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.

I’m fascinated by this; so much so that I’m going to run this analysis on the same data, but for the UK. Keep an eye out over at LloydMorgan.co.uk. (Yes, I am a total geek.)

Also worth a browse is the not-so-impressive MusicThatMakesYouDumb and the beautifully addictive WikiScanner.

Interested in how I’ll be collecting the data?It’ll essentially be the same as with Virgil’s data, but instead of using SAT/ACT data I’m going to try and find the average UCAS points of students entering UK universities. So far I’ve had no luck with this, so may end up using the Daily Telegraph‘s ‘table of tables’.

Edit: The Good University Guide provides lovely raw statistics on UK institutions. I’ve grabbed the 2008 data and will be applying a weighting of 1.0 on entry requirements (UCAS points) as this is based on the students, not the institution. Yay for Google!