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I don’t believe the smartest of the smartest are woke.
Probably a plurality (majority if we exclude 'doesn't care about politics much') of the "smartest of the smartest" are sort of "woke" in the sense of having significantly left-leaning views. They didn't like trump, don't like racism, worried about the climate, cool with trans people, maybe they find Musk offensive. A lot of the people on e.g. https://mathstodon.xyz are like that. Many math professors (very smart!) with pronouns.
Fewer, but still a significant number, are very "woke". Rust's a great programming language, see creator graydon hoare's mastodon, which is pretty funny (following are retweets within the past 1.5 months)
Ehh…In my experience (including at a top law school) most kids are generically progressive but the smartest kids tend to be classically liberal (ie not woke)
To take this beyond my-anecdote vs your-anecdote, higher cognitive ability is associated with more support for free speech across ideologies. But while classical liberals support free speech, not everyone who supports free speech is a liberal.
(I suspect the connection is that smart people hold more beliefs heretical to their in-group, so opposition to punishing heretics is self-interested.)
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Notoriously less woke economics is high IQ, lowest IQ majors are the wokest ones. Source 1. The evidence seems to be pointing more towards classical liberalism being correlated with IQ. Source 2.
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I agree that post graduate degrees probably lean heavily progressive. But a lot of that is selection effects (eg smart people who aren’t progressive don’t go into academia).
Also, donor class donations is quite complex. I don’t think that is very indicative. Hell, it would be interesting to know if major donors look a lot like the ex ms Bezos.
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