Virgil Griffith, the 25-year-old Caltech graduate student known for embarrassing numerous corporations with his WikiScanner, has aggregated Facebook data about the favorite bands and books of students from various colleges and plotted them against the average SAT scores at those schools, creating a tongue-in-cheek statistical look at books and music that make you dumb:
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.
Griffith came up with the idea as a way to show how to take two separate sets of data that were pretty straightforward on their own–in this case, the average SAT score and the favorite books among students at various universities–and combine them to become more interesting. Griffith says, “Their unity is hilarity incarnate. This is to inspire people to think creatively about the data sets that are on the Internet.”
Griffith’s favorite band is Daft Punk, which didn’t make it onto the list.
The two sites, by the way, are Booksthatmakeyoudumb.virgil.gr and Musicthatmakesyoudumb.virgil.gr, but they seem to be overwhelmed at the moment.