Hewlett-Packard just put out a mind-numbingly stupid study. In fact, reading it made my IQ drop and my anger level rise all at the same time. The study was designed to help businesses deal with “improper use of technology” by employees, to help them increase their productivity. The study’s findings? That technology makes you stupid. That “sending e-mails or using mobile phones can be more distracting and harmful to the IQ than smoking marijuana.” The study even has a cute little name for this “problem”, Info-Mania.
the study said “an average worker’s functioning IQ falls 10 points when distracted by ringing telephones and incoming e-mails … more than double the four-point drop seen following studies on the impact of smoking marijuana.”
This cheeses me off for a variety of reasons. Namely, because there are about a hundred and one assumptions which formed the basis of this study, and each one of them is fucking stupid…
First of all, the thing they are really studying here is how to make sure that technology doesn’t keep people from being productive. This is just a code-word for making sure that they stay enslaved to the system, that they aren’t being “distracted” by anything which can’t be quantifiably analyzed to make money for the corporation. If they want to measure anything worthwhile, they should measure the happiness and authentic humanity of a person who is a listless yet productive cog in a corporate machine, as compared with somebody who is not. Productivity is simply not an equivalent to personal worth.
Nor is IQ. It’s been talked about for years now, how IQ is not an accurate or even remotely complete means of measuring a person’s abilities. Even the best IQ tests only try to guage one subset of the mighty cosmic possibilities of the human mind. A stilted, socially-biased test just can’t tell you the potential good that can come from a person.
Third, getting stoned on pot represents very strongly one type of knowledge which is completely un-quantifiable to modern science. Since it doesn’t fit into a stupid sheet of paper where you fill in little dots with a number two pencil, they say that marijuana makes you stupider. Preposterous. I’m not going to argue that hardcore potheads don’t end up being a little weird sometimes. But stupider? Not by a long shot.
Similarly, everyone I know who’s really adept at technology also happens to be really smart, but not necessarily in an easily identifiable way. They tend to be brilliant problem-solvers, very flexible thinkers, extremely creative and incredibly good at making weird things connect. To jump up and say these people are even “stupider” than pot-smokers is just ridiculous. What’s really being exposed by this study is the utter inadequacy of standardized testing as a guage of human intelligence. Intelligence is changing, has changed, and will change even more. And it will not be at all as linear, rational or IQ-based as it used to be. It’s going to be this big sprawling weird thing that doesn’t give a shit about fitting into boxes, or making meaningless distinctions on paper.
Do you want a reality check on how out of touch Hewlett-Packard (and presumably a million other giant corporations) really is? Check out the recommendations put out by this study:
The tech giant has put out some guidelines, such as discouraging the use of handheld devices and laptops during meetings and cutting down on one-word e- mail messages, such as those that just say, “Thanks.”
Oh my god! Fucking brilliant! Thank sweet Jesus for assholes in offices with high IQ’s and an inflated sense of how important they are! Where the fuck would we be without them? Probably getting stoned and listening to music, watching DVD’s or emailing each other with whacked out stoner revelations.
FYI: In case you’re wondering, I haven’t gotten stoned in months and months and months. As they say, my “anti-drug” is computers.
PS. Columnist Mark Morford has an equally stupid response to this study. I swear, sometimes that guy drops nuggets of gold, and other times they are nuggets of doody.
UPDATE!
This “study” may have just been a “clever” marketing gimmick by HP in order to promote a new efficiency-based product. Fucking bastards. If nothing else, this is an extremely useful example of how organizations commission “studies” with the express aim of promoting their organization, and nothing more.
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10 Comments
I’ve done some of my best writing stoned. That aside, the sheer absurdity of these tests is just ridiculous. These things don’t afect “IQ,” they affect one’s ability to concen trate- just like lack of sleep, over-extension, and stress- ‘thieves’ of ‘productivity’ that don’t bother these people at all. They might as well claim crying babies or people with loud stereos lower your IQ.
OTOH, (heh heh), Mark isn’t entirely wrong. The company (that which must not be named) is always getting ‘data’ that suggests that people don’t like to read on the internet, that they want quick, easy read, power point infor..so they want us to provide that. In that sense, the internet (like powerpoint) does make people dumber. It’s not the internet at fault, but the mindset of CNN-more, quicker, faster, funnier…and people gravitate to the crap. Here we have access to an amazing depth of information, but the corporate ideal is to promote to the largest possible audience- which means celebrity news rather than in depth analysis of politics, moralistic email glurge rather than reasoned debate, etc.
The trick is, I don’t think people are any different since the advent of internet- there might always be the domination of the hylic instinct to entertain oneself or indulge anger by reading “common sense” glurge (who doesn’t get those horrible emails where the preacher rails against the ’stupidity’ oif the ‘elites’ from some family member or co-worker?)
The ultimate irony of studies like this is that there’s nothing they can do- they want the submissive, half sleeping people who IM “Wt R U L8R?” and post their pics on “Hot or Not” to work for them, because those of us who question are anathema (even if in the end they are the creative drive that got those companies made to begin with.) These activities can also be addictive/compulsive. (I’ve seen people with check email excessively for newsletters with jokes, “pretty panty exchanges,” and other klippothic interests.) They seek slaves, but then they despise them for being slaves.
In the end, though, it’s the commercial aspect of all of this that enables the rest of us to find and communicate with one another, when we’re not being “them.”
yeah totally. i think another major problem is that companies are always coming up with “studies” about how people “want” short soundbites. and while that may be true, they also arent offering people any alternative. and i think this is part of where blogging helps bite them in the ass. it encourages people to step outside the soundbites - okay, most bloggers still do that, but more and more are providing long format good info
i’m pretty sure i read somewhere that this study is actually an hp viral marketing scheme, like they’re gonna release something that basically says ‘unlike the others, hp doesn’t make you stupid because our new computer is x.’ i’ll see if i can find the reference somewhere . . . .
oh… that makes more sense, cause otherwise this is just total bull-hockey
yep, it’s ’sales science.’ here’s some info:
http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2005/04/does_email_really_re.html
see especially the links in the comments.
Yea
I read the SFGate article and couldn’t find anything specific about how the study was conducted. OK, listen to this sentence again:
an average worker’s functioning IQ falls 10 points when distracted by ringing telephones and incoming e-mails … more than double the four-point drop seen following studies on the impact of smoking marijuana.
The assumption of this sentence is that IQ measures a time-dependent process. It rises and falls depending upon ones activity. IQ has enough conceptual problems even defined as a measure of a constant (or at least slowly-changing) cognitive variable!
And suppose IQ really does measure a time-dependent latent variable? How the fuck did they actually measure it? How do you administer an IQ test while somebody is busy being distracted by an email or a phone call?
Perhaps they conducted a “quick and dirty” IQ test, a sort of proxy, at regular intervals throughout the day? And then used regression-calibration or some other measurement-error adjustment to infer the trajectory of the underlying latent process. But this would just be stupid, because such a technique would require uncheckable assumptions about the time-variation of the questions in the proxy test.
So, in summary, I think the study was poorly designed, poorly reported, or simply fake.
… and if you couldn’t tell already from my last post, YES I am a statistician. I can see right through that kind of BS and it just pisses me off.
uh yeah, i think we pretty much established that its fake, but i like having the firsthand take on it
I find this amusing: the study they’re citing for marijuana causing a “4 point drop” in IQ actually presents that finding only for long-term heavy users, i.e., more than 5 joints a week, every week (the study does not define the size of a joint).
Those of us on the pro-legalization side of the drug war debate know this study for a different reason: subjects who smoked every week, but less than five joints, actually saw a RISE in IQ of 5.8 points, and even former users’ IQ rose by 3.5, more than the control.
So I’m glad that, in hyping a product through pseudo-science, HP has managed to reinforce stereotypes about drug use by cherrypicking statistics, just like a good corporate citizen should. Blah.
(source: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/artic...cgi?tool=pubmed&pubmedid=11949984 )