However, adding a PvP element to the game is not a solution, it's just distracting your playerbase from the weak PvE.
IMHO, PvP does not distract people from weak PvE, it is the other way around. PvE distracts people from the fact that there is no good PvP built into the game. When people do not have any other people to fight or compete with, then they just decide to kill computer opponents instead. It is unrealistic to think that a game can be pure PvP since it is tough to create enough tention between players without making the game too competitive. But the better job a game does of giving the players as much PvP conflict as possible without making it too tough on new players, the better the game will be.
Actually, in my experience Windows is FAR easier to develop for than the linux platform. I have to do some linux programming when I need cluster-like speeds, but it is much easier to program with Visual Studio or Borland Developers Studio than any linux developing environments I have ever used. KDevelop is very nice, but doesnt approach a Windows quality IDE enviornment.
Since when does D&D have anything to do with PvP? Have you ever tried PvPing using the D&D ruleset? It doesn't work. Wizards annihilate everything in their path and fighters don't have a chance
This is simply not true, you can have good PvP in Dungeons and Dragons. In fact I do not think there is anything more fun that having multiple PCs fighting against eachother. I may agree that 1v1 fighting is pretty bad, but MMORPGs are not about dueling, they are about groups fighting eachother. Fighters can do a damn good job against wizards, they just need the right equipment. A set a bracers that can do an anti-magic field 3 times a day followed by grappling is going to down any wizard. And a fighter can afford those items since he isnt spending thousands copying spells into his spellbook. There are probably some minor rule adjustments needed, but nothing more than any decent DM would be expected to do.
D&D is about party teamwork not pwning noobs.
Since when is PvP about "pwning noobs"? Sure it does happen, but the real fun of PvP is about large groups of people fighting eachother. It is what makes MMORPGs so great, since nothing like it exists in any other type of game. FPSs come close, but still cannot reach the same scale. And it has a great deal to do with cooperation, but cooperation against other people not just computers.
But D&D 3.5 and D20 isn't a balanced pvp ruleset and therefore if they want to make D&D online I'd prefer they stick as close to the pen and paper ruleset as possible instead of messing with it to accomodate l33t doods
The 3.5 ruleset is the closest to balanced that DnD has produced yet, although I do agree that most d20 is crap. I love the new ideas, but they almost never balance anything that they produce. Any good DM can balance his or her world, so why cant the makers of this game? It is just lazy.
In real Dungeons and Dragons you have the Dungeon Master to give you conflict. It isnt that you are competing with the DM, but a good DM can make your conflicts have the feel that you are competing against real people. If you are just playing the game by going through boring modules and have a DM that doesnt make the NPCs come alive, then you really arent enjoying some of the best parts of roleplaying.
In an online game, the NPCs do not have a human person playing them. They are pure AI and no MMO has done a very good job with the AI of NPCs. You need humans to give you conflict in an online game. There are some GMs but not nearly enough to give you the feeling of competing against humans.
It is true that DnD is about cooperating, but the fun comes in cooperating against an enemy. And I cannot imagine anyone actually feeling like they are competing against anything when they are killing random mobs. Without some kind of decent PvP any MMORP is doomed to be filled with nothing by juvenile carebears.
Actually, I am very glad that these games do Stress Tests. Almost all MMORPGs have problems when the game is released, I cant imagine how bad it would be if they didnt do these tests.
I have played dungeons and dragons most of my life, but somehow I just knew that I shouldnt get my hopes up for this game. Instead of being a fun and competetive game they seam to have catered to only the carebears. With a lack of real PvP, I know that I will probably never play this game. I guess I can understand why this is, since the D&D game system is not very well balanced. They probably just couldnt make a balanced online game so they just made it so you couldnt compete with other humans.
I just hope they provide at least some sort of interesting high level content to the game. In most games you have PvP to interest you at your maxed out level, since killing random computer controlled mobs gets very boring.
If you honestly think that you can go out and play sports without conditioning your body then you must never have been good at any sports after maybe the grade school level.
I absolutely cannot wait until your average person can use products like this. I spend between 10 and 20 hours a week in the gym (depending on work schedule), and I would love to have that reduced. I even enjoy what I do in the gym for the most part. But being able to spend less time in the gym lifting and more time just playing sports would be great. I dont think its a problem at all that regular people will finally have this.
Someday people will remember the days when humans spent time lifting weights just like we now remember when people rode horses to work.
No one is condoning the fact that he was beaten, but it isnt like anyone is suprised. If you go walking around the south side of Chicago with an open bag of money with 100 dollar bills flying out of it, dont be suprised if you get mugged.
My dad always said that it isnt enought just being right if you end up being "dead" right (he said it in the context of driving).
Science asks "how" and religion asks "why"? What's the problem with that?
The problem is that it simply is not true. Science also answers "why", such as "why does rain fall from the sky?" And religion also answers "how", such as "how was the world created?" They do indeed quite often provide different answers to the same questions.
Being a believer myself, I can understand the need some folks feel for having faith in their life. It gives us hope, resilience, and teaches us how to find happiness and peace.
The problem with this is that the happiness and peace that is found from faith in religion is incomplete. It is like saying that you can do calculus, but only with a TI-92 calculator. If the only way that you can find happiness in this world is by believing that a celestial being is giving it to you, your faith is no less of a crutch than that calculator.
I guess the bottom line for me is that science doesn't try to tell me how I should live my life, and relgion doesn't tell me all of the nuts and bolts of how I came to be alive.
Actually, science can sometimes show people how to live their life. Couples counciling is a way to find methods to help couples live a better life together. These methods are based on actual research, not faith. Evolutionary psychology is constantly find new theories regarding why humans have the emotions and beliefs that we do. While we do not know everything yet, it is quite possible that any question may be answerable eventually.
Fundies trying to teach religion in a science class is just as shameful as a scientist saying that I'm deluding myself by believing in something that he/she hasn't experienced.
I dont agree with this either. Someone trying to teach religion in a science class is actually undermining the education of students in this country. I have no problem if they want to try to spread the "good word", but they are doing it in the wrong place. I would agree with your analogy if someone went into a church and tried to teach that God doesnt exist, but I have never heard of any secular people doing such things. The analogy does not hold up.
All we try to do is open as many people as we can to the idea that the world is a wonderful place without the need of celestial beings. To believe that individual people have the capacity for good and great things, but not because of fictitious dieties that infuse them with righteousness. Most secular people believe that spreading such ideas is important, but we keep it in open forums where such discussions belong. Teachers should do the same, and keep religious talk out of classrooms.
Almost all of the areas of "science" that you mentioned where not scientific advances based on the scientific method. Most were simply conjectures by a few people, and most of the time they were beliefs not held by the majority of scholars in their given era. Most of the ideas that you spoke of are closer to philosophy than they are to science.
3. I can only speak about the ones I know of, but for instance Columbus did indeed believe that the world was smaller than it is. But that was a miscalculation by one man. That was not an incorrect theory. Most of the people who did not want to circumnavigate the globe were also the ones that thought the world was much larger than Columbus did.
4. I dont even know what you are talking about regarding "Life on the Moon." Other than some science fiction novels I do not know of any experimental data from any century that suggested there was life on the moon.
5. As for the Hollow Earth, again they only believed that because they had absolutely no way to test it or even guess at it. It was never a theory, just a bunch of guesses. It was never any closer to the truth than any faith based religion is.
6. Infinite Divisibility was just another guess, like the hollow earth. Until we had ways of measuring such small items, that was more like philosophy than science.
8. The "Atomic Holocaust" that you speak of was again just a crackpot idea that a few physicists had that had no bases on reality. It was not backed up by any scientific data, which is one reason why it was ignored.
12. While we now know that Homosexuality is not an illness, it could still very well be a mental disorder of some kind. There has to be some reason why a creature would not have natural sexual urges. While bi-sexuality is quite natural, actual homosexuality is not. It doesnt make homosexuals lesser people, but it is obviously some kind of abnormality that does have a cause.
I can see it now, Microsoft will use this against the Linux community. When the missile defence system still doesnt work in another decade, this time it will be all linux's fault.
If it doesnt work then just send it back in and replace it. I doubt that you will have much trouble once you show that it locks up every time you try to play a certain game. I just bought 4 24" LCD monitors from Dell for work, and one had a huge white line of dead pixels. They sent me a new one, no questions asked, and I went on with my life.
You get what you pay for, but $300++ isn't cheap IMNSHO.
Are you kidding me? You think that a triple core multithreading 3.2 GHz processor with a top of the line video card and 512MB of ram for $300 is expensive? I would love to know where you are buying your computer equipment from, because if it is cheaper than this then I have found a replacement for NewEgg and PriceWatch.
He was referring to the way that certain equipment is given to players in most role playing / MMO games. The "drops" are random, sure you get something every time but you never know what it is. If you knew that you would get a certain sword every time you killed a certain NPC, then you wouldnt sit there all day with friends waiting for him to spawn again. You would just kill him once and be done with it. It is that randomness that helps cause the addiction that the parent poster was referring to.
He isnt saying that Microsoft is necessarily better than Linux for supercomputers. He is only saying is that there could very well be a market for them as well as linux servers. If that is the case then it makes sense why Microsoft would want to sell a few more peices of software.
While it may be more fun to believe that "big business" is in the wrong here, I think it entirely more likely that their lawsuit has merit. The article states that the company is only filing the lawsuit to clear their reputation. The company must know that such as lawsuit will most likely cause bad PR unless they can prove that she was lying. Since they have decided to go forward with the lawsuit anyway shows that there may be merit to their case.
Big business is not always in the wrong, and there are just as many misinformed nutjobs out there as there are corrupt businessmen.
I know margins are tight, but will $70 (assuming the mfg ends up paying retail, which is unlikely) really make that much difference? And realistically the difference between being a preferred customer and just another run-of-the-mill OEM is probably more like $20 per license.
Dell sold 31 million units in 2004. That means that if the preferred customer discount is as little as $20, then they are saving about 600 million dollars a year from that $20. So YES, I think that being a preferred customer is a very big deal.
I dont think you can possibly mischaracterize or overexaggerate the rediculousness of not limiting science to natural explanations of questions. Any humor used is simply a way to mask the horror of the situation.
Yeah I guess we will probably always disagree. But I do find your last comment amusing, mentioning that elitists are in the minority. That is because elitists will always be in the minority based on the very definition of what makes them elitists. If they were not in the minority (of above average intelligence) then they wouldnt be elite.
And for every self-absorbed elitist there is another elitist that is out improving our world by inventing the light bulb or the radio. Having a dislike for the elite in this world is very similar to how people like me hated the football players in highschool, since they got all the cheerleaders.;-)
I really wish I could continue with this debate, but unfortunatly I am at work and that is just too much to respond to here. But I do want to make one point.
83% of Americans believe in the virgin birth of Jesus but only 40% with degrees believe the same thing. I think a lot of Americans are apathetic in general but I don't think that they're necessarily as stupid as would be required for the 83% figure and 40% figure to both be right.
I actually believe that the discrepency between "intelligent" people and "average" people really is that high. There is a saying that goes: In general the top 20% of a profession does 80% of the work. This isnt backed up by any studies that I know of, but in general people who are good at what they do are vastly better than the rest of the general public. Based on the above saying, the elite in our society could very well be 16x more productive than the rest of society.
Your average person in america has a 98 IQ. Your average graduate with a degree in science (engineering/physics/chemistry) has an IQ of 115, which is about one standard deviation for IQ scores. This means that your average B.S. student in science is in the 84th percentile of intelligence, while your average american is in the 50th percentile. This is a vast difference in intelligence. This is the difference between a person that struggles with fractions in school and a person who excels at calculus.
As for statistics, if you use 130 as the IQ required to be a "genius", you can see the difference between the average population and an average graduate with a science related B.S. degree. An average american has a 1.6% chance of being a genius, while the average science graduate has a 16% chance. This is a 10x difference. I know it sounds elitest, but your average graduate with a degree in something such as physics or biology is VASTLY more intelligent than your "average" american.
The study that I mentioned was from Nature Magazine, article 394(6691) 23 July 1998. They took a group that the "National Academy of Sciences" considered to be eminent scientists, not just a group of people with bachelors degrees in biology. I majored in Physics in college, but since I now work as a computer programmer I would hardly consider myself an eminent scientist. Another study mentioned in Scientific American, September 1999, did a study that gave different numbers for people with B.S. degrees and those considered to be "eminent" scientists. It gave 40% of people with B.S. in sciences are religious and 10% of eminent scientists are religious.
As for 93% being too high of a number, I agree that even I am a little skeptical of that number. But while I too know quite a few people from college that I consider scientists, none are on the caliber of even being nominated for the National Academy of Sciences. So any anecdotal evidence that I have would have no bearing on the caliber of people that this study used.
A few other studies include one done George Gallup in 1995. In this gallup poll it shows that 53% of people who have attended college believe that religion is important in their life while 63% of people with no college feel the same way. Also 48% of people who make $50k+ a year believe religion to be important, as opposed to 66% of people making less than $20k a year. While a college education and job earnings are not direct measures of intelligence, this again shows that on average you are less likely to be religious if you are of above average intelligence.
Norman Poythress did a study in 1975 regarding SAT scores and religious tendencies. He found the mean SAT scores to be: Strongly Anti-Religous(1148), moderatly anti-religious(1119), slightly anti-religious(1108), and religious (1022). This study was done at the University of Texas, but I am not quite sure how to get a copy of it.
This does not mean that there are not groups that as a whole are above average. I am sure that NBA players as a whole have above average levels of fitness. Does believing that make them elitest snobs? I am sure that Mensa members have an above average level of intelligence. Does believing that make them elitest snobs?
It is possible to believe that you have above average intelligence and be correct.
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However, adding a PvP element to the game is not a solution, it's just distracting your playerbase from the weak PvE.
IMHO, PvP does not distract people from weak PvE, it is the other way around. PvE distracts people from the fact that there is no good PvP built into the game. When people do not have any other people to fight or compete with, then they just decide to kill computer opponents instead. It is unrealistic to think that a game can be pure PvP since it is tough to create enough tention between players without making the game too competitive. But the better job a game does of giving the players as much PvP conflict as possible without making it too tough on new players, the better the game will be.
Actually, in my experience Windows is FAR easier to develop for than the linux platform. I have to do some linux programming when I need cluster-like speeds, but it is much easier to program with Visual Studio or Borland Developers Studio than any linux developing environments I have ever used. KDevelop is very nice, but doesnt approach a Windows quality IDE enviornment.
Since when does D&D have anything to do with PvP? Have you ever tried PvPing using the D&D ruleset? It doesn't work. Wizards annihilate everything in their path and fighters don't have a chance
This is simply not true, you can have good PvP in Dungeons and Dragons. In fact I do not think there is anything more fun that having multiple PCs fighting against eachother. I may agree that 1v1 fighting is pretty bad, but MMORPGs are not about dueling, they are about groups fighting eachother. Fighters can do a damn good job against wizards, they just need the right equipment. A set a bracers that can do an anti-magic field 3 times a day followed by grappling is going to down any wizard. And a fighter can afford those items since he isnt spending thousands copying spells into his spellbook. There are probably some minor rule adjustments needed, but nothing more than any decent DM would be expected to do.
D&D is about party teamwork not pwning noobs.
Since when is PvP about "pwning noobs"? Sure it does happen, but the real fun of PvP is about large groups of people fighting eachother. It is what makes MMORPGs so great, since nothing like it exists in any other type of game. FPSs come close, but still cannot reach the same scale. And it has a great deal to do with cooperation, but cooperation against other people not just computers.
But D&D 3.5 and D20 isn't a balanced pvp ruleset and therefore if they want to make D&D online I'd prefer they stick as close to the pen and paper ruleset as possible instead of messing with it to accomodate l33t doods
The 3.5 ruleset is the closest to balanced that DnD has produced yet, although I do agree that most d20 is crap. I love the new ideas, but they almost never balance anything that they produce. Any good DM can balance his or her world, so why cant the makers of this game? It is just lazy.
In real Dungeons and Dragons you have the Dungeon Master to give you conflict. It isnt that you are competing with the DM, but a good DM can make your conflicts have the feel that you are competing against real people. If you are just playing the game by going through boring modules and have a DM that doesnt make the NPCs come alive, then you really arent enjoying some of the best parts of roleplaying.
In an online game, the NPCs do not have a human person playing them. They are pure AI and no MMO has done a very good job with the AI of NPCs. You need humans to give you conflict in an online game. There are some GMs but not nearly enough to give you the feeling of competing against humans.
It is true that DnD is about cooperating, but the fun comes in cooperating against an enemy. And I cannot imagine anyone actually feeling like they are competing against anything when they are killing random mobs. Without some kind of decent PvP any MMORP is doomed to be filled with nothing by juvenile carebears.
Actually, I am very glad that these games do Stress Tests. Almost all MMORPGs have problems when the game is released, I cant imagine how bad it would be if they didnt do these tests.
I have played dungeons and dragons most of my life, but somehow I just knew that I shouldnt get my hopes up for this game. Instead of being a fun and competetive game they seam to have catered to only the carebears. With a lack of real PvP, I know that I will probably never play this game. I guess I can understand why this is, since the D&D game system is not very well balanced. They probably just couldnt make a balanced online game so they just made it so you couldnt compete with other humans.
I just hope they provide at least some sort of interesting high level content to the game. In most games you have PvP to interest you at your maxed out level, since killing random computer controlled mobs gets very boring.
If you honestly think that you can go out and play sports without conditioning your body then you must never have been good at any sports after maybe the grade school level.
I absolutely cannot wait until your average person can use products like this. I spend between 10 and 20 hours a week in the gym (depending on work schedule), and I would love to have that reduced. I even enjoy what I do in the gym for the most part. But being able to spend less time in the gym lifting and more time just playing sports would be great. I dont think its a problem at all that regular people will finally have this.
Someday people will remember the days when humans spent time lifting weights just like we now remember when people rode horses to work.
No one is condoning the fact that he was beaten, but it isnt like anyone is suprised. If you go walking around the south side of Chicago with an open bag of money with 100 dollar bills flying out of it, dont be suprised if you get mugged.
My dad always said that it isnt enought just being right if you end up being "dead" right (he said it in the context of driving).
Science asks "how" and religion asks "why"? What's the problem with that?
The problem is that it simply is not true. Science also answers "why", such as "why does rain fall from the sky?" And religion also answers "how", such as "how was the world created?" They do indeed quite often provide different answers to the same questions.
Being a believer myself, I can understand the need some folks feel for having faith in their life. It gives us hope, resilience, and teaches us how to find happiness and peace.
The problem with this is that the happiness and peace that is found from faith in religion is incomplete. It is like saying that you can do calculus, but only with a TI-92 calculator. If the only way that you can find happiness in this world is by believing that a celestial being is giving it to you, your faith is no less of a crutch than that calculator.
I guess the bottom line for me is that science doesn't try to tell me how I should live my life, and relgion doesn't tell me all of the nuts and bolts of how I came to be alive.
Actually, science can sometimes show people how to live their life. Couples counciling is a way to find methods to help couples live a better life together. These methods are based on actual research, not faith. Evolutionary psychology is constantly find new theories regarding why humans have the emotions and beliefs that we do. While we do not know everything yet, it is quite possible that any question may be answerable eventually.
Fundies trying to teach religion in a science class is just as shameful as a scientist saying that I'm deluding myself by believing in something that he/she hasn't experienced.
I dont agree with this either. Someone trying to teach religion in a science class is actually undermining the education of students in this country. I have no problem if they want to try to spread the "good word", but they are doing it in the wrong place. I would agree with your analogy if someone went into a church and tried to teach that God doesnt exist, but I have never heard of any secular people doing such things. The analogy does not hold up.
All we try to do is open as many people as we can to the idea that the world is a wonderful place without the need of celestial beings. To believe that individual people have the capacity for good and great things, but not because of fictitious dieties that infuse them with righteousness. Most secular people believe that spreading such ideas is important, but we keep it in open forums where such discussions belong. Teachers should do the same, and keep religious talk out of classrooms.
Almost all of the areas of "science" that you mentioned where not scientific advances based on the scientific method. Most were simply conjectures by a few people, and most of the time they were beliefs not held by the majority of scholars in their given era. Most of the ideas that you spoke of are closer to philosophy than they are to science.
3. I can only speak about the ones I know of, but for instance Columbus did indeed believe that the world was smaller than it is. But that was a miscalculation by one man. That was not an incorrect theory. Most of the people who did not want to circumnavigate the globe were also the ones that thought the world was much larger than Columbus did.
4. I dont even know what you are talking about regarding "Life on the Moon." Other than some science fiction novels I do not know of any experimental data from any century that suggested there was life on the moon.
5. As for the Hollow Earth, again they only believed that because they had absolutely no way to test it or even guess at it. It was never a theory, just a bunch of guesses. It was never any closer to the truth than any faith based religion is.
6. Infinite Divisibility was just another guess, like the hollow earth. Until we had ways of measuring such small items, that was more like philosophy than science.
8. The "Atomic Holocaust" that you speak of was again just a crackpot idea that a few physicists had that had no bases on reality. It was not backed up by any scientific data, which is one reason why it was ignored.
12. While we now know that Homosexuality is not an illness, it could still very well be a mental disorder of some kind. There has to be some reason why a creature would not have natural sexual urges. While bi-sexuality is quite natural, actual homosexuality is not. It doesnt make homosexuals lesser people, but it is obviously some kind of abnormality that does have a cause.
I can see it now, Microsoft will use this against the Linux community. When the missile defence system still doesnt work in another decade, this time it will be all linux's fault.
If it doesnt work then just send it back in and replace it. I doubt that you will have much trouble once you show that it locks up every time you try to play a certain game. I just bought 4 24" LCD monitors from Dell for work, and one had a huge white line of dead pixels. They sent me a new one, no questions asked, and I went on with my life.
You get what you pay for, but $300++ isn't cheap IMNSHO.
Are you kidding me? You think that a triple core multithreading 3.2 GHz processor with a top of the line video card and 512MB of ram for $300 is expensive? I would love to know where you are buying your computer equipment from, because if it is cheaper than this then I have found a replacement for NewEgg and PriceWatch.
He was referring to the way that certain equipment is given to players in most role playing / MMO games. The "drops" are random, sure you get something every time but you never know what it is. If you knew that you would get a certain sword every time you killed a certain NPC, then you wouldnt sit there all day with friends waiting for him to spawn again. You would just kill him once and be done with it. It is that randomness that helps cause the addiction that the parent poster was referring to.
He isnt saying that Microsoft is necessarily better than Linux for supercomputers. He is only saying is that there could very well be a market for them as well as linux servers. If that is the case then it makes sense why Microsoft would want to sell a few more peices of software.
If she is a mininformed nutjob, and has said libelelist (is that a word?) statements, then yes she can be sued.
While it may be more fun to believe that "big business" is in the wrong here, I think it entirely more likely that their lawsuit has merit. The article states that the company is only filing the lawsuit to clear their reputation. The company must know that such as lawsuit will most likely cause bad PR unless they can prove that she was lying. Since they have decided to go forward with the lawsuit anyway shows that there may be merit to their case.
Big business is not always in the wrong, and there are just as many misinformed nutjobs out there as there are corrupt businessmen.
I know margins are tight, but will $70 (assuming the mfg ends up paying retail, which is unlikely) really make that much difference? And realistically the difference between being a preferred customer and just another run-of-the-mill OEM is probably more like $20 per license.
Dell sold 31 million units in 2004. That means that if the preferred customer discount is as little as $20, then they are saving about 600 million dollars a year from that $20. So YES, I think that being a preferred customer is a very big deal.
Those are militarily held suspects, not citizens. They do not have the same rights.
I dont think you can possibly mischaracterize or overexaggerate the rediculousness of not limiting science to natural explanations of questions. Any humor used is simply a way to mask the horror of the situation.
Yeah I guess we will probably always disagree. But I do find your last comment amusing, mentioning that elitists are in the minority. That is because elitists will always be in the minority based on the very definition of what makes them elitists. If they were not in the minority (of above average intelligence) then they wouldnt be elite.
;-)
And for every self-absorbed elitist there is another elitist that is out improving our world by inventing the light bulb or the radio. Having a dislike for the elite in this world is very similar to how people like me hated the football players in highschool, since they got all the cheerleaders.
I really wish I could continue with this debate, but unfortunatly I am at work and that is just too much to respond to here. But I do want to make one point.
83% of Americans believe in the virgin birth of Jesus but only 40% with degrees believe the same thing. I think a lot of Americans are apathetic in general but I don't think that they're necessarily as stupid as would be required for the 83% figure and 40% figure to both be right.
I actually believe that the discrepency between "intelligent" people and "average" people really is that high. There is a saying that goes: In general the top 20% of a profession does 80% of the work. This isnt backed up by any studies that I know of, but in general people who are good at what they do are vastly better than the rest of the general public. Based on the above saying, the elite in our society could very well be 16x more productive than the rest of society.
Your average person in america has a 98 IQ. Your average graduate with a degree in science (engineering/physics/chemistry) has an IQ of 115, which is about one standard deviation for IQ scores. This means that your average B.S. student in science is in the 84th percentile of intelligence, while your average american is in the 50th percentile. This is a vast difference in intelligence. This is the difference between a person that struggles with fractions in school and a person who excels at calculus.
As for statistics, if you use 130 as the IQ required to be a "genius", you can see the difference between the average population and an average graduate with a science related B.S. degree. An average american has a 1.6% chance of being a genius, while the average science graduate has a 16% chance. This is a 10x difference. I know it sounds elitest, but your average graduate with a degree in something such as physics or biology is VASTLY more intelligent than your "average" american.
The study that I mentioned was from Nature Magazine, article 394(6691) 23 July 1998. They took a group that the "National Academy of Sciences" considered to be eminent scientists, not just a group of people with bachelors degrees in biology. I majored in Physics in college, but since I now work as a computer programmer I would hardly consider myself an eminent scientist. Another study mentioned in Scientific American, September 1999, did a study that gave different numbers for people with B.S. degrees and those considered to be "eminent" scientists. It gave 40% of people with B.S. in sciences are religious and 10% of eminent scientists are religious.
As for 93% being too high of a number, I agree that even I am a little skeptical of that number. But while I too know quite a few people from college that I consider scientists, none are on the caliber of even being nominated for the National Academy of Sciences. So any anecdotal evidence that I have would have no bearing on the caliber of people that this study used.
A few other studies include one done George Gallup in 1995. In this gallup poll it shows that 53% of people who have attended college believe that religion is important in their life while 63% of people with no college feel the same way. Also 48% of people who make $50k+ a year believe religion to be important, as opposed to 66% of people making less than $20k a year. While a college education and job earnings are not direct measures of intelligence, this again shows that on average you are less likely to be religious if you are of above average intelligence.
Norman Poythress did a study in 1975 regarding SAT scores and religious tendencies. He found the mean SAT scores to be: Strongly Anti-Religous(1148), moderatly anti-religious(1119), slightly anti-religious(1108), and religious (1022). This study was done at the University of Texas, but I am not quite sure how to get a copy of it.
This does not mean that there are not groups that as a whole are above average. I am sure that NBA players as a whole have above average levels of fitness. Does believing that make them elitest snobs? I am sure that Mensa members have an above average level of intelligence. Does believing that make them elitest snobs?
It is possible to believe that you have above average intelligence and be correct.