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AptiQuant Browser/IQ Study Was Likely a Hoax
A steady stream of people have submitted notes this morning saying that the story we (and the entire internet, and even NPR's Marketplace) mentioned recently talking about browser platform correlating with IQ looks like a hoax. Of course, if you read the Slashdot discussion, you probably would have known this already, but now everyone knows. The company responsible for the survey, AptiQuant, looks to not be real.
They look not to be real?!
After all, I use Opera.
It's still very funny. This whole business of calling it a "study" though is bad to begin with. A study requires some work. What this was at best was metrics, or "analysis."
This signature has Super Cow Powers
I swear, Homer Simpson is right, you can find a study to prove anything. He conducted a study to prove that.
They results still look true to me, even if it was a hoax. Think about it. Many of you know IE users.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
I'm using IE like I always have and I don't understand.
AptiQuant CEO: "Shit we've offended all the IE users and there's uncountable legions of those bottom feeders. You, minion! Spin something!".
No one has yet mentioned the "post the hoax and earn revenue then post the retraction and earn more revenue" angle.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Well that sucks. I swear my intelligence increased the instant I switched to IE with Chrome Frame and Camino. Damn placebo effect.
Better known as 318230.
So someone could have been a real journalist last week with a small amount of Google skills. Got it.
The "results" seemed to fit all our pre-established notions of IE users in general - they don't know any better, because they are stupider than the rest of us. Now I would like to see someone do a legit study using this methodology and see what the actual results are. My confirmation bias says they'll actually be pretty close to the fake results.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
It seems like a lot of work to be a fake. To give peoples browser preferences and their average intelligence doesn't really prove anything useful. As the only thing I could think of would be to poke fun at Microsoft and say Yes you have the higher market share but you got the market share of idiots. It is not like if you switch browsers you will become smarter.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The bigger story is that most mainstream news sites don't do any fact checking!
dumbas troll article based on game show science might be fake, in other news a sea erchant died the president will be speaking at its funeral
Anyone could tell this was just pretentious assholes wanting to make themselves feel better on the internet.
The realistic part was losing thousands of brain cells by the second.
Well played, whoever did this. Sure, a lot of /.ers are no doubt going to play the "I suspected it was fraudulent from the second I heard of it!" card, but they essentially trolled the entire internet and caught out enough big news agencies (from slashdot to the BBC) to make their efforts worthwhile.
I just wonder why, though? Was it as simple as trolling the internet, or was there some other purpose to it? Can anyone think of a legitimate reason for this, other than a cheap laugh?
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
next you will be telling me PowerPoint doesn't make you dumb after all either ;)
While the company may not exist, I suspect that the majority would buy into just about all that it said. Far too much practical experience of seeing that Window users are stupid losers.
Don't spoil it now! I'm fully expecting a significant drop in IE6 users in the next round of the various stats put out each month because of this. Anything that gets users off that nightmare and onto something newer, even just a more recent version of IE, is a good thing in my book!
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Say it ain't so Ms. Zuckerburg. They have a web page with a Facebook link. They've got to be real. Right?
Have gnu, will travel.
I wondered about that study when I saw it the first time. But then it started to make sense. My former workplace still uses XP/IE6. I knew I felt dumber every time I walked into that building. My new job lets me run Firefox and I certainly feel a lot smarter here than I did at my old job.
Media outlets everywhere duped by some joker. Awesome. Who cares what browser someone uses? Nobody ran that story though huh.
Back in 1997/1998 when I ran a fan website. For a period of time I had shamefully turned away IE users for a time because of a website incompatibility from the site and received angry e-mails. Then, about 6 months later, I turned away Netscape users with the same reasoning. What I found is that the e-mail from IE users tended to be much shorter and use simpler words with more mistakes in grammar. Its one of things that I did, but alas never published. I still have all the e-mails though. My thoughts about it at the time were that people who choose to use IE at the time don't really think about their choices much and just go with what is given to them.
... it probably is. The study sounded reminiscent of the study of IQ vs 2000 presidential voting, which requires some states to have average IQs almost in the drool-cup range.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Funny I thought it was misleading. I fell for the hype. I haven't done that since the Blair's Witch Project http://www.blairwitch.com/ and other info here http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0185937/ Either way I just looked it up and the domain name was created on 2011/07/14 UTC. So if they have been around wouldn't they have been on the web a lot sooner, since they were to have been an intuition about the web?
Paul: Father... father, the sleeper has awakened! - Dune
And they failed.
...Internet Explorer users, on average, fell for the hoax the most, with IE6 users most likely to believe it was real and IE8 users being somewhat less gullible. Firefox, Chrome and Safari users fared somewhat better as they tended to not believe it as much as the IE users. IE with Chrome Frame and Camino users almost never believed the hoax, while Opera users immediately new it not to be true.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Horizontally, information is getting better and better. We can find information and news in many countries and languages within a few keystrokes. Vertically, the inflationary impact of "free news" is decimating the editors. /. is free, but the model of submitting stories which are weakly edited and commenting on them is going to be correction-based after publication.
Gently reply
as individuals feel the need to find identity in all that we do, our browsers in the digital age have become that next natural extension to our endless search for the perfect definition.
people are smart,
people are stupid,
browsers are software.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Or the "results" are true, but this particular source, for that result is bogus. Which is what has actually happened here.
It reminds me of the Bush trick, where they fed a reporter a 'typed' letter that could be debunked, then they debunked it, thus discrediting the whole line of "Bush got out of Vietnam war duties because of his dad". Yet Bush did get out of Vietnam war duties thanks to Pappa.
So the source is bogus the report is bogus and yet IE users are dumber.
Modern journalists really do have a sub-100 IQ, because their widespread publishing without question of this story proved it.
Great, another thread where we can pass off computer experience as general intelligence.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Also Lot of older/business folks have decent enough intelligence not to waste their time getting suckered into fixing everyone's computer or switch browsers every week while some ie6 jock steals away with their secret love interest.
I use IE, FireFox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera... which, by my calculations would have put me at the top of the IQ heap (they are additive, right?). Now I guess I'll have to look for some other metric to prove how intellectually superior I am.
...even if the study itself didn't, or was faked.
According to the BBC article, "IE supporters, who have threatened AptiQuant with legal action."
Right. Threatening the authors of a study with legal action, rather than pointing out flaws in the study, or doing a better study, or doing research into the possible reasons why the link might have existed, really makes it clear that those IE supporters are complete morons, who have no clue what research actually is, or how it works.
People showing off their stupidity proves that they're stupid.
Why doesn't the gene pool have a life guard?
It's produced by APM, American Public Media, aka, Minnesota Public Radio.
That was a story from the hoaxers themselves.
I am actually planning on doing this, though at the user's choice rather than automatic. We've seen the "I didn't read the article" / Teal Deer effect for so long, that no one page fits anymore, if it ever really did.
Instead, depending on the type of method I decide upon, there would be "easy" "medium" and "advanced" levels of the same pages, so the folks who want the sound bites can get those, and the gang who wants to discuss the limitations of null bits in C can get the other level of detail.
My basic inspiration is the Ski Slope system.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Let's say I invented a browser today. Where would I put it? Github. Who's on Github? Geeks. They're smarter.
If the browser were good, it would expand out through the social network with geeks at the root. The early adopters would continue to be smart people, until the circle started to expand to their dumb friends.
Who uses IE? A very broad spectrum of people.
I wager that regardless of the quality of the browser, the less popular it is the smarter the users are.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Funny thing is if someone actually did the research it would probably be accurate !!
I did have to wonder how they were getting IQ data on that many people.
Somebody sold me this rock that wards against bears. A bear ate me anyway. I should do a study of why rocks ward against bears and not exercise my legal rights for the damage done to me by the guy who sold me the rock.
it was a cute one. Didn't anyone at least get a giggle out of it?
Where's my sock? There it is...
The results of the IQ test are based on the reaction to the story.
A good reason to keep the link and article up--- for sending to IE users!
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
...this poor sod. He's trying to understand (and made me laugh in the process).
I personally think this and the previous story are a complete waste of time. A browser is a browser. Beyond back, foward, stop, refresh, and bookmarks/favorites I don't really give a shit what it does. Tabs are a nice touch, as are security features like popup blockers, smartscreen, etc. I mostly want it to provide me with the most screen real estate it can without making access to those features unnecessarilly inaccessible. On my Windows PC I use IE9, on my 4 year old Mac laptop Safari, and on my RHEL work laptop I use Firefox. All of these fill my core requirements and even contain some or all of the 'nice touch' features I mentioned.
You know the other thing that is really great about using the browser that comes with each OS? Windows Update, Software Update, yum, each update the browser along with the OS. No having to think about clicking, waiting to be prompted, or otherwise searching for updates apart from that singular effort for updating the OS.
As for security, a healthy dose of common sense, a fully patched system, a software firewall, and an antivirus/malware package are a really good start for keeping your system secure. No browser has ever been completely safe, and none ever will be.
I personally think this and the previous story are a complete waste of time. A browser is a browser. Beyond back, foward, stop, refresh, and bookmarks/favorites I don't really give a shit what it does. Tabs are a nice touch, as are security features like popup blockers, smartscreen, etc. I mostly want it to provide me with the most screen real estate it can without making access to those features unnecessarilly inaccessible. On my Windows PC I use IE9, on my 4 year old Mac laptop Safari, and on my RHEL work laptop I use Firefox. All of these fill my core requirements and even contain some or all of the 'nice touch' features I mentioned. You know the other thing that is really great about using the browser that comes with each OS? Windows Update, Software Update, yum, each update the browser along with the OS. No having to think about clicking, waiting to be prompted, or otherwise searching for updates apart from that singular effort for updating the OS. As for security, a healthy dose of common sense, a fully patched system, a software firewall, and an antivirus/malware package are a really good start for keeping your system secure. No browser has ever been completely safe, and none ever will be.
As I posted to the previous Slashdot story about this (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2357650&cid=36941282), "Given the fact that they are saying [a particular test] is what they gave (when they don't mistakenly say they gave the WISC), the test results are not to be trusted."
Basically, what was written up in the methods of the report was impossible to do IQ test-wise. A hoax is much better than such gross incompetence.
The point of online IQ tests, it seems to me, is to determine if you're smart enough not to waste your time on a stupid online IQ test.
"You gotta not play to win!"
You use IE6 don't you?
Is 1563649 a prime number?
Being published on the Internet automatically makes something true.
Also, since correlation implies causation AND it works both ways, all you need to do to instantly become smarter is switch to Opera. :)
They dismissed the whole thing as a waste of time, and went on to do other things, while the stupid people filled space on the Slashdot article page discussing the "study".
the site even says it's a hoax:
http://www.aptiquant.com/news/tell-tale-signs-that-should-have-uncovered-the-hoax-in-less-than-5-minutes/
PhysOrg is still reporting/reblogging this as a news headline.
He once inserted random mutations into his code, just so he could have the experience of debugging.
It's okay to dislike something, but don't let that hatred get in the way of your critical reasoning skills.