I think you mean: Why is intelligence negatively correlated with administrative skills?
The answer is: they are not necessarily negatively correlated.
And if they are, really smart people delegate. See Cecil.
It isn’t. Next question.
You don’t seem to understand something, 'Kid: Brains have nothing to do with server speed. Sure, the best thing to do would be to get a faster server… but Brains don’t double as cash, either.
The last time this was discussed, one of the Admins said it would cost in the range of $20,000 to get a new server.
Do you have $20,000?
No?
Then shut up.
Why is Intelligence indirectly proportional to administrative skill?
Dang, I didn’t realize it was so simple.
Brains =/= server speed.
And here I thought server machines were intelligent beings from outer space, well the Unix ones at least.
I bow to your ability to reduce the complex to the inane…
Have you considered politics?
**
To spend so you can babble?
Oh, I get it… you wanna be an asshole.
Where, here’s the thing, asshole… you’re whining about the “bad Administration” of the Boards. You assume that, since you got an isolated error while loading the page, the Administration of the Boards must be an idiot.
However, nothing can be further from the truth, as the simple fact of the matter is that the Administrators are simply strapped for cash. Does this mean a lick to you? From your response, I say “No.” Therefore, I dub you as what you are:
Asshole.
Vauge? As opposed to your quote?
Actually I liked it.
Cite? If I had a cite my question would be a foregone conclusion.
Ill leave the dekloration that smartys cant speel ortype forlater.
This is the pit, *** 'em.
Seriously, I have responded to serious replies seriously.
By the way I used WordSmyth to look up “aggrandizing” but to no avail.
Please help.
In short, I presented, in the pit, an observation of life. An observation similar to “Whenever walking in or out of an establishment with double doors always open the door with the lock.” or “The First Rule of Mechanicdom is that you have to take something completely apart in order to understand why you didn’t have to take it completely apart.” They are simply observations of life. There are no cites other than the countless times that those observations have proven true. But observations in and by themselves are not necessarily(sp) true.
Bingo!
Cecil lends his name to this board. Cecil writes the Straight Dope. This is the Straight Dope Message Board. Cecil, whether he or you want to admit it is responsible for the good name of this board that bears the name of his work.
And that is exactly the argument.
Why are smarties unable to administrate.
For instance, why is Cecil, a smartie, unable to admistrate a decent working board? I am sure that he could research servers, operating system, hardware, internet usage and bottlenecks and come up with a message board to shame all message boards if he did everything himself. But by admisintrating this board of many complaints he confirms my hypothesis that smarties cannot administrate.
What does this block of text even mean? You know something about these, and thus are smart?
If so, then why don’t you understand how vBulletin works, and the issues with the Board and its speed and operation? There have been about a billion posts about it in ATMB.
Thus, my only real dispute with your OP is that your whole premise of Cecil being a “bad administrator” is faulty.
Oh, I get it…you prefer profanities to logic.
Using an occurrence of errors to support a hypothesis is not whinning. Not neccessary good science but not whinning.
The title of this thread calls Cecil a smartie.
To repeat a SNL skit, FOR THE READING IMPAIRED:
**CECIL IS SMART.
CECIL HAS A MESSAGE BOARD.
SEE MESSAGE BOARD GO CLUNK.
CECIL IS STILL SMART.
MESSAGE BOARD STILL GOES CLUNK.
*WHY DOES SMART CECIL HAVE A MESSAGE BOARD THAT GOES CLUNK?
**
Or smarties the ability to administrate!
Believe me.
I understand your need to repeat yourself.
I don’t care how vBulletin works any more than an efficient office manager cares how electrons make a word processor work.
The point is that when an administrativily efficient (albeit more often than not an idiotic and overbearing) office manager tells a secretary to type a letter, that letter is posted by close of the business day.
OK, let’s take a different, polite tack here.
I contend that the (primary) reason the SDMB has technical problems is due to an inability to legally acquire money to exchange for the goods and services needed to upgrade the server and the bandwidth.
I also contend that “Cecil” (Ed) knows about this, but this is a problem where the resources to implement the proper solution do not exist.
Do you contend that because he cannot find a way to make things work, having found the solution, that that makes him a lousy administrator? Or is your contention instead that the solution that he has arrived at is faulty, and thus in that manner he is a lousy administrator? And, if that is true, is it also your contention that since you are a “smartie”, then you should not be expected to have the capacity to suggest a better answer, because by definition you too are a lousy administrator?
And the curious listing of the programming languages and OS’s above was somehow to be evidence put forth as proof of you being in the “smartie” caste?
Interesting logic. But I fear it is faulty on many levels. Here is an example from below that might emphasize my point better:
He could “research” them. He has. So have I - I run my own Board using the same exact software as the SDMB. How can either me or Ed have a Board to “shame all message boards” without money to exchange for goods and services to upkeep the Board? Are you saying that my Board would be better if I just found a “better solution” via research? What about money? It doesn’t matter how smart one is - if you do not have the tools to implement your ideas, you then by definition normally cannot bring them to fruit.
Lessee… what was it you said? “I have responded to serious replies seriously.” And I have responded to assholic replies assholically.
I answered your question, very simply. With minimal rudeness. Yet you respond with the manner of one with a pole the size of the Washington Monument up his ass. Remove that pole, 'Kid, and maybe you’ll get a few more “serious responses”.
No, but saying “Cecil Adams, PBUH, has the slowest, most error prone, unweildy message board ever concieved” is whining, you dickhead. Furthermore, claiming that an occurrance of errors means that the Administrators are lousy at their job, is just pure idiocy. Finally, responding to the people who set out to correct your flawed thinking with derision is the behavior of an asshole, which is what I have dubbed you.
And in your OP you call him a “lousy Administrator”, and also later in your post you imply that he (ignoring the fact that he doesn’t manage the Boards) must either be a crappy Administrator or an idiot.
“Goes clunk”… what a highly scientific definition.
In any case, it DOESN’T “go clunk”. It chugs along quite nicely, considering the extreme amount of stress that’s been put on it. Your isolated incident (which, in my being here for over a year, and over 5,000 posts, I have never encountered this error) does NOT equate with the Boards “going clunk”.
Smarties are candy. They’re very delicious. But, yes, candies do have a very limited ability to administrate a message board. However, I’ll bet dollars to donuts that candy would make a better administrator than you would.
I’m beginning to question whether or not you understand stuff like, y’know, Reading Comprehension. If you haven’t noticed, your whole “Smart People Can’t Administrate!” angle has been debunked. Repeatedly.
If you’re going to criticize it, you’d better know how it works if you don’t want to look the fool.
Sure, if the secretary only has one letter to type. What happens when that secretary has ten thousand letters to type? Will she have them all done by the end of the day?
You don’t understand how computers work, you don’t understand how the Internet works, you don’t understand how the software works, and you don’t know shit about the Administration of this board… so, why the hell do you feel qualified to criticize it? Educate yourself before you open your mouth again, boy.
So, AcidKid. Having fun yet? Or have you had enough to see that you’d better stay off the acidities for a while?
Everything has been explained to you at this stage. Cecil has little to do with the Message Board. The reasons for the slowness of the Message Board have become apparent (to you - they were apparent to the rest of us all along). You have given no other example of “smarties that are lousy administrators”, as poor a point it may be to begin with.
To put it eloquently: what the fuck is your problem?
A CEO of a manufacturing company has little to do with a an assembly line yet it is job to administrate the company effectively to ensure the smooth running of that assembly line. If the assembly line does not run smoothly then the CEO is brought to task by the shareholders.
The CEO doesn’t have to know how the assembly line works and I doubt most CEOs could design an assembly line. Now could the engineers who designed that smooth running assembly line, who designed the robots on that assembly line, who designed the software to run those robots, could they administrate the company as well as the CEO?
No! As a matter of contention the more brilliant their software solutions, the more effecient their hardware, the less likely that they could fill in for the CEO when he goes on vacation.
AcidKid, I’m gonna type this slowly, so you’ll have a better chance of understanding.
Cecil is not the CEO of The Straight Dope. It’s a freakin’ newspaper column that he writes, not a publically held corporation. The Straight Dope Message Board is administered, not by Cecil, but by The Chicago Reader. That was the paper that first published his column, lo these many years ago.
The Reader gets no compensation for this message board, apart from the banner ads that sometimes appear (and I think they “buy” most, if not all, of them).
In short, your CEO analogy as it relates to this message board is wrong. You’re trying to make a factual argument based on (your) opinion. That won’t work.
If they were me, they certainly could. Ya see, I’m and engineer and most days I wear an administrator hat, too. And a management hat. The vagaries of small business, don’tcha know?
Now, go away.
ACIDKID –
It’s pretty clear from your posts why it would be against your better judgment to think. Now if only it was against your better judgment to speak, and you went with your better judgment.
Before asking why a particular state of affairs exists, you must first establish that it does exist. You have not. If you want to have a discussion on whether smart people make lousy admininstrators, have at it, but you will of course be expected to prove your assertion. You assert, as if this is Great Debates:
. . . which I find to be rank nonsense. To assert that a single person cannot understand both that cause and effect exists and that such a thing as human nature exists and may be predicted, strikes me as idiocy. In any event, empirical evidence is not a “complex non-human mechanic,” whatever that means, or any type of “mechanic;” it is a thing, not a process.
I believe you mean “inversely”? Again, this question is based on an unproven assumption and therefore neither requires nor deserves an answer, until the validity of the underlying assumption is established. It’s like asking “Why are people nicknamed ACIDKID so obtuse?” Until you show that the assertion exists, that it is, there’s no point to asking why it is.
Um, no, it wouldn’t. Your question would be a “foregone conclusion” only if it were assumably true, demonstrably true, and supported by the vast majority of non-lunatic-fringe citation. One or two or ten cites for your proposition do not transform it into a foregone conclusion. Strange that a “smartie” such as you would fail to appreciate this rather unsubtle distinction.
You might avail yourself of that mysterious resource known as “the dictionary.” True smarties not only know what “aggrandize” means, they know what dictionaries are and how to use them.
Wrong. In the Pit, you asked a question. A question is not an observation.
These are actual observations, not questions. They also do not solicit opinions on why something exists, they merely note that it does, in fact, exist. They do not make value judgments. They are not based upon unproven and unprovable assumptions. Compare and contrast to your OP and see if you cannot discern the difference. Be warned that failing to discern the difference will further call into question your self-declared status as a smartie.
Wrong. Cecil, by lending his name to this effort, runs the risk that, if shoddily done, it will reflect badly on him. That does not make him responsible for it, especially if his involvement is in name alone. Dinah Shore is not responsible for the way the Dinah Shore Golf Tournament is run, though she obviously has a vested interest in seeing that it is run well. But these are not the same thing.
Another surpassingly bad analogy. Since a Board administrator obviously administers a Board, he or she by necessity ought to be familiar with the software by which the Board runs – a crucial part of keeping it running. An office manager manages the workings of the people in the office to ensure it runs smoothly; he or she does not manage the inner workings of the machines.
Wrong again. The important thing is that when an efficient secretary is told to type a letter, he types it. (In my world, he better not sign and post it without first putting it in front of the person who assigned it, unless directly told to do so.) But if an office can only afford, say, a secretary half-time (in the mornings) and a letter is submitted for typing in the afternoon, that letter will not be finished until the next morning when the secretary comes in. This does not reflect badly on the office manager but merely reflects the realities of the economies of that particular office. Similarly, a Board that runs slowly may be reflecting the realities of the economies underlying its existence, as opposed to administrative incompetence. That is the case here. Why you would [iassume* it must be administrative incompentence, I can’t imagine.
Not necessarily correct. If the assembly line is not running optimally due to things known to be beyond the CEO’s control – like a shortage of materials, or a lack of funds to perform desireable upgrades – those problems will obviously not be blamed on bad management. This strikes me as obvious and makes me wonder why a smartie such as yourself does not see it.
There is no reason why a properly trained engineer might not become a CEO, just as there is no reason why a CEO who came up from the factory floor could not return to the floor if necessary. This is a matter of skill training, not intelligence, and certainly not a matter of being “people smart” versus “book smart” as if the two are mutually exclusive, which of course they are not.
Well, maybe not so much anymore…
Dinah is dead??? Dinah’s been dead for seven years???
Nobody tells me anything.
Let me guess, bad administration is why the CEO of GM can’t get the Suburban to have the gas mileage and cost of the Metro? Apparently in the world of AcidKid, good management would be able to transcend economic and technical realities and give him what he wants. If Cecil weren’t such a lousy administrator he could get volunteers to write database management software that performs faster than the hardware of a computer can operate at. Right.
And if OS/2 were such a great OS, why did pretty much everyone who had it switch to Win95 as soon as it was available? Maybe your criteria for quality are different than the criteria of the marketplace.
Well, I tried to talk sensibly and in a non-insulting manner to show Acid why I and others feel he is misguided. I see now that once again I wasted my time, and he is likely laughing at all of us that posted. Time to write off another newbie.
Well, unlike AcidKid I actually know something about OS’s and programming. And I know a lot about OS/2, as I was a developer of several applications running under it for several years.
OS/2 was, and still is, a superior operating system. It didn’t run many Windows games, and it didn’t run Office 97. OS/2 had very limited support from many hardware vendors, and many software vendors as well. Anytime you wanted to add a new device to your PC it was like the twelve labors of Heracles to find the right drivers for it. Installation of programs and hardware was difficult, and uninstallation equally so. But, most importantly, it didn’t say “Microsoft” on it. And it simply could not compete against Win95 and the tremendous marketing effort put out by Microsoft.
OS/2 was far more stable, better performing, gave a better and more complete TCP/IP suite to users, and had lower memory usage than Win95, WinNT, and Win98. It was easier by far to program in than Win95 or NT - but it still lost out.