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The average forum member

Nakosis

Nakosis

Non-Binary Physicalist
Premium Member
sun rise said:
Personally intelligence is overrated. There are more people I enjoy interacting with here than before and that's what counts with me.
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Yes, I was going to say something similar. There are more things than just intelligence to find value in.
Like experience, wisdom, honesty. I'd rather an honest idiot than a dishonest genius.
Not to say intelligence has no value but it is just one among many traits that have value.
 
JustGeorge

JustGeorge

Imperfect
Staff member
Premium Member
Nakosis said:
Yes, I was going to say something similar. There are more things than just intelligence to find value in.
Like experience, wisdom, honesty. I'd rather an honest idiot than a dishonest genius.
Not to say intelligence has no value but it is just one among many traits that have value.
Click to expand...
Agreed.

I can't even say intelligence is on the list of preferred 'buddy' traits for me. If someone is, great. But its not how I choose my friends.
 
JustGeorge

JustGeorge

Imperfect
Staff member
Premium Member
Debater Slayer said:
I prefer fashion sense, but that rules out @SalixIncendium. I'm now stuck with other traits to pick from.
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I had a friend once that was venting that she was frustrated how her other friend kept taking her CDs and clothes, and flirting with the men she was interested in.

I reassured her, reminding her that I thought her clothes were hideous, and her taste in music and men just awful.

We bonded over that, fellow weirdos that we were.
 
Quagmire

Quagmire

Imaginary talking monkey
Staff member
Premium Member
I would say that the percentage of people who tend to overestimate their own intelligence has gone down a bit, which makes for a more pleasant atmosphere for everybody else.

(And the people who've shown up in the meantime with those tendencies are so comically obvious that it's, well, comical and obvious).
 
ChristineM

ChristineM

"Be strong", I whispered to my coffee.
Premium Member
The average forum member will be aged between late teens and close on centenarian, male, female or other, be married, partnered or single, intelligence seems to be from around 100 to 130, maybe a little lower or higher. They may log in to RF only occasionally or be permanently logged in several hours a day. Have diverse hobbies. Really just average human beings with one thing in common... RF
 
Brickjectivity

Brickjectivity

Veteran Member
Staff member
Premium Member
Jayhawker Soule said:
On a scale of one to ten, how aparently intelligent is the average forum participant?
If you've been here for more than a couple of years, is tis average inching up or declining.

My view:

6 | declining​
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5. We're of average intelligence overall. I think when the forum changed to a different software that we lost a lot of regulars, and this lowered our score. Clever people are more rare than common, and so I think that losing a lot of people the forum will decrease in overall intelligence. As we get more users the overall intelligence increases. For example if we doubled our users I think we'd hit a 7 even if a lot of stupid people were in the group.

On the other hand more users will tend to make us into an echo chamber. Its easier to manage people who all agree, and I don't think its on purpose but more users causes the environment to move towards one kind of opinion group. Possibly its because the Dirs don't do what they are hoped to do which is provide echo chambers. Even while we get smarter we also get less diverse, which is a little bit of a downward factor in intelligence while overall there is increase. The biggest area of diversity here seems to be political diversity, though it is about 3/4 lefty.

This brings me to Dirs. They don't have room for argument, and I think they used to. They were blue before, and that was working from what I am told. All argument tends to happen in secular areas of the site, but religious people often love a good religious argument excluding secular talk. I think this tends to make the site secular, but there are other forces pushing it towards the secular namely that most people have high religiosity but low religious education. They don't know what to do in a debate. The secular people, too, who come here often are ex religionists who never had much religious education either, so they can't raise the bar (in rhetoric and knowledge) either. When they come here its often the case that they are learning rhetoric for the first time. We're a bunch of beginners. Its a tiny bit off topic, but I think we should do what used to work which was the blue dirs. That should help increase the diversity a bit more and draw in more academics.

If you look at the religious (and antireligious) arguments we have they often are repeats of rudimentary discussions, not even seminary level discussions which I'd put at 8 or 9. It takes a lot of intelligence for people to talk about such complicated subjects. The best ones we have are usually on Philosophy, and everything else often turns into something like a he said she said.

Intelligence isn't always good though when it comes with extreme deficits such as an inability to listen. I would count someone who reads and listens as more intelligent than someone who is merely clever, creative, or a strong analyst though these are excellent qualities.

Finally, the forum is not at the center of our lives. If it were we'd all be reading books about forum topics. We'd all be 7s, 8s and 9s and the forum would be electric. Instead it is the few who raise the level, and these only come when the total number of participants rises.
 
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