Are Mac Users Smarter than PC Users? 987
arminw writes "Maybe not smarter, but according to MacNewsWorld they are better at expressing themselves than the average Slashdotter and certainly are better at handling the king's English than the average PC operator." Also, michael is better than CowboyNeal. Mathematical expressions of written style don't lie!
Troll food: I'm hungry! (Score:5, Interesting)
For a more realistic and interesting baseline, I collected about 2,800 lines of Slashdot discussion contributions and ran style against them to get the following ratings summary along with a lot of detail data omitted here:
Kincaid: 7.7
ARI: 8.0
Coleman-Liau: 9.7
Flesch Index: 72.4
Fog Index: 10.7
Lix: 37.1 = school year 5
SMOG-Grading: 9.8
Notice that these results apply to comments from Slashdotters, not to the text on which they're commenting. Look at the source articles and you get very different results because, of course, most are professionally written or edited -- although there is an interesting oddity in that ratings for files made up by pasting together stories posted by "Michael" are consistently at least one school year higher than comparable accumulations made from postings (other than press releases) by "Cowboyneal."
Yeah, first off, I want to know what 2,800 lines he took. I would hope he didn't use a random method of comment gathering as anything under +3 is generally junk (and thus why it holds there). I want to know if he has taken a look at more recent Slashdot banter or comments generated since its inception. It's a well known fact that the signal to noise ratio has increased over the years (as is expected as the site grows in "popularity").
When he mentions that he wasn't performing this "study" on the text Slashdotters were commenting on, does that mean that he wasn't paying attention to the particular stories we were responding to? That could have a major impact on the results.
Yes, all of us Slashdotters are stuck-up assholes, but I seriously doubt that the higher rated comments are written at a 5th grade reading level unless you are looking at -1 to +5 instead of +1 and above (which I assume that most people read at).
Perhaps he posted this, knowing full well we would troll it, just to prove his point?
I guess if this hadn't originally been posted to MacNewsWorld I would I have found it extremely funny that the storey was posted by "pudge" instead of Cowboyneal...
Mac vs PC- intelligence of the user (Score:5, Interesting)
Having both. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Article text in case of slashdotting! (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Oh really? (Score:5, Interesting)
This reminds me of the shock I got a few months ago when a Mac user buddy of mine was showing off the G4 he had bought on clearance when the G5s came out. I didn't think of him as a power user, especially since he never shelled out $20 for a better mouse. But I almost fell out of my chair when I asked him how many iTunes songs he had purchased... he did a command-tab to cycle thru his apps, stopping on a terminal window, and did a "find . -name "*.m4p" -print | wc -l"
Someone was doing their homework!
Re:That makes sense to me. (Score:1, Interesting)
Seriously, don't go bashing the arts unless you don't listen to music, watch movies, or do anything besides code. And if that IS you, go outside. There is sunlight. It is refreshing and warm.
Articulation != Intelligence (Score:2, Interesting)
The Macs core markets are education, publishing and "independent creative professionals" i.e. writers, graphic artist etc. . It's a population that spends a great deal of it's time communicating in writing for money as opposed to core markets in the PC world who communicate with numbers in the form of spreadsheets and databases.
The more profound bias is the idea that well articulated writing reflects an underlying high degree of "intelligence" (whatever that is) when it really just reflects specialization. People who write a lot get good at it regardless of how dumb they are otherwise and people who write very little do not get good at it no matter how much they excel intellectually in other areas.
*nix users still seem above the mac users (Score:5, Interesting)
Correlation of Education and Cost (Score:5, Interesting)
The answer is grey (Score:4, Interesting)
Today it is the PC-Windows user who does not need to know anything, while the MAC (OS X) user should know something about how to operate the computer. Of course there are still many ignorant Mac Users (not the Slashdotters) who don't know that OS X is built on BSD, never see get into CLI, etc.
BUT, when you say PC users, you have to include Linux User. I'll guarantee that ANYONE that has any kind of Linux OS installed knows more than the average Mac user about computers. BUT, a BSD geek using OS X probably is smarter than the average linux user.
Make sense? I didn't think so.
Re:Mac vs PC- intelligence of the user (Score:5, Interesting)
The question that is then raised is, "Do Mac users have a better grip on the English language, or does the Macintosh provide a more comfortable platform for professional writers?"
Sesequepedalianism does not, however, imply 'intelligence'.
Sesequepedalianism? That's not even in most dictionaries!
Show off.
Makes me wish.... (Score:5, Interesting)
The email responses I received from each set of browsers users was very different. On average, Netscape users seemed more educated and had a longer average word and email length than IE users. most IE users had a 1 or 2 line email where as Netscape users usually where 2 paragraphs at least.
I should release that study sometime.
I call BS (Score:2, Interesting)
Now go make fun of whatever mistakes I made in the above paragraph, but which my aged eyes could not catch!
Macs are chick magnets (Score:5, Interesting)
Usually the first time a girl enters my room she is immediately drawn to my Titanium Powerbook. Soft coos are heard while she breathes in its elegant beauty and caresses its curves. "It's so thin!" she says.
She notices what's onscreen. I've been talking on AIM, but there's these little characters with colored talk balloons! That's just so cute.
She'll pick up the iPod next, and start playing with its little wheel. She flips it over and looks at herself in the reflective back. She likes how the lights come on when she touches it and the little red text appears on the buttons.
But I'm sure you get the same response from your "gaming machine" with a clunky CRT.
So? (Score:5, Interesting)
This study doesn't say anything about the level of intelligence, but merely the type of person that uses x computer.
Re:Article text in case of slashdotting! (Score:5, Interesting)
[...]
Kincaid: 7.7
ARI: 8.0
Coleman-Liau: 9.7
Flesch Index: 72.4
Fog Index: 10.7
Lix: 37.1 = school year 5
SMOG-Grading: 9.8
For comparison, here are the statistics for the article itself:
Kincaid: 7.1
ARI: 7.3
Coleman-Liau: 11.3
Flesch Index: 69.0
Fog Index: 9.8
Lix: 36.7 = school year 5
SMOG-Grading: 9.7
Mac users may or may not be smarter than PC users, but Paul Murphy is evidently not any smarter than the average slashdot poster.
Re:Flamebait (Score:4, Interesting)
Those that can afford nicer toys are those that usually are smart enough to get better jobs and make more money. Great article...
just can't let that one lie... (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't think it was fright that was at play the first day in 1984 when I first used a Mac at the computer store in White Plains NY - I can remember exactly when and where - and saw the Finder, MacWrite and MacPaint all playing nicely with wach other and doing incredibly useful stuff and all that useful stuff coming out of an Imagewriter just like it looked on the screen.
I daydreamed, goggle-eyed about what might have been in the preceding 6 years of undergrad/grad work with this on my own desk rather than the terminals connected to PDP-11s or whatever...
No, I definitely wasn't 'scared' of the DOS machine that sat next to it. The DOS machine was text-based and non-intuitive and did nothing to *EN*courage me to use a computer more (i.e. ADD to my computer-using courage) and since then my dealings with DOS, Win 3.1, 95, 98, NT, ME, XP have *DIS*couraged me and I expect others as well. Most people with Wintel stay with it for the same reason people stay with Ford Escorts. They move and it seems there are lots of them. Of course as you drive down the street you see everyone's porch lights flashing because they think you're the pizza guy... but you put up with it because it's not as bad as it used to be - XP sucks less than 98, Escorts suck less than Pintos.
It hasn't changed much - people bought/buy Macs because they do more things right out of the box, the box is better looking (you can make a dining room table out of sawhorses and 1x6 lumber - but do you? No.) and it's more stable (I know that's the UNIX heritage coming thru - that's nice - it could be its Magic Bunny heritage 'now with more spiffnoodle' for all I care - my iBook has had three kernel panics since the OSX preview thru 10.3.whatever, I can grab a new still camera like I did just last night, plug it in and it just plain works. Plugging that same camera into my wife's 3-year-old Presario laptop was just a sad, long series of installs, mutually exclusive dialog boxes, vaguely referenced suggestions and tentative downloads and some really hair-pulling eventual software...
it's not fear unless you count fear of inevitable frustration and wasted time.
And I'll have another iBook soon - three years is my cycle - lowest end, cheap but damned powerful... and pass this one on and it will still do a lot like my PBDuo and PB1400 are still doing...
Re:Article text in case of slashdotting! (Score:3, Interesting)
Front Page of Fark (direct dump)
Front Page of slashdot (direct dump)
Latest entry from my Journal (text only)
Cmdr Taco's latest Journal Entry (text only)
Hemos's latest Journal Entry (text only)
William Safire's 14 July Column
Only a portion of style's output is shown, as quoting more statistics would trigger the slashdot junk filter.
Not that surprising... (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe it's not that simple (Score:3, Interesting)
This may not have been intended to be humorous but it sure came across that way to me. You first make a blanket statment about those who use Macs, then you make an even broader statement, comparing academics, artsy, and literary types on the one hand, and geeky technical people (all of which Slashdotters are supposed to be according to your broad brush portrayal).
Then you get even more reductionist by saying that these geeky technical pursuits are useful, by opposition implying that academic pursuits (you know, learning and stuff), arts (you know, self-expression and stuff), and literature (did an electrician write the Lord of the Rings?) are useless. Who is that Twain guy in your sig, anyway?
Finally, as an aside, you mention that better writing style might be handy in communication. You may be on to something there. Believe it or not, people who write for a living have to put a lot of work into it, because conveying information effectively is not something that just occurs spontaneously.
There are millions of Windows and Linux users who are creative, artsy types. There are millions of Mac users who are hard core technical types. There are even *gasp!* millions of technical geeks who are also artistic, and vice-versa. I know, it sounds like dogs and cats sleeping together, but it's really true!
Re:Mac vs PC- intelligence of the user (Score:4, Interesting)
I could go on and on, but basically, it's just a really nice user experience for novices and advanced users alike. Most of the criticism I've encountered are people complaining about how macs were 10 years ago, not how they are now. They're MUCH less quirky and I think most of the critics simply havent spent enough time with a next-gen Mac to appreciate it.
I've often referred to them as the BMW of computers. Are they the fastest? No, especially if you're a mechanic and built your own hot-rod. Are they expensive? Yeah, but not too bad at entry-level. The advantage, is every aspect completely solid and designed to make the best possilbe experience for the operator. Test drive a BMW 3-series and its hard to complain. Test drive a PowerBook, I think you'll find similar results.
either I am a moron or these results are nonsense (Score:3, Interesting)
I used some simple sed and awk scripts to filter my emails in a crude way to get as much of the paragraphs I actually wrote and to strip away all of the rest. I removed email headers, tried to only include the first part of multiparts, and avoided all attachments. I also replaced all email address and urls with the word 'address'. Finally I attempted to splice-out all forwarded messages and copies of what others had written. I expect that this script was not perfect, but it seemed close enough:
<snip - sigh...>
The lameness filter is preventing me from posting the scripts, and I could not get around it by pasting many copies of the lameness filter message here. Interestingly, I got to a page that seemed to have a form on it to add and remove active discussions. Interesting indeed :)
Re:Article text in case of slashdotting! (Score:3, Interesting)
readability grades:
Kincaid: 5.1
ARI: 5.4
Coleman-Liau: 8.7
Flesch Index: 84.0
Fog Index: 8.2
Lix: 30.0 = below school year 5
SMOG-Grading: 8.1
sentence info:
289566 characters
69688 words, average length 4.16 characters = 1.28 syllables
4799 sentences, average length 14.5 words
51% (2458) short sentences (at most 10 words)
13% (663) long sentences (at least 25 words)
1 paragraphs, average length 4799.0 sentences
5% (240) questions
39% (1888) passive sentences
longest sent 180 wds at sent 39; shortest sent 1 wds at sent 28
word usage:
verb types:
to be (2408) auxiliary (905)
types as % of total:
conjunctions 4(3043) pronouns 14(9464) prepositions 12(8414)
nominalizations 1(675)
sentence beginnings:
pronoun (1825) interrogative pronoun (216) article (438)
subordinating conjunction (123) conjunction (235) preposition (218)
Re:Troll food: I'm hungry! (Score:3, Interesting)
And, of course, anyone reading your ratings would downgrade you to "humo(u)r impaired".
Now, granted, "boxen" is a rather old bit of wordplay that's not nearly as funny as when it was new. But it's still good for ferreting out the people who don't have anything more important to complain about. So we can expect that it will continue to appear here, until it no longer gets any comment from bored readers.
I wonder if there are any language metrics that successfully take into account things like geek wordplay humor? That's gotta be something that's difficult to measure.
Re:Makes me wish.... (Score:4, Interesting)
"Blocking IE? Oh, great, it's another of those 'IE sucks and I hate it therefore I won't let anyone visit my site because I am elitist' people. Screw that, I've got better things to do."
"Blocking Firefox? Maybe they don't realize what the market share is like. I should email him and let him know."
Obviously, in each case, I'd end up writing vastly different kinds of email (well, in the first case I wouldn't write email at all, but hey.) Just categorizing it on "browser type" really doesn't tell you much.
(And I've run into both kinds of site in the last month, which is why I know those would be my reactions.
Re:Mac vs PC- intelligence of the user (Score:4, Interesting)
Executive Summary: His translation goes like this...
"PCs are for the unimaginative. The Mac lifestyle appeals to a smug elite who find happiness in blowing wads of cash on shiny noisy shit."
The whole analysis:
--- The PC is merely a succedaneum for satisfying the nympholepsy of nullifidians. The haecceity of the enchiridion of arcane and recdonite elements of the Mac gestalt appeals to the oniomaina of an eximious Gemeinschaft whose legerity and sophrosyne, whose Sprachgefühl and orexis find more than fugacious fullment in its felicific experience. ---
Gemeinschaft = "community"
Sprachgefühl = "language feeling"
'gestalt' is not a bad word...though it's pretty much only used in a psychological or, at least, biological context...
succedaneum = "substitute"
nympholepsy = "frenzy believed by ancient peoples to have been induced by nymphs"...WTF? The real fun of using 'big words' is the play among their connotations and denotations...you tip your hand when the absurd stares at you so plainly...we're talking about computers, not woodland sprites...
nullifidian = "of no faith, or not trusting to faith for salvation"
haeccity = "this-ness"
enchiridion = "handbook"
recondite = "not easily understood"
Not to brag, but let me brag for a bit. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I meet the average user on a daily basis (Score:2, Interesting)
There was a time when the Mac was definitely a superior platform to do graphics work. I recall when Ulead's photo editing packages was the only thing the PC users had. But I digress.
Forward to today. I no longer have my printing business and am now doing network diagnostics/repair etc. I also have many clients from my old industry and most of them are Macintosh based. (they might have a PC sitting alone in the corner for the occasional PC job) I would not consider any of my Mac-shop clients to be any more intelligent than my PC-shop clients. Truthfully, it seems that the Mac users blissfully forage ahead *knowing* that they have chosen the superior platform, without any real knowledge to back it up.
Just like back in my printing days, you are generally more likely to find a PC user that is capable of giving the Mac shop the type of file that they need, vs. a Mac user being able to give the PC shop the type of file they need. PC users seem to be more comfortable with different file formats and such. This may be misguided, or at least offset by the few extremely stupid people I've come across.
Also, don't forget, but the Mac was extremely virus prone in the early days. Hell, it was one of the humorous points I used to make. On the pre-BSD Mac OSs, you could contract a virus just by inserting a disc. Yes, it was actually running a program when it placed that icon on your desktop, but since there weren't ANY computers connected to the internet (Yeah, I even ran a dial-up BBS for my company circa 1989-1994) viruses didn't get any real attention.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that *most* people really don't know why they like what they like, but I'll bet that there are plenty of blinking 12:00 (or 88:88) VCRs in both Mac and PC users households.
-FB