You didn’t murder it, just winged it a bit. The people who need to be sent up for murder are those who say things like “This needs fixed.”
I’m reasonably sure we’re in the top ten Internet communities for smugness and self-satisfaction, but I’d need a few reliable cites to be certain of it. 
I would recommend you give Pennsylvania a wide berth.
No.
There are internet communities that are broad and high-profile, like Reddit, which presumably have a high total amount of education spread around many users.
I expect there are internet communities made up of highly specialized educated persons, who are on average highly educated in one particular field.
The SDMB does well (how well relatively? I don’t know) with the breadth of fields of specialization.
In any case, there’s no minimum education required to start posting here. So are we going by active users, or by active users times some function of post frequency?
But measuring it against other communities for average education level multiplied by frequency of posts and by breadth of coverage of different fields would be a bit arbitrary.
Certainly not “firmly.”
Sadly true–or would be without the “absolute” characterizations. We do lack quality control.
But the GQ and CS threads occasionally do well.
And the longest GD threads are often badly “debated.” Something settled quickly doesn’t need to have seven pages of shouting.
But we’re good at the shouting thing, right? We’d be better at it if the mods weren’t such insufferable tightasses hellbent on keeping us from greatness; but we are genuinely good at the shouting, aren’t we?
Shouting, pushing people about, low slung holstered stun gun …
First off, there is a GQ answer to this: The answer is No. There are metrics by which we are not the best, so there is no way we can be “firm.” Hence, without moving this thread to IMHO, there was nothing to discuss.
Second, I actually the pretentiousness–while it contributes to the worst parts of this board–also is what makes it good, because it creates a community that calls people out for bad posts. I’ve seen other places with intelligent people commenting, but there always seems to be a reluctance to just let someone know that something they are saying is stupid. We may go overboard here, but it is nice.
The people at, say, Something Awful seem to lack this, and the result is a lot more stupid posts, even with their pay-to-post system (which is why I will never join there. I lurked here for the same reason. Paying for the right to talk is weird.) Reddit is much, much worse. Everywhere else I’ve found doesn’t seem to be general purpose enough.
(The spinoff boards are general purpose enough, but just don’t have enough volume of posts.)
Nah, definitely not the most highly educated board I’ve been on. The Student Doctor forum is mostly people who are either MDs/DOs/PhDs or are on the way to achieving a doctoral degree.
I do agree that people on here tend to be more intellectually curious than on websites that just take a cross-section of the general population like Yahoo Answers.
That’s mostly a relic of the old days when people who posted here tended to be Cecil fans. I think Cecil’s column appealed to people who are curious about the world and enjoy learning new things.
However, Cecil’s column is not really much of a focus here anymore, and I don’t think you need to be especially bright to fit in here Just avoid saying anything aggressively dumb, don’t use leet-speak/text-speak typing and people will leave you alone here.
My bumping this thread was not a smart thing to do.
So, no.
But it’s the funnest! <----{ no, not proper english }
Eh. It had it coming.
If you insist.
Western Pennsylvania, specifically. Those Pittsburghundians do terrible, terrible things to the language (see also: “yins”).
We may not be the best educated, but we certainly have the biggest dicks on the internet.