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Study Compares IQ With Browser Choice
rennerik writes "A recent study of 100,000 people taking IQ tests compared the scores with which browser the person uses on a regular basis. On average, Internet Explorer users fared the worst, with IE6 users at the bottom of the pile and IE8 users performing slightly better. Firefox, Chrome and Safari fell in the middle with little difference between them. IE with Chrome Frame and Camino landed on top, along with Opera, whose users scored the highest"
The smaller the sample group, the more intelligent the average in it, in all recent "technology vs. intelligence" studies. Can we just deduct that the less intelligent flow with the crowd, the more intelligent actually pick what's best for them, and call it quits?
Shachar
They break up the different versions of IE, if you combine all the IE versions then the IQ levels exceed the others.
or you brought down the average for the Opera group.
I read this a couple days ago (days ago? Come on /.) and I still don't know if they corrected for income.
Dumb people tend to end up poor. Poor people use older stuff because thats all they can afford.
Not thinking its insightful to learn that poor people have cruddier older hardware.
Also smarter people are more likely to admin their own computer, thus be permitted to upgrade... Not sure how or if they accounted for that.
Its possible, that above and beyond the effect of poverty or work I.T. configuration, dumb people do dumb things, but i dunno; that's a pretty cutting edge idea worthy of a Nobel.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Internet Explorer makes you stupid.
This is how statistics work, right?
(Typed in Internet Explorer)
I use lynx. Does this make me a God?
But then I realised of all IE browsers it's IE6 that runs on Linux...
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
As a professor of psychology who has used intelligence tests in research, have given them clinically, and have taught students to use them, I just wanted to say to be very skeptical of this report.
The report is very sketchy.
It claims, for example, to have given the WAIS-IV online, the WAIS-IV being probably the most commonly administered intelligence test in existence.
The problem with this claim is that the WAIS-IV can only really be given in person, by a trained examiner. There are subtests on the WAIS-IV that would be impossible to actually give online. I.e., not only would it be a bad idea to not given them online, without a trained examiner, it would be physically impossible.
It's possible the firm claiming this study gave tests similar to the WAIS-IV, or gave portions of the WAIS-IV, but it is actually not possible to do what they actually claim in the report. They also don't give enough details to actually know what they really did, either, so you can't know.
I actually think the results they report are what I would expect, if I were forced to make a prediction, but the whole thing has a cloud cast over it by the fact they're claiming methods that are impossible (and actually perhaps illegal, given that the WAIS-IV is copyrighted and strictly controlled).
Keep in mind this report is being released by a for-profit company trying to benefit from publicity, using methods that are sketchy at best. Take it with a huge grain of salt, if at all.
Visitors arrived either through organic searches or through advertisements on other sites, and Aptiquant made a note of which browser each test taker was using.
This is add-driven self-selected polling. Manipulative and fraudulent.
The chats do not distinquish between the browser at home and the browser at work. That matters a lot when you looking at Internet Explorer.