BooksThatMakeYouDumb is a little ‘statistical’ graph on how average SAT scores correlate with what books people read. Accepting it’s unscientificness Virgil (the creator) lists the most notable things about the data:
- Harry Potter is the most popular book. The Bible is the second most popular book. At least among college students, Harry Potter is, like the Beatles, indeed bigger than Jesus. Harry Potter still wins even if you add “The Bible” and “The Holy Bible” together.
- The smartest religious book is “The Book of Mormon”. The dumbest religious book is “The Holy Bible”. I’m sure this pleases the Mormons immensely.
- The dumbest philosophy book is “The Five People You Meet In Heaven” and the smartest philosophy book is “Atlas Shrugged”.
- “Lolita” is the smartest book.
- The top/bottom 20 books are remarkably stable. I tried 5 different weighting algorithms and their only variation was in the middle. The dumbest books were always at the bottom, and the smartest books were always on top. This is even further corroborated by the fact that the extremes change remarkably little with increasing m.
- This is slightly specious, but if you wanted to you could consider “I Don’t Read” as a control variable. Thus, if “I Don’t Read” is smarter than 13 books, then you’d think these bottom thirteen books could in fact, make you dumber than not reading at all.
Also worth a browse is the not-so-impressive MusicThatMakesYouDumb and the beautifully addictive WikiScanner.
Comments
One response to “Books That Make You Dumb”
This isn’t to congratulate you on anything because it’s a proven fact within the publishing industry that men don’t read. I’m just a fan of the word Infogasm. I trust you don’t hold the patent?