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."

Comments

Email vs. Marijuana

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a non-issue to realize that most of the modern day losses in productivity come from distracted workers using the internet for personal pleasure rather than company projects. This distraction effort splits the focus of the individual and causes a decrease in the finite amount of cognitive processing ability given to any one task. Marijuana on the other hand results in modification of the reward pathway system in the brain. So there is an actually psychochemical difference in the brain which leads to addiction. Between the two, marijuana actually modifies the brain negatively while email only distracts. I really wish these people had taken the time to realize this before putting out a sensationalist piece of work.

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Wow... just Wow

Not only Carl Sagan

[sp0rk173]

Richard Feynman was an out user of recreational Marijuana, and he was one of America's leading physicists.

Of course, the burn out down the street who does nothing with his life except collect welfare is also an out user of marijuana. Bottom line? Everyone's different. Bottomer line? The burnout down the street might not want to do anything with his life, whereas Richard Feynman dug physics and math. Pot tends to lead you to do what you want, as opposed to what you should. Maybe if he didn't smoke, Feynman would have been some kind of accountant helping people get rich instead of contributing to the world of physics. Which would have been better? Who knows.

Anyone who's ever gone to a scientific conference can tell you that marijuana might not actually have any effect on IQ. Many, many scientists are pot heads, especially the especially bright ones.

Re:Worse than this? The horror....

[monkeydo]

It'd be a lot easier to check their claims about the studies they cite if, well, they had cited any studies. Otherwise, it's just pothead optimism.