Being Lazy Is a Sign of High Intelligence, Study Suggests (independent.co.uk) 254
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Independent: Findings from a U.S.-based study seem to support the idea that people with a high IQ get bored less easily, leading them to spend more time engaged in thought. And active people may be more physical as they need to stimulate their minds with external activities, either to escape their thoughts or because they get bored quickly. Researchers from the Florida Gulf Coast University gave a classic test -- dating back three decades -- to a group of students. The 'need for cognition' questionnaire asked participants to rate how strongly they agree with statements such as "I really enjoy a task that involves coming up with new solutions to problems," and "I only think as hard as I have to." The researchers, led by Todd McElroy, then selected 30 'thinkers' and 30 'non-thinkers' from the pool of candidates. Over the next seven days both groups wore a device on their wrist which tracked their movements and activity levels, providing a constant stream of data on how physically active they were. Results showed the thinking group were far less active during the week than the non-thinkers. "Ultimately, an important factor that may help more thoughtful individuals combat their lower average activity levels is awareness," said McElroy, according to The British Psychological Society. "Awareness of their tendency to be less active, coupled with an awareness of the cost associated with inactivity, more thoughtful people may then choose to become more active throughout the day."
was going to post earlier (Score:5, Funny)
but did'n feel like doing it
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on their WRIST (Score:2)
"wore a device on their wrist which tracked their movements and activity levels"
Um.. I think I may have found a flaw in their methodology? They may have caught a whole fistful of arbitrary data with that "Wrist Motion" monitor.. Data that could force them to toss all their conclusions, which could choke off their funding and really stain their reputations. I don't want to come off as a know it all but this study seems a bit anti-climactic.
"Only boring people get bored." (Score:2)
That saying was everywhere when I was a kid.
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So were plenty other, equally retarded sayings. Most still exist today and are considered axioms. How fucked up is that?
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As Calvin once said (Score:5, Funny)
As Calvin once said, "You know how Einstein got bad grades as a kid? Well mine are even worse!"
Re:As Calvin once said (Score:5, Informative)
As Calvin once said, "You know how Einstein got bad grades as a kid? Well mine are even worse!"
This is of course quite amusing as I'm sure you are referring to the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. But did you know said comic strip is a satire around two characters that represent two prominent historical figures with two very different philosophical points of view:
John Calvin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Thomas Hobbes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
If you read into their differences of opinions on many things related to society, you'll find relevance to this topic. We can't really understand why our society and culture values things and whether those things are appropriate today or ever even were rational to begin with if we don't understand the roots of where that thinking came from. The comic strip of course is more digestible in popular culture instead of having read comparably dry historical text but understanding the true historical context is very important especially as we evolve our values and ideas forward into the future.
I can buy that (Score:5, Insightful)
Second time I think of how to automate it
Third time I test my script
Fourth time I refine my script
Fifth time I run my script and go back to whatever I was doing.
Re:I can buy that (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I can buy that (Score:5, Funny)
And all I have a copy of this [xkcd.com] on our team server's home page, darn.
xkcd is funny but does not always present reality (Score:5, Funny)
I concur with the GP, if a problem is being repeated, then I seek solution on how to automate it. Over the year i automated a lot of stuff from testing, to revenue accounting. I also learned to always foresee additional cost equal to the initial development, over the next ten year, as debugging or maintenance, and when somebody ask me to automate stuff I ask them to sign it off with the knowledge and understanding of that maintenance cost.
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Heretic! Of course xkcd represents reality; you just have to choose the right one. In this case, here's [xkcd.com] the one you want.
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If that's the way your software development processes work, you probably should get out of the software development business.
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And all I have a copy of this [xkcd.com] on our team server's home page, darn.
I like that one, but the one hanging on my wall is this one [xkcd.com], which I like even more. No one seems to like when I use it as a visual aid during meetings.
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And this is where the "learn to code" stuff is going. There are a lot of processes out there ripe for automation. Small and mid sized businesses are still being run by manual processes. I've shown multiple people that Excel can sort. (Yes, they were sorting by hand).
I'm a mechanical engineer that has been doing the above since I started. I now have my hardware in the loop integration testing in a script run by jenkins. I already did it once and it's boring and tedious. Jenkins can do it faster and 24/7.
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In my old company we used to have secretaries who would email people the day before they had a meeting room booking to check to see if they still needed it. It turned out that a lot of meetings were actually being moved/cancelled and people were
How lazy was the grad student who came up with it. (Score:5, Funny)
You can really imagine the conversation that led to this research question.
"So you're too lazy to come up with a research topic?"
"Yes."
"That's not very smart."
"... I beg to differ."
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I've always said that to be a good IT pro, you have to be lazy in a particular way. Automation is a good example of it. Another is the tendency to come up with a permanent fix instead of constantly dealing with the fallout.
For example, I remember working one place where a particular server crashed in the middle of the night every week. When I came into the company, it had been happening for six months, and once a week, one of the IT guys had to come in early to make sure the server got started up before
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It was an act of laziness-- I didn't want to keep fixing the problem over and over again, so instead I spent extra time to fix it properly the first time.
The laziness came from not fixing the problem in the first place. Some IT managers love to throw people at a problem rather than assign someone to fix problem.
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The laziness came from not fixing the problem in the first place.
My point is that they're both laziness. Yes, not fixing the problem could be seen as laziness, but fixing the problem could be seen as just being a smarter form of laziness.
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[...] but fixing the problem could be seen as just being a smarter form of laziness.
That's how I find time to comment on Slashdot at work. ;)
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Of course if you are really lazy you don't bother commenting any of them!
I have 5th Gen (as per your example) scripts I wrote more than a decade ago that I still use and work. However without doing a bunch of work to go through it, I've sort of forgotten exactly what some of them do, only that I need to run them at a certain point for particular processes...
Anyway I agree. I'd rather be lazy by that definition than to plod through the same work each year and be labeled hard working. I recall several instanc
OB XKCD (Score:2)
https://xkcd.com/1319/ [xkcd.com]
also
https://xkcd.com/1205/ [xkcd.com]
The one thing I've found with automation to solve repetitive tasks is that the are two things that can happen to make the time savings spiral out of control. 1) is other people getting a hold of it, using it for something it was never intended to be used for, as part of some system, which know by default you have to try and support or something. 2) Is when whoever you are providing it to see the results and how good they are, they want more, then differently,
I'm not lazy (Score:2)
I'm just allergic to manual labor. And being active.
So I do tend to spend a lot of time thinking.
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Thinking or letting the mind go into a cycle of obsess, ping pong, ponder, zone out and repeat.
Damned medication.
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I'm just allergic to manual labor. ... So I do tend to spend a lot of time thinking.
And I'm not asleep, just resting my eyelids.
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I am not lazy either.
I just really enjoy doing nothing.
I will take vacation time and just sit at home.
obvious conclusion (Score:5, Funny)
"Being lazy is a sign of high intelligence" -- I knew it, this means I must be an underappreciated super-genius!
"lazy" !? (Score:5, Insightful)
being physically inactive and being lazy are two different things.
one can be physically inactive, or less active, while doing a lot and expending lots of energy, through metal activity and stationary activity.
any one who codes, or writes papers/books, designs stuff, or paints pictures, etc, or even watch and read thought provoking books/plays/movies know that such things can take a lot out of one.
may be only people who do nothing of the kind, and write absurd careless/thoughtless summaries here, that are full of silly errors and duplicates, mistake all that for 'laziness'
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When it comes to thinking, is it not always going to be thinking about what you are doing, whether that is physical activity or mental activity. Thought is required to move, it is just the extent of thought and the type of movement, the reward for the desired thoughts, will always be the responding flow of rewarding brain chemicals, that zone of pleasurable thought. So that zone can be achieved either by focusing on low level thought physical activity or high levels of thought with limited complexity of ph
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I do isometrics in the office every day... there is no other work out like it trying to push away the immovable stupidity of office politics.
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Mowing the lawn? I put on the headphones, grab a cold "lawn mower beer" (Amber Bock or similar "lighter" beer compared to what I normally drink), and mow away. Sure it takes me 3 hours to do my acre and a half on a riding mower, and I'm not good for much else when I'm done due to my BAC levels, but at least it isn't mind numbingly boring.
One of my friends from high school got a job on a lawn crew - Fridays were "LSD Days" - drop a tab and get to work... too hard core for me.
non-brainer (Score:3)
if you're smart, thing happen more efficiently or are dropped when unnecessary - also a type of laziness, avoiding chaff.
commentsubjectsaredumb (Score:4, Insightful)
But sure, there's going to be some kinds of correlation. When you "Work smarter, not harder" the obvious interpretation is that you don't work needlessly hard (lazy) because you were smart (intelligent) about the situation.
Being "intelligent" is naturally going to trend towards optimized points on diminishing return curves. For an easy example and the obligatory car analogy, you might be "lazy" about where you buy your gasoline. The curve will shift if the price gaps become too punishing and demand more scrutiny, but otherwise you have bigger concerns than the tiny (after travel losses) savings gained from using the station across town. Conversely, the curve will shift the other way if the gaps become zero, or if the sheer scale drops (eg we're talking $0.12/gal vs $0.18/gal) so it's now too many orders of magnitude away from your income context (presumably) that giving it attention is a waste of your brain's fucks. You give it zero fucks. You don't even look at the price. You're "lazy".
That's probably a measure of intelligence right there. You can quickly ballpark how many orders of magnitude is too far away to warrant fucks. To wit, you sense where increased effort only gains diminishing yields, and get lazy. Or smart. Or both.
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savings gained from using the station across town
With as much as fuel prices fluctuate, you'll save far more by buying on the correct day rather than from the cheapest station. Around here, that tends to be Thursday mornings.
Yay! (Score:5, Funny)
That's actually a very
It isn't laziness (Score:5, Insightful)
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"The brilliant and energetic man makes the best staff officer. He handles routine work with accuracy and completeness.
The brilliant and lazy man makes the best commanding officer. He tends to see the big picture accurately and avoids preoccupation with detail work which might distract him.
The stupid and lazy man makes the best subordinate. He will do what he is told properly, no more no less.
The stupid and energetic man, however, is to be avoided at all costs. He is quite capable of ruining the best laid pl
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If two people are assigned the same work and receive the same pay, one of them completes it in 2 hours and the other takes all day to complete it - whats wrong with the faster of the two spending the remaining 6 hours doing their own thing?
Their efficiency is for their benefit, if you want them to use it for your benefit then you need to reward them one way or another. If you pay then more you can reasonably expect them to do more work in the same length of time.
Indeed if that person would carry out extra w
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It's true, but there's a lot of gray area in there. What if we're talking about programmers, and the person that took all day wrote much better, much more easily maintainable code that was easy to update and add new features to, and included unit testing in their work. The one that did it in two hours wrote spaghetti code that was difficult for anyone else to figure out and maintain, and didn't even bother with any but basic crappy testing?
And the boss asks why the latter is sitting around eating Cheetos
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spending the remaining 6 hours doing their own thing?
What remaining 6 hours? I mean - most of these employers want you on salary so that you're exempt from overtime pay. So you don't even owe them a specific number of hours.
Of course the reality is more often getting assigned multiple times more work until it requires overtime to complete it.
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And that bold woman? Marie Antoinette.
And the man who witnessed and recorded this exchange? Albert Einstein.
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Re:It isn't laziness (Score:4, Insightful)
Why the shit is this shit here? It's not science! (Score:5, Insightful)
They never tested IQ, and IQ is not intelligence. They passed out a questionnaire where people self selected with bullshit questions, then tracked them for a single week.
To put it another way, this is like sorting fruit salad into grape and kumquats by shaking the bowl so the small ones end up on the bottom and so everything on top is a kumquat, everything else is a grape, without even checking that the fruit salad was in fact made with blueberries, pineapple, strawberries, and tomatoes(technically a fruit).
This is shit science I would chew out a fifth grader for it, because they failed to determine if the factor they were testing was present, and used a shit sorting method. A questionnaire with questions like that isn't going to get you any useful results unless you're testing self perceptions of inteligence related to something(to which I'd argue that this study proves that lazy gits think their smart to excuse their laziness, which is just as valid as their conclusions).
Where the hell do these people get the idea that it's alright to call this shit science? A first year student of any science other than social or political would be able to see what they've fucked up, and I've only excluded those two because they generally work with questionnaires and so might assume a competent questionnaire was created, which I highly doubt due to the absolute shit example questions. Mien Gott.
How are salt futures doing these days? (Score:3)
I have a couple problems with this concept. I doubt levels of physical activity correlate that highly with intelligence. For one, as others have here have noted, intellectual activity is often physically draining. Secondly, serious physical activity can likewise be mentally taxing. Ask any athlete about the level of concentration required to compete in their chosen sport, and the knowledge required to perform at a high level.
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Conversely, as I mentioned in another post, I like hiking, jogging, and don't like mowing the lawn despite the fact I have to do it occasionally. None of these are really mentally taxing. Hiking is great if you can enjoy the scenery, but even then, like with those other activities, I'm often thinking about other things, and often do my best thinking while doing them. Just because someone is physically active doesn't mean they are a pro at some sport.
+1 for "thinking" being physically draining, though. I
BAM! (Score:5, Insightful)
See, honey? I been telling you. I'm not napping, I'm contemplating.
As Bertrand Russell said,
Now can I please order No Man's Sky?
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Not me. I was definitely napping.
See (Score:3)
Sloth is a virtue (Score:2)
Do thinkers have less active jobs? (Score:4, Insightful)
"Over the next seven days ...wore a device on their wrist... the thinking group were far less active during the week than the non-thinkers"
It doesn't mention if these people had a week off work, or if they had to work normally during those hours. So one wonders if there is a correlation here between "thinking people" having desk job, and "non-thinking people" having more active jobs, like pizza delivery -- was the job they do taken into account in the study?
I know after a day working out problems and stretching my mind, when I get home I just want to sit and unwind. About the most active thing I would do is walk the dog. So I can understand why thinking people may be lazier, to some respect (at least to _my_ respect), but I know a lot of intelligent "thinking people" who would be quite active, which would go against the reported findings of this study.
Without access to the paper itself I can't answer these for myself.
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Do thinkers have less active jobs?
This question is irrelevant. The only thing of value is value. Producing value with the least amount of work is efficient. It's just math. See: LEAN, Toyota Production System, etc.
Laziness == efficiency (Score:3)
That philosophy also includes working out which jobs are worth doing and which are unnecessary or futile. An active person might clean their house every day. A lazy person might only do it when visitors are due. Which one is correct?
It is also worth noting that anyone who has read the Perl Book (one of life's necessities, no matter how lazy you are) already knows this.
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A lazy person does the least amount of work necessary to do a job
Yep and that concept is counter-intuitive in America to the substantially sized group of people who have roots in Puritanism. In the extreme cases, Puritanism would say digging a ditch with a spoon is a better use of one's time than than usage of a back hoe. You'll find that this value placed on back-breaking manual labor has its roots in religion the extreme cases of which are the Amish and the Mennonites. It's that mentality that is whining about "lazy" people and how they had to walk to school up and
It's old hat (Score:2)
Choose a Lazy Person To Do a Hard Job Because That Person Will Find an Easy Way To Do It
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2... [quoteinvestigator.com]
Lazy people (Score:2)
How have we defined laziness? -activity levels seems rather vague. Grouping "thinkers" and "non-thinkers" sounds like bias.
I know some very intelligent people that are constantly on the go due to kids, work, training and a restless nature. How have we defined "intelligent"?
Lazy people, as I define them; are those that choose inaction at the expense of others. Like not taking out the trash until someone else is fed-up and does it for them. You could argue it is intelligent to force others to expend more
Meh (Score:2)
Da Vinci's opinion on geniuses and work (Score:4, Informative)
"Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active." - Leonardo da Vinci
If Being Lazy Is a Sign of High Intelligence (Score:2)
Wishful thinking (Score:2)
Even from the very bried summary, it is clear that this does not suggest that "being lazy is a sign of high intelligence"; it only says that intelligent people get bored less easily, which makes sense, since they are more likely to think of something interesting. If layness was a sign of high intelligence, then the brightest people would be the ones sitting on their sofas gobbling snacks and watching soap operas.
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We are.
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Being Lazy Is a Sign of High Intelligence.... (Score:2)
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Lazy journalism at play.
Find a thoughtful sport / physical activity (Score:2)
I think the problem with being lazy but having an appetite for thought, is that many physical exercises are extremely tedious and repetitive. There are some sports that I think are more demanding of the mind, I know all competitive sports have a form of strategy, but the technical skill of sports vary greatly. Thinking "i'm lazy, I need to do exercise" and then going to the gym, is a recipe for failure... if you want to do it consistently then you need to enjoy it.
My sport is rock climbing, from an outside
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Existential Thinking (Score:2)
More "intelligent" (perhaps more aware is a better term?) people tends to realize things existentially. They tend to ask questions like "what is the point of this task?" as well as many other things. When they really consider the possible rational, logical answers to these questions, they arrive at interesting conclusions some of which erode their motivation to do certain things but spark their interest in things that are more purposeful.
A great example is Alan Watts in his famous talk "Life is a Hoax": h [youtube.com]
Meditation (specifically Mindfullness) (Score:2)
Lazy Einstein (Score:2)
Wow this must means I am the Einstein of our generation. I could probably write the greatest intellectual paper of all times, but I really can't be bothered.
Work Shop Fact (Score:2)
Sloths (Score:2)
I've always suspected that sloths are intelligent. Think of all the advancements to science we could discover if sloths spilled their secrets.
We need to start a sloth torture facility. Torture them until they tell us the secrets of Nuclear Fusion generators.
Ob HHGTTG: (Score:2)
For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much — the wheel, New York, wars and so on — whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man — for precisely the same reasons.
Douglas Adams - the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
this just in (Score:2)
...new study validates sedentary tech guys.
"Because of (handwavy psych 101 rationalization shoehorned to fit some trivial data) this PROVES that
- women are actually aroused by familiarity with obscure code jargon
- avoiding sun in close proximity to one's maternal forbear (say, in a basement) leads to much higher intelligence
- obesity is a sure sign of sexual prowess"
Nerds go wild at the information.
Huh? (Score:2)
So those that don't RTFA (Score:2)
So those that don't RTFA are actually the smart ones?
Meh (Score:2)
Well (Score:2)
Obvious (Score:2)
Lazy engineers make for the best engineers. We only want to fix a problem once, not over-and-over again.
Just one example.
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The problem here is that this isn't lazy... laziness would be learning the correct spellings and then just using them instead of having to put thought into how to spell a word based on its sound (and they getting it wrong).
I know you were trying to be funny, but it didn't work. Sorry.
Re:OR (exclusive) (Score:4, Interesting)
Perhaps the typical Fat Dumb American are actually intelegent people who cannot find work to match their potential.
This isn't other similar research correlating intelligence with other related issues.
Such as intelegent people tend to get paid less than people with lower intelligence. Or People with higher IQ may get caught up in drug addiction.
I think in part much of American values are built on the concept of hard work and not on smart work.
If I am smarter than the next guy and gave a task to do I may get it done in half the time and go home early while the guy who is having a harder time is putting in overtime. Thus he is getting paid more for doing more work however the outcome is the same.
Then we also get the smart guy questioning authority. So the boss will say "Do it this way." While you may think of a better way and the boss doesn't like watching you not following his direction.
Now all this goes down to a link in America correlating obesity with income. So this with other research such as this one helps paint a better picture of the complex issue that we face. Not the simplified tweet or a snarky comic of a fat guy in a wheelchairs with flags and gun going 'Merica!
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You're upgrading the hour you gained though, you'll feel better and be healthier.
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If I am smarter than the next guy and gave a task to do I may get it done in half the time and go home early while the guy who is having a harder time is putting in overtime. Thus he is getting paid more for doing more work however the outcome is the same.
If you are being paid based on time spent at work, then you're most definitely not working smarter by getting the job done quicker. The smart worker will realize that he needs to find ways to put in as many hours as possible while doing as little as possible, but still keep his employer happy.
Same thing with questioning the authority that feeds (pays) you. You might think you're being smart by suggesting improvements, but if the boss doesn't want to hear them, then you're actually being stupid and workin
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True if you are in the mindset that you are trying to keep your job.
However the issue, is if you are particularly smart you get bored easy so you will try to do something to fill the boredom.
That analogy is like saying my cat is smarter than a chimpanzee. Because the cat knows enough to sit there and sleep all day and not cause trouble thus making it easy to care for and getting a steady supply of food and shelter. While a Chimpanzee if left alone will wreck the place over an extended period of time, thus
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Still American Colleges and Universities are still top notch in the world. I have seen American Students struggle just as hard as foreign students from those countries who have top education marks.
In terms of education in America we can do better. However I expect the metrics that we are using to understand our ranking is flawed. Also the fact it is easy to hack metrics.
For example. In the United States there is a path for any student who is willing to graduate from high school, this means the full norma
Re:OR (exclusive) (Score:5, Funny)
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This looks more like the people who *think* they are intelligent are lazy. Physical activity is good for both the body and mind.
Re:These studies, Jesus... (Score:5, Informative)
This looks more like the people who *think* they are intelligent are lazy.
It is not just about being lazy, but about what you do with your laziness. The most intelligent goof off by posting on Slashdot.
Physical activity is good for both the body and mind.
TFA is using "lazy" to mean lack of physical activity. So if I pull an all-nighter and write 1000 lines of code, I am lazy. If I go for a walk instead, then I am not lazy.
Re:These studies, Jesus... (Score:5, Interesting)
If you pull an all-nighter and write 1000 lines of code, then you're likely in violation of the "I only think as hard as I have to" part.
If, on the other hand, you spent your time daydreaming, a light bulb came on while you were taking a shower, and the net result is 20 minutes of work and 30 lines of brilliant code, then you qualify.
But management will ding you, because while you're supposed to work smarter and not harder, if they don't see you "working", then you're "obviously" not being "productive". So keep doing those all-nighters and job security will be yours. Maybe.
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This looks more like the people who *think* they are intelligent are lazy.
It is not just about being lazy, but about what you do with your laziness. The most intelligent goof off by posting on Slashdot.
You fall into the category of people who think they are intelligent; some of the most intelligent may goof off on Slashdot whereas others don't. But I'll tell you one thing they don't do - make categorical statements about subjective concepts.
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TFA is using "lazy" to mean lack of physical activity. So if I pull an all-nighter and write 1000 lines of code, I am lazy. If I go for a walk instead, then I am not lazy.
This makes no sense. How exactly does "lack of physical activity" equal lazy? I would love to have a job that is more physically demanding than my current job. Unfortunately, most high paying intellectual jobs also tend to be low physical activity. Unless you are tracking what people are doing off the clock then this data is meaningless. Based on my experience, many people with office jobs tend to be more active in their off hours than people with physical jobs.
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Laziness. Overweight high blood pressure diabetes enlarged heart. Short-term memory lethargic easily confused and short tempered. Early symptoms of dementia, marked by personality changes impaired reasoning and a need to get away from the confusion by getting away from people who are causing the confusion. Becoming antisocial and worried and Inactive. Needing background noise to ease your worrying. begin sleeping in the armchair and buying rubbish products from television shopping channels. End up not able to climb over the rubbish you have purchased from the shopping channels. Getting hungry finding it hard to stand.
What does Trump supporters have to do with this topic?