Thinking Different

”Intelligence” is as debatable of a term as “taste”, and nothing produces passionate debate online like questioning one or the other (maybe “less filling” or “taste great”). Using a diction and style program to analyze the vocabulary and readability of Slashdot, PC and Mac users’ posts, Paul Murphy of LinuxInsider set out to discover which camp has the best grasp of the English language. The results are cited as a purely unscientific and loose indicator of intelligence, since “almost everyone agrees that a native English speaker’s ability to write correct English correlates closely with that person’s ability to think clearly.”

So do Mac users differ? You bet. Here’s the ratings summary based on about 3,000 lines of text taken from reader comments hosted by the Macintouch site:

 Kincaid: 8.9

 ARI: 9.4

 Coleman-Liau: 10.0

 Flesch Index: 67.8

 Fog Index: 12.0

 Lix: 40.5 = school year 6

 SMOG-Grading: 10.7

Not only were these ratings significantly higher than those given Slashdot’s contributors, and thus better than those given text from the PC sites, but the vocabulary was larger too. Without collapsing words to their root forms, but after removing punctuation (including capitalization) and numbers, the Macintouch stuff had 870 unique words to only 517 for the combined PC sites.

No real surprise there. But to be fair, conversely, I would confidently wager that a test measuring scientific/mathematical proficiency would produce results heavily skewed toward the Slashdot crowd. And a survey measuring artistic ability would most likely pivot results back favouring the Macintosh population. In reality, claiming “superiority” of any sort is a moot point since different tools are used for different jobs by different personalities. That being said, an interesting tangent would be to poll political affiliation and social/political activism amongst users ( Kerry,  Bush,  and… ahem Al Sharpton...use Macs). In either case, remember to vote and spell check!