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.