The findings have been treated with scepticism by Professor David Spiegelhalter of Cambridge University's Statistical Laboratory: "They've got IE6 users with an IQ of around eighty. That's borderline deficient, marginally able to cope with the adult world.
"I believe these figures are implausibly low - and an insult to IE users."
I think we should listen to this. It's not really a plausible result.
I'm afraid people are dumber than you think. It's just that you don't meet a lot of them, because intelligent people aren't usually drawn to stupid people. Also, some of the people who took the test could be children or something. Children don't care about browsers, they just use the obvious choice.
Even a child should average 100. It's done as a ratio of "mental age" to actual age, times 100. So if you're 10, but have a "mental age" of 15, you have (15/10)*100= 150 IQ. Perversely, this makes it much easier to have an elevated IQ as a child, but normalizes all IQs with age. I was tested at age 6, and was scored somewhere around a 167 (10 year mental age / 6 year actual age). To keep the same IQ now, I'd have to test as like a 59 year-old. And therein lies the problem with measuring IQ...how do you quantify something like that. If Stephen Hawking retains all his genius-level faculties and lives to be 100, that makes his mental age over 200. What does it mean to "be as smart as a 200-year old" anyways??
Well... no. IQs are weighted so that people, on average, score 100. This study would put the average internet explorer user in the bottom 8% or so of the population in terms of IQ (as well as implying the top 8% are magically drawn towards super-minority browsers).
Uhh...no, the distribution should fall in a bell curve, so 80 IQ would still be about 25-30 percent of the population? I'm not going to do the stats math to figure out the rough percentages, but I'm sure it's a good bit higher than 8%.
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Topic: How to raise your IQ by switching browser. (turns out is a hoax) (Read 6198 times)