Investors, forums and intelligence?

Following on from the thread dealing with grammer and spelling, I was just sitting here thinking that as a whole, the Somersoft Community is a pretty well educated lot when it comes to the written word. We all have different backgrounds, different (formal) levels of education, work (or not work) in different fields and have different income levels/needs.

While it's well known that Investors usually have a better financial intelligence than the general populace, could it be that perhaps we are more intelligent too? Or are people (as a whole, not just investors) more likely to post on a forum if they are comfortable with the written word?
 
Or are people (as a whole, not just investors) more likely to post on a forum if they are comfortable with the written word?
Heck no. You frequent the wrong (right?) forums, seriously. There are forums out there that have the most mindboggling lack of spelling and grammar, to the point of being almost unreadable.

I find child and parenting forums to be by far the worst. Ah, the people educating little ja'Zzm'ynne in her formative years, preparing her for school. Hacker/warez and gaming forums are abysmal too, just a different kind of abysmal as a lot of the bad 'spelling' there is deliberate abbreviations.

And go check out icanhascheezburger.com or whatever the url is and try and make sense of the comments :D

I co-run a Dungeons and Dragons server. We choose Dungeon Masters and forum moderators primarily by their ability to SPELL, tell a good coherant story, hold a decent conversation, and deal with small children - the server is very child friendly and we have a lot of under-10s on it and you just can't promote a tard and expect them to be able to manage people properly. We've done OK so far. Funny, most of our mods are older, in their 40s and 50s.
 
Skater - I'm not feeling particulary intelligent today.
Just saw that another thread got closed at the request of "OP" -
and I have no idea what "OP" means.
 
Following on from the thread dealing with grammer and spelling, I was just sitting here thinking that as a whole, the Somersoft Community is a pretty well educated lot when it comes to the written word. We all have different backgrounds, different (formal) levels of education, work (or not work) in different fields and have different income levels/needs.

While it's well known that Investors usually have a better financial intelligence than the general populace, could it be that perhaps we are more intelligent too? Or are people (as a whole, not just investors) more likely to post on a forum if they are comfortable with the written word?

No; we are simply people who "DO" things and get off our collective backsides in our life.

This also involves the effort to learn how to read, spell, understand literature (grammar), construct a sentence correctly, etc.

The majority of penguins can't be bothered, or think they are too cool, or whatever.
 
Well I'm a very very poor when it comes to writing and spelling, but that will never stop me from going far in life, and if anyone cares to disagree, I think that I will be the one to have to last laugh :D
 
I have certainly noticed spelling and grammar standards are much higher on forums such as this and share investing forums than on other sites I frequent. In particular some car enthusiast forums have atrocious use of the english language. It may have to do with those sites generally having a lower age group on average. The worst offenders are always the misuse of the words lose/loose, your/you're and the three theres. Quite annoying for a grammar nazi such as myself.

As for being more intelligent, without blowing too much smoke up my own ***, yes I think we investors are more intelligent, not just financially. It takes a bit more intelligence to choose to improve our financial intelligence so that we can be responsible with our money and provide for our family, or just our own desires. Rather than just ******* away everything we earn for a small short term gain.
 
I have certainly noticed spelling and grammar standards are much higher on forums such as this and share investing forums than on other sites I frequent.

Maybe then, there is a link to those who want to better their financial situation with a higher than average intelligence (and I am not trying to blow my own horn here, it is just a ponderance). Not really being involved with other sites, I was trying to ascertain if other sites had the same/similar levels as to this site.
 
I once had this girlfriend who was doing a Phd, and i was just a scummy Masters student. She was also Taiwanese and about 8 years younger compared to me. Anyway, she got this great idea that we would both do separate IQ tests so that we could see how smart we both were.

Anyway we did the tests and I got a rather good score - much better compared to hers, and needlessly to say, she was very upset, and in fact, rather cranky about it. She kept saying, how could I be smarter compared to her as she was doing a Phd in cancer research and I only had a Masters etc, she also said that she went to a private school and that her father paid so much money for her education. I told her that i went to public school in regional Australia and just mucked around and never studied and spent my afternoons at the river - whereras she spent her afternoons in cram schools and was basically a 12-14 hour a day student. I was happy with the result, but boy, she was peeved.

Oh well. She is long gone now and as far as i know is working in some hospital in the States as a cancer specialist.

I want to add extra to the comment about car forums. A few years back, i was doing up my beloved ZH Fairlane and so i joined a forum for people doing up classic Fords. Not wanting to sound like an intellectual snob or anything, but i got no joy in that forum at all. The posts were hard to read, hard to understand and full of "lazy talk" and abbreviations etc.

In addition, as a favour, i once had to set up and monitor a forum for a son of one of my friends. The son is into online games and nothing else and is one of those kids who's only social life and life in general is spent in front of a computer playing games. I wanted to to monitor and administer it as it was being set up on one of my servers and there was no way i going to allow other people to administer something that was on one of my servers. Anyway, i made a habit of reading all the posts (as all good administrators do), and i couldn't understand much of what was being posted. No grammar, no punctuations and no structure.

The spelling was atrocious, and to be frank, their was nothing much at all that would qualify as a well meaning post. It really made me wonder what the literary strength is from the teenagers of today.

Just my words.


Thanks


g
 
well my grammar and spelling has suffered dramatically since posting on forums :D Just check my posts, I don't proof read anything - my uni lecturers would be absolutely appalled by my lack of dilligence. But then again I have really developed my ability to use a computer and type one handed. I can do it just as quick with one hand now as I can with both. :)

Oh and trust me, there are some really stupid people out there posting on some other forums I visit....
 
hubby and i had a chuckle about an email he got from one of his "blue collar" staff describing a problem they were having in the process. apparently the email was full of the word "worm" ... and hubby couldn't work out what the staff member was talking about ... until he twigged that it was meant to be warm.

logical to someone who spells phonetically if you think about ... w-or-m. unfortunately in his trade there are quite a few staff who didn't recieve a high quality education and can't spell - and with so much more communication taking place in the written word - deciphering can be an interesting task.

p.s. hubby is well educated!
 
hey - not all car forums are filled with literary retards! I spend a lot of time on one car forum... but i probably only stay there because the english standards there are quite high compared to most other forums.

I must admit that Somersoft has quite a high standard of poster though. Almost all posts are easy to read, use correct (enough) spelling and decent grammar. Sure not everything is perfect, but its pretty darn close.


I too also find that many younger people these days have quite poor english skills. In my work (im a buyer/product manager), i deal with our Chinese suppliers as well as our sales staff.
More regularly now, im finding emails from our Chinese suppliers easier to read than those from our australian sales staff.

The ones that irk me the most are those with ZERO punctuation.

This is my favourite, from a store manager in Albury..... copied and pasted VERBATIM.

Hi Guys,

I have a regular customer that comes in all the time to get a lot of stuff of us (especially Solar Gear) he has purchased a 120w panel about a month ago and installed it with his other panel that I sold him and all seems well but the last week or so the panel in not performing as required. Its about 1A to 1.5A down on current compared to the others and there is a small section of this panel that heats up to a very high temp to the point it cant be touched without burning your hand. Now only about 1 or 2 sections do that the rest of the panel is fine to be touched. What I’m wanting to know does that sound like a faulty panel and if so how do I go about replacing it as I have never seen, heard or done a solar panel warranty claim do I replace the unit (as the customer lives in Cobram 2 ½ hrs drive from here) and send it back to you or keep it here, or do I have to send it back to you guys at the warehouse for repair, testing or replacement. Please advice asap as he is awaiting my return phone call.
 
People don't seem as worried about spelling and grammar these days, and younger people seem, generally, more interested in txt-speak.

Uni grads where I work sometimes have a hard time with the concept that badly written stuff doesn't go to clients. It has to be right.
 
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I like the old saying:

"There is no idiot like an educated idiot"

And there is no shortage of them around.

btw: I once met a lady at a conference and we had lunch together. She gave me her businees card and all it had on it was:

Her name

PHD

Phone number.

I kept the card as you never know when you might need a PHD.

Now to me, that's an idiot.
 
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