[version_five]

I remember reading that people who swear a lot are statistically smarter. I'm sure there are lots of caveats to that, as with the code.

How long will it be before someone who doesn't understand causality starts encouraging developers to write profane comments? It wouldn't be any more absurd than lots of other non-causal behaviors I've seen pushed because somebody successful does them.

[LeifCarrotson]

Failing to provide the typical social signals seems correlated either with extreme competence - they don't need to use polite language or other signals to boost employability - or with complete incompetence. There's a skill floor that cuts off the latter from this dataset when they can't configure an SSL certificate for their git client; their curses at "unable to get local issuer certificate" or "fatal: repository not found" are not uploaded to the Internet.

[ahamm]

I believe Nassim Taleb wrote about this in relation to 'virtue signaling' - not swearing being a sign that people are trying to 'signal' professionalism in order to keep their jobs, and therefore are more likely to have less actual professional skills (which if good enough would secure their jobs regardless of profanity) and vice-versa. Same for hoodies over ties, etc. Although all this probably gets flipped now that we have people writing papers like this - context is everything.

[halkony]

Do you remember where he wrote about that? Sounds like something in Antifragile, but let's be honest, any one of his books is better called a corpus.

[WalterBright]

> I remember reading that people who swear a lot are statistically smarter.

I'd need more evidence of that. My anecdotal experience is that saying "fuck" a lot is indicative of a lack of imagination. For example, Winston Churchill's legendary devastating insults, with no profanity necessary.

[davely]

There is probably some cognitive overhead required to actually not swear in certain situations, especially if you’re prone to doing it.

“What the f… heck is this, kiddo?”

Definitely gotta utilize those brain wrinkles in that case.