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I often think that “hiding one’s power level” often drives the narrative forward. If you have every conservative hiding their power level, and every liberal flaunting theirs, it’s going to keep the myth alive.
To be honest, at best I think most “smart liberals” are actually over educated mid wits who know how to game the education systems to get good grades and pats on the head from teachers. The problem, obviously is that one can grade grub and be a moron. In fact, it probably helps. To win that came, you have to be smart enough to figure out the answers the teachers want you to give, and have the skills to research and produce a paper giving the correct answer. On the other hand, you have to be dumb enough to accept these narrative at face value and to have few original thoughts in your head. To me, this is actually a great tell of lesser intelligence. Just ask them what they disagree with the authorities on. Ask them to come up with an answer where there’s no establishment answer. They absolutely have no idea how to do it. They cannot think through a problem and come up with a real answer to the question.
"Hiding one's power level" is a little different -- it's not about smarts, but about believing politically incorrect facts such as the disproportionate number of US murderers who are black.
I think possibly one of the most revealing papers about this sort of thing was the MIT paper where they lambasted COVID skeptics (and Trump supporters!) for being willing to do research.
Irresistible to quote from that:
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Do you have any evidence that capacity for independent thinking is lower in your outgroup than your ingroup? If not, you are just guilty of a flipped version of the same thing that the parent accused them off, with "free critical thinkers vs. NPCs" taking the place of the "smart pro-science liberals vs. chud knuckledraggers" one.
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