Amusing, but it's kind of a truism. Changing your browser requires cognitive capacity. Those who change it the fastest have the highest cognitive capacity. Even without other explanations, that explains variations of version within a single browser, and to some extent Chrome and Firefox. The really surprising thing for me was Opera. You can't explain that with mere willingness to update or try something new.
The really surprising thing for me was Opera
Agreed. If what being smart gets me is Opera, I'd rather be dumb!
IQ will be lower the more market share, so this is silly.
not necessarily. Let's say my browser is targeted toward people with low IQ, and I get 10% of the market, biased heavily toward low IQ. Suddenly, people with high IQ realize that it's a great browser for them as well, and they all start using it - I increase market share AND raise correlated IQ levels.
It is more accurate to say that increasing market share will tend to shift average IQ score toward the population mean.
This is the first time I've ever heard of ads for a "free IQ test" actually leading to the real thing! The paper uses the word "significant" quite a few times, but never mentions the significance level, or confidence intervals, or any other indication of the statistical quality (or lack thereof) of this data. The large number of subjects (100K) suggests that the results may be valid, but it would be nice to see this…
There's a major validity problem with the sampling method, and exterm points out a pretty glaring bias, so high numbers don't necessarily improve validity, only reliability. Random sampling would be much better than opt-in sampling, but it's obviously pretty difficult to do that in practice.
I've been using Opera for about 11 years now. When I started, there was nothing that was better. Even with that huge advertisement widget. It still is extremely competitive, if not leading in most things. For casual browsing it is unmatched.
It's not about one feature; it's the completeness of the whole browser. Things that you'd expect in Firefox/Chrome in extensions are built in here. It's still as fast as Chrome to the user, never mind silly benchmarks. Give it a spin some time.
It has some features that are fairly unique and I appreciate their experimentation. For example, Unite makes it very easy for your average person to share music, files, a streaming webcam, or whatever from within their browser. It's a great way to do something like let a friend listen to a cool album you just discovered without either of you ever leaving the browser. I still prefer Chrome on the desktop but I respect…
Coming soon to a courtroom near you: RIAA has Opera shut down as an "illegal filesharing program".
IQ will be lower the more market share, so this is silly.
not necessarily. Let's say my browser is targeted toward people with low IQ, and I get 10% of the market, biased heavily toward low IQ. Suddenly, people with high IQ realize that it's a great browser for them as well, and they all start using it - I increase market share AND raise correlated IQ levels. It is more accurate to say that increasing market share will tend to shift average IQ score toward the population me…
Your last statement is indeed the phenomenon I was intending to describe.
However access to the internet (and tools) has gone to the wealthy and educated first, who tend to have higher IQ (as measurable by most tests) than the poor and uneducated. Hence adoption of new browser technology is often among the cognitive elite (for access reasons) and penetration toward the masses (average IQ) depends on the overall appeal and not just a small fad among those with early access.
This is the first time I've ever heard of ads for a "free IQ test" actually leading to the real thing! The paper uses the word "significant" quite a few times, but never mentions the significance level, or confidence intervals, or any other indication of the statistical quality (or lack thereof) of this data. The large number of subjects (100K) suggests that the results may be valid, but it would be nice to see this…
Yeah, the "free IQ test" thing made me wonder too. I always thought that intelligent people would not be very likely to click on those ads.
Furthermore, what would the usage of adblock be by IQ percentile? Opera's high showing may be due to it's adblock extension still not being as mature as those of Chrome and FF, and so the average Opera user might be less likely to use it. There's no doubt that Opera users would tend to be geeks and nerds anyway, but you could say the same thing of the top FF users. I'm not convinced that the methodology supports the apparent conclusion that the smartest people use Opera, just that of those who took the test, Opera users scored best.
Amusing, but it's kind of a truism. Changing your browser requires cognitive capacity. Those who change it the fastest have the highest cognitive capacity. Even without other explanations, that explains variations of version within a single browser, and to some extent Chrome and Firefox. The really surprising thing for me was Opera. You can't explain that with mere willingness to update or try something new.
Here's the trend I see: all the browsers after IE pretty much go in order of market share. Safari isn't that special because it's the default on Macs, so even though its market share is only slightly above Opera's, the score there is dampened because there's still greater diversity in the people using it. But way fewer people are using Opera rather than Chrome or Firefox...I bet if you went back to the times Chrome/Firefox had a similarly sized market share, you'd see the same spike.
So it's not sampling bias, per se, but...I guess it's something along those lines?
> it is a clear indication that individuals on the lower side of the IQ scale tend to resist a change/upgrade of their browsers.
AptiQuant needs to review their correlation/causation definitions. Resisting change is one plausible explanation, but the only thing the data clearly show is that the people who scored low on this IQ test tended to be using out of date browsers at the time they took the test. "Resistance" implies agency, which correlation studies do not establish.
I choose to go with the reverse explanation: older browsers actively reduce user intelligence.