One commenter noted that, relative to other qualities, intelligence was not a good predictor. He's right. I've gone through many of the other qualities and most seem to be better predictors. I ignored several of the qualities because they can only be judged once he or she has actually been in office. These include cabinet appointments, foreign and domestic policy accomplishments, as well as the handling of the economy. Integrity, background and the ability to compromise seem to be the only categories that are significantly worse predictors. And most others are better, some significantly so.
There's another major problem with my analysis; I merely used rankings. This only quantifies relative values, not absolute values. In theory, the difference between number one and number two on a category could be very large and the gap between two and forty three is very small. This isn't going to happen, but neither is an equal difference between each rank.
In the interest of intellectual dishonesty, I withdraw much of my analysis. I stil believe that intelligence can partially predict a president's overall greatness and that on the whole the Republican candidate do not possess it. But it must be combined with other qualities to get an accurate prediction. And there are several qualities that you can look at on that will give you a better forecast a president's historical ranking.
I haven't taken a course on stats in about seven years. Hopefully I will improve as time goes on and avoid this type (or any other types) of errors.
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