The Smartest Browser and OS

The IQ League maintain a "60 Second IQ Test" online. Interestingly, they correlate the results of this test with a number of statistics available from their server logs. Along with the geographical distinctions like city and country, the referrer and OS/Browser user-agent strings are also mined, to determine the Smartest Browser and OS. Cutting to the chase, the very smartest is Firefox on Unknown (which internal evidence suggests is MacOS-Intel), and the dumbest, as of this writing, is IE on WinNT. Quick! Test out and move the bars on the pretty graph! Can we make Slashdot.org the "Smartest Website in the World?" (It's currently number 2 behind ScienceBlogs.com.)

Comments

IQ Test?

[homer_s]

Since when do IQ tests contain questions about the bible, dinosaurs, etc?

Not that I'm disappointed that I did so badly or anything...

Re:IQ Test?

[mrbluze]

the most popular book in the world The most published, but I doubt even 1% of bibles have actually been read.

Re:IQ Test?

[Oktober Sunset]

Sorry, but how does knowing what date the H-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima measure any kind of intelligence?

That's general knowledge, and the ability to answer is dependent on culture, US or Japanese people would be be more likey to know the answer as it's a part of thier history. Linguistic inteligence is measured by things like the word logic ones (Retarded monkey, brain damaged baboon, the person who wrote that IQ test, Rocket scientist, which one is the odd one out?), all IQ tests should be answerable without any outside knowledge. What it is measuring is whether I can work out the calculation in my head, not if I was paying attention in history lessons 10 years ago.

Re:IQ Test?

[Max Littlemore]

Apparently people smarter than you are have decided that "who is the creator according to Hinduism, and for what was Al Capone eventually imprisoned" are very relevant to your IQ.

Aaaah, that's one of those arguments stupid people make when trying to beat intelligent people in an argument.

The same kind of stupid people who think that intelligence can be assessed world wide from general knowledge questions which are obviously based in narrow cultural bounds. Stupid stupid stupid.

Re:IQ Test?

[Eskarel]

While I agree with you that knowing something about other peoples religions is a useful thing to know, and while I might even agree with you that given that lapsed Christianity is the most prevalent religion in most western societies, knowing the exact contents of the bible, let alone the order of the books is really rather pointless.

Technically speaking you could be one of those folks who believe that every word in the bible is true and memorize every word in the bible so that you know what you believe and you still wouldn't actually have to know the order of the books(though unless someone cut up your bible and gave it back to you in random order as an experiment you probably would). Since even a devout follower doesn't actually need to know what book comes after Genesis, I doubt that someone of another faith(or lack thereof) should need to know that kind of detail.

If they really wanted to test cultural or historical knowledge of the bible they could have asked a whole lot more applicable questions.

Re:IQ Test?

[Simon Brooke]

And to respond to your criticism that "the ability to answer is dependent on culture"... Well, that's the entire point. If you don't know culture, that reflects a deficiency in your social intelligence.

Ok, so if the questions referenced the Bhagavad Gita, the Quran and the Prose Edda - all extremely important cultural artifacts - they would form part of a useful test of your intelligence, would they?

Certainly if you don't know any culture, that reflects on your intelligence. But the fact that you don't know a specific culture does not. There are people in the world who've never read the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Rigsveda, or The Art of War. Those people aren't necessarily stupid.

The Beatles and IQ

[allanw]

How does knowing facts about the Beatles (2/10 questions) have anything to do with IQ?

"IQ" test?

[ucblockhead]

Whoever wrote this "IQ" test is apparently not smart enough to understand how an IQ test works.

You can debate whether a real IQ test measures anything other than the ability to do well on IQ tests, however, real IQ tests don't depend on real world knowledge. That's the whole point of them. By my measure, 8 of the 10 questions it gave me are not even remotely worthy of being on an IQ test. For instance, knowing the date of the first olympiad is pretty much the definition of a question requiring real world knowledge.

Re:"IQ" test?

[JustinOpinion]

Yeah it seems more like a test of how quickly you can Google for answers.

Re:"Curretly"?

[JustinOpinion]

And as of now, Slashdot is ranked 15.

To me, this says more about sample size (or lack thereof) in these stats. The sample sizes are probably so small that the ranks are just statistical artifacts of the scores of the few people coming from each site. Also I'm sure the average scores are highly skewed by people who start taking the test and then just get bored and randomly guess some answers to get it over with. For small samples, small aberrations (e.g. a few smart, stupid, or lazy users) can obviously greatly skew the average.

Stats are nearly meaningless without some estimation of the error bars (or at least mention of the sample size!). All that to say: I wouldn't take these stats too seriously! Moreover, it's likely that as more and more Slashdotters take the test, the average will drop further and further from its statistically-anomalous level, to a more reasonable average. (As would the other listed categories, if only more people took the test.)

(Note: that's all assuming the test itself is even a valid measure of IQ, which I find rather dubious.)

Annoying bible book ordering questions

[Anonymous Coward]

Er... nice for the non-Christians and non-Jews in the crowd:

"Genesis is the first book of the Bible. Which of the following is the second book? (a) Genesis (b) Kings (c) Exodus (d) Numbers"

Uh, surely a proper intelligence measuring question would be:

"Which of the following books is not a work of fiction? (a) Genesis (b) Kings (c) Exodus (d) Origin of Species"

Lower is better!

[Joce640k]

I looked at the questions and I think dropping to to 11th place is a good sign.

IQ test it ain't.

Re:Lower is better!

[physicsnick]

It's even worse than that. I got penalized for only answering ten questions. They suggested I answer twenty more to remove the penalty. IN 60 SECONDS!!!

The test gives you about two seconds per question. That's not even enough time for general knowledge (read: culturally dependant) questions which don't belong on an IQ test, let alone complex pattern matching. I'm sorry, but that's no kind of IQ test.

Re:Lower is better!

[DeadChobi]

Apparently these guys don't know what an IQ test is. The first question I got was a "general knowledge" question, which doesn't require any type of intellectual inference. It's just a matter of whether or not you've absorbed the knowledge somehow.

Re:Lower is better!

[cp.tar]

Not only that, but the knowledge is both language-specific and, worse, America-specific.

Let's assume that even the anagrams ("Which of these is not an anagram of an animal?" type of questions) don't pose a problem to non-native English speakers. But what about the question on the serial numbers of dollar bills? I haven't handled a dollar bill in my entire life; how would I know anything about serial numbers?

Indeed, an IQ test it ain't.

Oh, and another thing: I realized -- belatedly, though -- that it was 60 seconds per question. Now I must track down the damned cookie to re-take the test.
Hm. 8 am. After class, then.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[Gewalt]

I have a mac. Safari is a decent browser, but it fails epicly compared to FF as it does not have extensibility as a primary function. It's the plugins that make firefox awesome. IE and Safari just dont even compare. (Opera? not even in the same league as IE, let alone safari)

Re:"Curretly"?

[egomaniac]

As for the validity of the IQ test, it had two nearly identical Bible questions (which book comes after Genesis). Is such simple factual knowledge even relevant to IQ?

There's a slight correlation between basic knowledge like this and IQ, but it's hardly a useful type of question. Especially if the person you're testing isn't Christian.

For example, it asked me the date on which we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima... I knew it was 1945, but don't know the particular date. I wasn't even born until thirty years later. I'm not sure that the fact that I didn't happen to know the exact date off the top of my head means I'm not as smart as somebody who did.

My Bad

[Max Littlemore]

I got stuck on the first question.

It said "Who is Winnie the Pooh's depressive donkey friend?" and I spent too long looking for the "How the fuck does knowing something about British children's fiction later bastardised by Disney tell you anything about my intelligence?" option.

Sorry everyone, I should have known better than to try and answer a question with a question.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[The Master Control P]

You should charge. Otherwise there's no consequence for being stupid and no incentive to not be stupid.

for foreign people it is a language test

[someone1234]

Real IQ tests should be language independent.