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Comment by drenvuk | Hacker News Reader

I was confident that the users of news.ycombinator.com were getting dumber in aggregate. But yesterday I decided that the feeling in the back of my mind had been there long enough so I ran some simplistic data measurement. Turns out that based on my methodology the influx of people "dumber" than those who were here first started between 2011-2013. I was among them. Also the level has been consistent since those years so not much has changed.

I'm going to attempt to get data more often to confirm my assumptions outside of this one circumstance. Seeing my beliefs disproven was a bit of a wake up call. Also, I need to stop being a dick.

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What's your metric for "dumb."

Just a simple ratio: curse words/normal words over a period of time. There was some study that said smarter people are more likely to curse or something to that effect but every experience with the smartest people I've come into contact with has shown me otherwise. Their vocabulary, positions in their line of work, logical arguments and grades when we were back in school are what make me think I'm right.

I'm willing to believe I'm wrong again because there could be any number of other factors. But we're talking about outrageous beliefs so here we are.

Given the contradiction between the research study and your anecdotal experience I feel this experiment did not arrive at any meaningful conclusion.

Maybe there was a recent influx of dumber HNers. Anecodotally I agree with your initial conclusion. I feel there's been an influx of dumb people.

How would you measure intelligence in something that could be contained in a simple sql query?

You can't. Not all things can be molded into a quantitative analysis. For this stuff all you can rely on is your anecdotal judgement.

Even though IQ isn't exactly the best metric for measuring intelligence (as the test can be gamed and people aren't even sure if it's actually an accurate measure of what we interpret as the definition of "intelligence."), I feel that if I had access to the IQ score of every user that joined HN, I feel this would be the best possible metric we can come up with as IQ does correlate with many real world attributes that we actually do associate with "intelligence."

I thought highly intelligent people curse a lot

To test that hypothesis, we can also try to estimate the size of the vocabulary of the users based on their comments. Vocabulary size is probably roughly correlated with intelligence. It is kinda biased against users who don't live in the Anglosphere though.

Though you acknowledged the bias against non native English speakers, I feel that’s a huge bias. I for one can write two pages comment on Reddit without thinking, but I never dare to so on HN. I feel the pressure to be succinct on HN and being a non-English, that’s not easy. And it’s not (primarily) because of vocabulary.

As a non-native English speaker myself, I totally understand and sympathize.

> Vocabulary size is probably roughly correlated with intelligence.

Is it? AFAIK it is correlated with reading books and here in Eastern Europe lots of people who are "smart" at sciences have ostentatious disdain towards literature.

The reason I chose to measure curse words rather than vocabulary size is that I believed that people with an adequately sized vocabulary would be able to accurately utilize words rather than relying on curse words which are more flexible. To me, curse words seem like easy placeholders for feelings that the speaker or writer isn't willing to take the time to describe.

Testing vocabulary size is similar but penalizes people with a limited but accurate vocabulary, regardless of whether they use curse words as a crutch.

But again, assumptions and flaws, etc, etc.

You do have a point. But one could certainly also argue that "Impropriety is the soul of wit." :-)

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