Slashdot Mirror
Are Mac Users Smarter than PC Users?
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!
Ok, this is absolute troll food but I'm hungry:
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...
Interesting correlation. I personally expect that this more relates to a correlation of age and artistic tendency than Mac vs. PC. While the apocryphal 'h4x0r' will be a Windows / Linux user, have few face to face social skills, and be a youthful male, the classic 'Mac user' is just an insanely cool bohemian dude who probably lives in a free wi-fi enabled coffee shop. My personal impression (after playing with Macs and PC's since they were born), is that the typical Mac user likes to use the tool for artistic / creative purposes, and the typical PC user does not. This implies a higher ability to obfuscate in a polysyllabic vein. Sesequepedalianism does not, however, imply 'intelligence'. If it did, Mary Poppins should have been running the bank instead of those old farts who could not say "Supercalafragalisticexpialadocious".
How about having both PC and MAC?
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Run a comparison between Slashdot and Fark, we gotta get some more ego-boosting in here.
Then how come when I put a two-button mouse on my grandma's Mac, and she tried to use it, her head exploded?
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!
I'm a computer science major and a Mac user, you insensitive clod!
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.
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.
from reading the article, I thought that he was unfair, and should have separated the unix users from the windows users. After all, they are two different worlds. Not only that, but slashdot regroups windows, mac and *nix users altogether. Mixed bunch indeed, but I'd like to see a comparison between mac users and *nix users for one. Also, since MacOSX is based on unix, wouldn't that mean that somehow the people that programmed unix were better than Apple programmers? Evidently Apple wasn't able to come up with a stable OS of it's own and had to find a way of finding a stable one. And for literature's sake, please don't think that people who use abbreviations on slashdot don't know how to type the words they abbreviate. Sometimes, people need to type fast (when your boss is behind you, or you've got work to do) and typing whole words such as Microsoft or Macintosh can take a long time, especially when you don't like one or the other, and need to retype them several times before getting them right. Maybe we need a literary section on slashdot, that relates to fiction books as well as php, C or Perl manuals to up our score a bit. Ideas anyone?
---- I am certain of only one thing : I know nothing else.
According to the article Mac Users have a larger vocabulary and use better English. This is expected to a certain degree since many Mac users were first introduced to their machines in high school or college when Apple had a lock on the educational market. Apple retained a larger precentage of college campus computers even after the general public and high schools began to transition to PCs. As a result, new users of Macs were being disproportionately recruited from among people with some college or college degrees. Better vocabulary and grammar skills would certainly be expected among this group. Cost could also be a factor. Macs cost more than PCs as a result those most likely to purchase them will be people with higher than average salaries. Since there is a correlation between salary and education, those purchasing Mac will once again have an above average educational level.
Back in the day of early Mac OS's and MS-DOS (And Windows until 3.11), the PC [Windows] user had to know more than the Mac User to operate the computer.
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.
Reading this reminds me of when I ran an experiment on my Philip Glass Library website back in 1997. For a period of 3-4 weeks, I blocked Internet Explorer, then about 2 months after that, I blocked Netscape for about 3-4 weeks.
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 work for a NASA contractor. Many NASA folk still use Macs, as do some of the older guys in my shop. They are all terrible at expressing themselves using the English language. Run-on-sentences run rampant. The comma, when used, is used incorrectly. The possessive form is used when plural should be used. IANAEM (English Major), I am simply an old-schooler who thinks the language should be used correctly.
Now go make fun of whatever mistakes I made in the above paragraph, but which my aged eyes could not catch!
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.
There are many areas one can be intelligent in. Sure, they are better at English and other "humanities" types of skills...
...so I conclude that Engineers, the ones good in math and science, use PCs.
This study doesn't say anything about the level of intelligence, but merely the type of person that uses x computer.
Slashdot and Other Style
[...]
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.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
It seems simply an obvious statement of fact.
Those that can afford nicer toys are those that usually are smart enough to get better jobs and make more money. Great article...
"...the typical Mac user bought his machine because he was scared of DOS..."
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...
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
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 necessarily that surprising when you think about it, for a variety of reasons. Macs dominate a much smaller sector of the market, and they are generally more expensive. So the people that buy them are more likely to be in higher income brackets, are more likely to have had more schooling, etc... Now this obviously isn't always true- just a correlation. Also, mac's are usually shinier.
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!
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
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 :)
I ran the style command (wasn't bundled with Mac OS X, so I had to compile it) on a P.G. Wodehouse text. I got the below results. Utterly preposterous--P.G. Wodehouse's command of the English language is unparalleled...
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)
2) If I were implementing the metric, any text using "boxen" would be downgraded to "Idiocy".
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.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I'm a Mac user, and somehow I still get suckered into helping a bunch of dumb people with their Windows problems. Hell, I'm the IT manager at my workplace in all but title and paycheck.
Glog!
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
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