Posted by Josh Rosenau on April 14, 2010 
According to this meaningless thing, the handful of people following me on Twitter (@JoshRosenau) is smarter than the horde of people following PZ Mahers on Twitter (@pzmyers). Clearly more stupid people need to start following me, or more of the smart people following me need to start saying stupid things about me.
I think the site’s algorithm needs fixing:
Good news I was following PZ but not you. Now I am following you both. That should bring down your score!
“PZ Mahers”? Is that misspelling intentional?
“According to this meaningless thing, the handful of people following me on Twitter (@JoshRosenau) is smarter than the horde of people following PZ Mahers on Twitter (@pzmyers)”
You’re making a classic mistake here by confusing the metrics. That ‘stupid thing’ measures and compares the stupidity of both your followers, not the smartness. You can’t then use that measure of stupidity to compare smartness. As PZ has such a larger following it would stand to reason there is much more stupidity among his followers. That is not to say a tool measuring the smartness of both your followers would necessarily not find more smartness among his followers.
Or something like that.
Twitter was built for stupidity, what did you expect? Personally I’m waiting for the forum that limits us all to 10 letter submissions so we can all grunt at each other.
LOLIRSMART
NOURNT
BOOBIES
looks like normal teen texting to me, go ahead with that 10 letter limit, your audience is guaranteed
J. J. Ramsey: Misspeeling PZ’s name is some sort of interweb tradition.
Joshua Rosenau spends his days defending the teaching of evolution at the National Center for Science Education. He is formerly a doctoral candidate at the University of Kansas, in the department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. When not battling creationists or modeling species ranges, he writes about developments in progressive politics and the sciences.
The opinions expressed here are his own, do not reflect the official position of NCSE. Indeed, older posts may no longer reflect his own official position.
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