Books That Make You Dumb
Rick Webb
Co-founder, COO : New York
topics: User Experience, Strategy, The Networks and the Internet, Viral Marketing, and Media Planning
filed under: Internet Culture
Griffith used aggregated Facebook data about the favorite bands and books among students of various colleges and plotted them against the average SAT scores at those schools, creating a tongue-in-cheek statistical look at taste and intelligence.For example, the favorite musician of the smartest students was Beethoven, with an average SAT score of 1371. Also on the “smart” end of the scale were Sufjan Stevens (1260), Counting Crows (1247), and Radiohead (1220). And sadly for Lil Wayne, enjoying his music was associated with being the dumbest, with an average SAT score of 889.
On the book front, Lolita was favorite tome of the brightest students (a result which Griffith called “charming”), with an average SAT score of 1317. The lowest-scoring students liked the erotica author Zane, with an average score of 980. And strangely, the students who listed their favorite book as “The Bible” were smarter (1047) than those who said it was “The Holy Bible” (980).
Ironically, students who wrote “I don’t read” in the space for favorite books were only slots 14 from the bottom in terms of SAT scores, meaning that there were 13 other favorite books that theoretically made students “dumber” than not reading books at all.
5 comments
While Virgil (now there's a great coincidence--you think his favorite book is The Aeneid?) did make a brief disclaimer about causation/correlation, but is that distinction going to be lost amidst all the online froth? As commendable as his wikiscanner is, what cracks me up about this alleged study is that it's a classic case of the sensationalism and al dente reasoning employed on the internet--a safe distance away from university math or philsophy departments--in order to raise a ruckus and increase pageviews. And hey, it worked, so I should probably file this under the "interweb marketing ideas that worked" folder for later.
Of course the whole thing depends on the assumption that fb profiles have some connection to truth, rather than being artfully constructed pieces of the online personae we all spend so much time grooming . . . but that's another rant.
P.s. Eric, sure, as far as dystopias go, I liked Brave New World and 1984 more, but to dismiss Fahrenheit 451 in six words seems a bit glib.
Try reading 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. This is a much better self-help book, and will certainly make anyone reading it much more intelligent, if they use the information in it properly!