The science shows that people who read and comment on the Light on Dark Water blog have an average IQ twenty points higher than readers of other blogs.

My starry-eyed naivete and optimism have always gotten me into trouble.

It's true that we can't measure the intelligence of mere readers, but we can do the science to make projections from other data. A large number of visits to this site come from Google and are to specific pages. We can reasonably assume that Google has directed them here in response to some search term. From the titles and contents of those pages, we can project that the person doing the search is of greater than average intelligence.

For instance, "Getting Started with Kierkegaard" tends to get at least one hit a day. So do the pages dealing with specific novelists and poets. Week 36 of the 52 Poems series is another regular: Tolkien's "Song of the Ents and Entwives." So the science shows that our visitors tend to be a fairly sophisticated group. Unfortunately I can't prove that they actually read what they came here for. Or that they liked it if they did read it.

Not me. Some of my best friends are pretty dumb.