Sunday, July 18, 2004 |
15:38 - M@c R SMRT & Ur Dum!!!!11l`11oneoneone
http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/35130.html
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Heh. Paul Murphy of LinuxInsider has done a "language usage analysis" of Mac users vs. PC users on Slashdot, with the aim of discovering whether Mac users are smarter than PC users.
My wife has a Dilbert cartoon on her office door in which one of the characters says: "If you have any trouble sounding condescending, find a Unix user to show you how." She's a Mac user and they were worse even before they all became Unix users too.
Or maybe not. But finding out whether the average Mac user really is smarter than the rest of us isn't so easy. Part of the problem is that even if you matched the admissions test results for a graduate school with individual PC or Mac preferences to discover a strong positive correlation, people would argue that the Mac users are exceptional for other reasons, that the tests don't measure anything relevant, and that it's unethical to do this in the first place.
In fact, it's pretty clear that this topic is sufficiently emotionally loaded that you'd get shouted down by one side or another no matter how you did the research; and that's too bad because a clear answer one way or the other would be interesting.
I doubt it's possible to get a definitive answer, but as long as you don't take any of it too seriously you can have a lot of fun playing with proxies such as the average user's ability to read and write his or her native language. This isn't necessarily a reasonable measure of intelligence (mainly because intelligence has yet to be defined) but almost everyone agrees that a native English speaker's ability to write correct English correlates closely with that person's ability to think clearly.
. . .
Overall, the results are pretty clear: Mac users might not actually be smarter than PC users, but they certainly use better English and a larger vocabulary to express more complex thinking.
Bah. All it means is that Mac users are the elitist, intellectual, language-fetishizing rebels who think they're hotter than the filthy unwashed masses. But we knew that already.
At least, those who post on Slashdot are...
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