No, or, a very brief linkspam on "intelligence"

[kaberett]

• tim on alternatives to "intelligent"
  
• Garran Means at Geek Feminism on the concept of meritocracy
  
• the Strawberry Perl Support Page (emphasis mine):

  To maintain sustainable long-term production of the distribution, we like to keep everything as simple and community driven as possible, so that our smartest users can help each other and all official features "Just Work".

No. So that their most experienced users, or their most active developers. Neither of those is the same as "smart".

In reasons why I love being a Dreamwidth dev...


Utterly unrelatedly, and rather more of a PSA, the Firefox extension Tree Style Tab is broken :-(

Comments

tim on alternatives to "intelligent"

[jack]

Oh, that's really good. Yeah, it's really hard not to say "intelligent", but those alternatives are really good, and I think almost always more precise as well.

Re: tim on alternatives to "intelligent"

[kaberett]

Tim is generally pretty awesome - strongly recommend him :-)

[simont]

I'm not sure about the suggested alternatives. Surely what they're really after is the users most able to help people, i.e. the ones who know or can work out the right answers, to do so. That's correlated to being experienced and active, but not identical. (Of course, it was also correlated but not identical to being smart.)

Also, it seems particularly incongruous now you've drawn attention to this passage that they want the smartest (or whatever) users to help each other rather than to help people who need it.

[kaberett]

YES THERE ARE MANY THINGS WRONG WITH THAT WRETCHED "SUPPORT" PAGE, and next time I will write my rant when I'm not on my way out the door ;) Nonethless I argue my suggested alternatives are more accurate...

And, yes, in general I am supremely unimpressed by the entire mess. I ended up doing everything properly on the netbook [which is running Debian, unlike my WinXP desktop] once I got somewhere it can connect to the internets and therefore dropbox (my current abode has no wireless tubes until the dodgy cheapo router shows up & gets set up next week...)

[simont]

TBH it seems to me the passage would make a lot more sense if the word "smartest" was simply deleted rather than replacing it with a different superlative...