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People are twice as smart as they talk, three times as smart as they write

blog.figuringshitout.com

21–30 of 31 posts

Re: People are twice as smart as they talk, three times as smart as they write

#21
post #8

After figuring Shit out, let's hope the author figures out how to scale this website.

I'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.

    location /people-are-twice-as-smart-as-they-talk-three-times-as-smart-as-they-write {
        serve static_article.html
    }

Re: People are twice as smart as they talk, three times as smart as they write

#22

Text 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 t…

Dissect the argument with surgical precision, if need be, but never with a canon? Sounds good to me.

Re: People are twice as smart as they talk, three times as smart as they write

#23

Text 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 t…

What 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.

Re: People are twice as smart as they talk, three times as smart as they write

#25
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'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.

location /people-are-twice-as-smart-as-they-talk-three-times-as-smart-as-they-write { serve static_article.html }

Wordpress should do that by itself...

Also, I think he mentioned apache rather than nginx...

Re: People are twice as smart as they talk, three times as smart as they write

#26
post #25
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

location /people-are-twice-as-smart-as-they-talk-three-times-as-smart-as-they-write { serve static_article.html }

Wordpress should do that by itself... Also, I think he mentioned apache rather than nginx...

Wordpress can't do it by itself, it can't configure the webserver, and if you meant loading and serving the file by itself - it still means using a heavy php process instead letting the webserver serve a few bytes of disk (which they are always great at doing).

Yea I saw he was using apache, but I thought I may as well try to lead him to the dark side :)

Re: People are twice as smart as they talk, three times as smart as they write

#28

Weird. I write smarter than I talk.

Talking 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.

Re: People are twice as smart as they talk, three times as smart as they write

#29

He 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.

It 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 :).

Rather 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.

Re: People are twice as smart as they talk, three times as smart as they write

#30
post #20
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you meet online? If so, that would make sense according to this article, since she would observe you being a third less smart.

yeah, 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…

The 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.
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