I’m sure class (or more generally, growing up with computers) matters a lot, but the distribution described in this article pretty much looks like an IQ distribution - this doesn’t mean its conclusions are wrong (two thirds of the population can’t use your design) but that it might be futile to try to teach advanced computer skills to a large proportion of society.
Say what you want about overzealous moderators, it is an incredibly useful resource. It’s easy to take it for granted but I remember the days before SO and it was much harder to find good answers to programming questions.
In theory it could be replaced with something else but good moderation and a very product-oriented leadership (mostly programmers, not MBA types) is what made SO what it is. These intangible “soft” qualities are the hard part - it would be easy to duplicate its technology.
Fair enough. Re-reading that comment, it isn’t very clear what I meant and it’s also true that the fact that something looks like a bell curve doesn’t mean at all that it’s related to IQ.
What I was trying to say is that the tasks given to the participants were at least as much about reasoning skills as about the computer skills and it is hard to separate the two.
I alway thought (was taught) that IQ is fixed and cannot really be changed so I found the study you linked especially interesting. If this is indeed broadly proven, it would change my entire worldview! Where can I read more about this?