supporting Obama:
http://www.leftiesforobama.com/
You think that's weird, how about the fact that all the Presidents back through Carter have had blue eyes, have been thin (Clinton was never that chunky), and have had a rather full head of hair (along with the obvious male and white parts). We have a weirdly narrow set of electable people, and other than the white bit, Obama fits all of them. Candidate for change, my ass: skinny left-handed guys with hair have been running this country for decades (which bodes well for me).
Conspiracy theory: left-handers tend to get ink on their hands while writing in English, because the hand drags over the newly-written words.
However, they're ideally suited to writing languages that go from right to left, such as...
Such as Hebrew, Mr. Ajay?
When I was little, my parents gave me a copy of The Natural Superiority of the Left-Hander.
This post is making me regret moving my blog from tsinister.blogspot.com
Obama = Lefty
I understand the motivation behind things like The Natural Superiority of the Left-Hander. They are designed to ensure children do not experience alienation for a handicap like being born left-handed. With that said, it would be a terrible mistake to actually believe being left-handed makes one special. The terrible truth is, all of you lefties suffer from a debilitating illness for which science has discovered no cure short of amputation.
The genetic superiority of lefties is a scientific fact, though we only have a correlation and not a causality, so I'm using "science" like a fetish.
Only a liberal creationist would disagree.
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There's a long list of ways in which left-handed people are supposedly more creative, nonlinear, nontraditional, etc. than most people, but one thing I've always wondered is which way the causation goes. I mean, are people left-handed because it's on the same gene (or brain lobe or prenatal enzyme or whatever) as artisticness and homosexuality and whatever? Or is it just because lefties are forced to think in nontraditional ways as children that they get predisposed to all that stuff? Learn to seek out a different set of scissors from everyone else, write a little differently from what feels natural, and you're forced to be more creative. Or something.
The part about the linked list that seems interesting to me is how recent they are. Seven presidents total out of about 42 or so, depending on whether we count Grover Cleveland twice and stuff. That's a little disproportionate, but not all that much. However, four of those seven are in the past 32 years? That's interesting. (Assuming that the list is comprehensive and the handedness of early presidents is known and so on.)
You think that's weird, how about the fact that all the Presidents back through Carter have had blue eyes, have been thin (Clinton was never that chunky), and have had a rather full head of hair (along with the obvious male and white parts).
Indeed, in the TV age, William Howard Taft would never get elected. Presidents apparently have to be good-looking, and in a culture still more-or-less dominated by WASPs, that only means so many things. However, there are obvious allowances for less-attractive traits that are signifiers of age.
Hmmm. Take into account that lefties became unusually presidential recently, and maybe this means that left-handed people are more attractive.
Truly we are living in the very definition of an aristocracy.
Felix,
Although Reagan wrote with a right hand as an adult, that was only because as a schoolboy, his teachers insisted he write with his right hand.
However, by orientation (or is it a preference), he was a southpaw.
Left handed people are a much larger portion of both ends of the intelligence scale. For whatever reason, they show much more variability than right-handed people (both positive and negative).
Clearly nature has a left-wing bias.
When I was young my best friend was left handed (sounds like something Colbert would say). His dad always said that meant young Matt was in his right mind. If Bush is, for his profession, unusually right handed, perhaps Mr. Weinbeck was right all along.
As a child, Reagan was forced to write right-handed, but there was a big social change and soon lefthanders were let be. Interestingly, you never hear about the Lefthanders Liberation movement like you do all the other liberation movements, but surely it happened, probably in the 1920s or so. It would be interesting to speculate why Lefthanders Liberation doesn't get its own month of PBS specials.
We're just better.
As every baseball fan knows, you need to bring in a lefthander to face a lefthander . . .
For the record, left handers are NOT automatically Transhumans.
Sebastian above has the point:
"Left handed people are a much larger portion of both ends of the intelligence scale. For whatever reason, they show much more variability than right-handed people (both positive and negative)."
By the way, "with lefties representing such a tiny proportion of the overall population," isn't really accurate. Industrialized countries world-wide have been seeing significant increases in left-handedness, believed to be due to childhood "correction" ending. It can be in the 20%'s.
"It's a hidden check and balance. Right-handed legislators have more trouble passing bills against left-handed Presidents. It is also harder for them to steal."-Posted by apm
But, it is easier to steal home on a lefty, thusexplaining the housing crisis.
rea,
But in baseball you also have to account for left eye or right eye dominance. Most people are the same side eye dominant as they are handed.
So the rare combination of a left-handed, right eye dominant batter, like Babe Ruth, is what you want.
Comments closed January 30, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
Obama too.
Posted by JC | January 16, 2008 9:32 AM