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 )

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.

http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2005/04/does_email_really_re.html

see especially the links in the comments.

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.”