4 ms·
People are twice as smart as they talk, three times as smart as they write
- JacobAldridge 17y agoI'm going to have a crack at taking this advice on board in future readings or discussions, not because of the logic behind it but because when the author "started doing that, I’ve not only been far calmer, I’ve learned much more too." The logic seems flawed to me, in that it equates focused with clever. You can be one without the other. Of the two, I'm definitely more clever than focused. I think the value a person contributes is usually the other way around. (Which is why my focus for this year is 'be more focused'.)
- whirlycott1 17y agoWords of wisdom from "Figuring Shit Out."
- cloudhead 17y agoquantity != quality, being smarter isn't about how many smart things you say, but about how smart each of them are.
- rw 17y agoThen there's the problem of the person who only says 1 thing, but it is brilliant. How about quality*quantity?
- JacobAldridge 17y agoThat formula may still have a signals v noise issue since it rewards each equally. How about quantity^quality, which would still factoring in quantity, but exponentially reward quality?
- shalmanese 17y agoquality*quantity would support my claim. Personally, I think something like the h-index (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirsch_number http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirsch_number) would be most appropriate. A person is n smart if he's said at least n things of n units of smartness :).
- bumbledraven 17y agoHe can't be too smart if he thinks that phrases like "2 times smarter" or "3 times smarter" have any meaning. 2 standard deviations above the mean, yes, "2 times smarter" no.
- shalmanese 17y agoIt was meant to be somewhat facetious, obviously, there's no such thing as two times as smart. Incidentally, one of the parts I cut out of that piece was predictions as to what nitpicky points would be raised in the comments and this was, indeed one of them :).
- bumbledraven 17y agoRather than addressing such points in an addendum, you could also have simply rewritten your piece so it wasn't word salad in the first place. But I suppose you'd have to have been 4 times smarter to do that.
- erlanger 17y agoAfter figuring Shit out, let's hope the author figures out how to scale this website.
- shalmanese 17y agoI'm at a loss at this point. The server's been hit with higher loads than this and survived fine. It's running Wordpress on Apache on a 512MB slice, there's no reason it should be this slow. Just rebooted it and it's still slow. If you want to help me debug it, my AIM username is the same as my HN one.
- Rabidmonkey1 17y agoCould you post the text of the article here, seeing as the server is down? I, and I'm sure others, haven't had the chance to read it yet...
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- gojomo 17y agoMake sure it's not swapping. Protect yourself against CGI-related memory leaks by making MaxRequestsPerChild small but non-zero. Revert any changes you made to various Apache limits (esp. thread or socket related) before the problem began. Turn off any other services. If all else fails, add a redirect to all clients except the CoralCDN itself to the CoralCDN. (See instructions at < http://wiki.coralcdn.org/wiki.php?n=Main.Servers http://wiki.coralcdn.org/wiki.php?n=Main.Servers >.)
- zepolen 17y agolocation /people-are-twice-as-smart-as-they-talk-three-times-as-smart-as-they-write { serve static_article.html }
- swombat 17y agoWordpress should do that by itself... Also, I think he mentioned apache rather than nginx...
- lsc 17y agohah. really? when I met my now-girlfriend for the first time, she said "wow, you are a lot less articulate in person"
- baddox 17y agoDid you meet online? If so, that would make sense according to this article, since she would observe you being a third less smart.
- stavrianos 17y agoI become much less articulate when I'm talking than when I'm chatting. I chat quickly, much more quickly than than most of the people I chat with, but there's still that extra second, second and a half to gather the thought and frame it properly. Even my jokes get funnier.
- lsc 17y agoyeah, on a mailing list. but if I'm twice as smart as I talk and three times as smart as I write, then assuming my IQ is constant, I would seem dumber if you read what I wrote (as it is 1/3rd my actual capacity) than if you listen to me talk, (as that is 1/2 my capacity.) But that's just a dumb joke. As for the article, I think it misses the point... writing and talking are quite different. (and writing in different mediums is different) - But when you write, you have a chance to strike out all the really stupid shit you said, before hitting send.
- baddox 17y agoThe part I don't understand is: twice or thrice as smart as what? What are you doing if you're not talking or writing? If you're not doing those, then no one can test your intelligence against when you are.
- lsc 17y agoyes, twice is a silly way of quantifying intelligence. 'standard deviations' is what you'd use if you want to sound, ah, intelligent. I'm just saying, people perceive me to be less intelligent in person than in writing, which runs counter to the author's point.
- shalmanese 17y agoText of the article until I can get my blog back online: I used to think that the point of editing was to eliminate all of the poor writing from an article so only strong arguments remained. It wasn’t until I started writing this blog that I began to appreciate how much good content routinely gets cut from the final product. Ideas will get cut if they detract from the focus of the piece, if there’s no logical place to put them anymore, some are even cut because they’re too interesting and merit their own separate post. I even cut a good line from the end of this paragraph because it wasn’t the appropriate sentence to close a paragraph with. Of every post I write, I estimate that I cut two good lines for every one good line that makes it into the final piece.What this means is that if you’re reading a piece of writing that you think is pitched at your level, the writer had to be three times smarter than you to have written it. Similarly, I noticed that when I was speaking, I would only say about half of the clever stuff I wanted to say which meant anyone talking to me was probably twice as smart as I think they are. This is, perhaps, why the internet is so full of assholes who think they’re the smartest person in the room. If you have a look at the comment section of almost any piece of content, at least half the comments tend to be some snide implication that the commenter is smarter than the author. Next time you read something, mentally assume that the author is three times as smart as they appear and think of how you would respond then. All I can say is ever since I started doing that, I’ve not only been far calmer, I’ve learned much more too.
- khandekars 17y agoDissect the argument with surgical precision, if need be, but never with a canon? Sounds good to me.
- dkarl 17y agoWhat made you choose a person's ability to write and say "clever stuff" as your measure of intelligence? It certainly isn't a good indicator among the people I know.
- philwelch 17y agoWeird. I write smarter than I talk.
- thetrumanshow 17y agoTalking happens in real time and cannot be faked. Besides there are multiple intelligences. No way you can determine intelligence from a single data point like how well you talk.
- joel_feather 17y agoThe post is just wrong. People write a lot cleverer than they speak or think, because they spend a lot of time formulating what they want to convey.
- unbannable 17y agoThis is not true if you have good writing skills, but most people (smart and otherwise) don't.