Observation: Intelligent people don’t comment
According to the statistics provided in the SquareSpace management console for my site I have had 447 comments in total posted to my site since I started it back in August 2009. That works out to around 10 comments per month. Roughly two and a third comments per week.
Not counting this post I have posted 859 entries. So, on average, I am getting just slightly better than half a comment per post. To be more precise I am getting 0.52 comments per post.
Comments this year are down on the average. So far this year there have been 18 comments compared to 45 new posts. This works out to a ratio of 1:0.4 for posts to comments. So the comments frequency is trending down.
I make it really easy to comment compared to a lot of other sites . You can use any alias or nickname you want. There is no validation. You do not need to register to comment. You do not need to enter an e-mail address to comment, although entering one is optional—but it will not be displayed as part of the public comment.
If you actually want your e-mail address to be ‘public’ (some people do) you have to enter it into the actual comment.
All you have to do is prove you are not a bot by deciphering the glyph correctly.
Assuming the bulk of people who read this site are at the higher end of the intelligence curve, which I think is a fairly safe assumption to make, then the obvious conclusion to draw from this is that, by and large, intelligent people don’t comment.
The more I thought about this conclusion the more I liked it.
In the 30,000 or so hours I have probably spent on the Internet in the last 20 odd years—going back to 1200 baud dial-up modems, using Archie and Gopher to search for stuff, and spending hours reading through NNTP Newsgroups—I doubt if I have commented more than about ten times.
I think I have left about five comments over at DPReview (Digital Photography Review), and the other five are just fill for other comments I am sure I must made somewhere at sometime.
Well I did not find much evidence to support my theory that intelligent people don’t comment. But I found some other mildly interesting bits and pieces—depending on your point of view.
It seems Ernest Hemingway is famous for saying “Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know”. As scholars will know, Hemingway himself eventually committed suicide.
Research in the UK indicates that intelligent types are likely to be very light consumers of alcohol in their teens (often being teetotal) with consumption increasing in their early twenties, and they become heavy drinkers in their late twenties.
Apparently intelligent people don’t smoke. Over at ‘The Stir’ not smoking is one of the Top 10 traits of intelligent people.
But (see clipping at right) it seems the same is not true for females. This is because only having the one mate has always been the female way—so the item says anyway.
This next one certainly applies to me. It is from the socyberty site (Yeah, I had never heard of it either) from a list of traits that highly intelligent people tend to exhibit. Number 6 is Intelligent people are not neat freaks. If this means intelligent people have messy desks, then that is me.
So as you can see I didn’t find any proof for my theory that intelligent people don’t comment, but I still think I might be on to something. It is sort of in the same zone as real IT people don’t use facebook.
