Slashdot Mirror
Bad Reporting, Not Email, Worse Than Marijuana
MoNickels writes "Turns out, those endless news reports and blog entries in April about "texting makes you stupid" were inaccurate. As linguist Mark Liberman at LanguageLog now reports by way of apologizing to Wilson, it wasn't Wilson's fault, but that of "rotten science journalism." Psychologist Glenn Wilson was reported to have done a study said that chat and email, as the Guardian put it, "are a greater threat to IQ and concentration than taking cannabis." But Wilson says, "This...is a temporary distraction effect—not a permanent loss of IQ. The equivalences with smoking pot and losing sleep were made by others, against my counsel, and 8 [subjects] somehow became '80 clinical trials.'" The original Slashdot story was covered back in April."
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5179038412 705987877
... And aye dont feal any more stupider.
Nobody's gay for Mole-Man.
But the real question is whether causal marijuana usage really has a lasting effect on your IQ.
I was having this discussion with a co-worker just the I'm sorry, what were we talking about?
I blame the man for lowering my IQ and for takin my stash...
At least being stoned all the time makes dupes more tolerable when I don't remember reading them the first time.
"Progress comes from the intelligent use of experience."
Article title is definitely true! With pot I'm only disoriented for an hour or two, but sucky reporting leaves me in a confused daze forever...
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
I mean, just take a look at yesterday's story about armed dolphins, which was patently false, and had no basis in fact.
Did slashdot editors even RTFA or correct it afterwards? No, of course not. It seems to be par for the course here nowadays. Post the most fantastic, sensationalistic articles to spark pagehits and flamewars, and the editors sit back and cash in.
The excuse that it's the readers jobs to correct just doesn't hold. The editors have a duty to inform in an accurate and factual matter, even if this is just a crummy overgrown tech blog.
Obviously those people at the Guardian have not yet read Slashdot.
Welcome to our information age crack house.
You know, you think you're not going to get anything because you're on Linux, but that works seamlessly with no plugins under Mozilla.
My hats off to the illuminata that made it possible for me to be able to see stupid high school kids screw around!
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
You can't trust wikipedia! Trust the mass media!
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
Well I never!
http://www.joejag.com/pics/cnn_columbia.jpg
"they sell eyeballs. When you buy a paper, you're the product and not the client."
ditto for this place
Before adopting WHATWG, read the moonlight.NET EULA [http://www.microsoft.com/interop/msnovellcollab/moonlight.mspx]
Surely you're toking, Mr. Feynman?
Yahoo! Pipes are awesome. How awesome? http://pipes.yahoo.com/jesdynf/slashdot
Or how about, "Reading Slashdot, Worse Than Marijuana".
Bradley Holt
There's no way that casual...wait, what was I saying? Could you repeat the question?
But did they admit their mistake soon enough? I've been smoking pot 24/7 since that article ran (/. told me it was OK!) and now I may be severely retarded. Any other nerds in my boat?
..
Man.. I've really gotta stop trusting everything I read on the internets, someday this is gonna get me in trouble.
Oh well, I'll always have those free Xboxes and iPods I won...
Some of us can afford a few IQ points.
On the plus side, you can program in Lisp, now.