Books That Make You Dumb

Ever read a book (required or otherwise) and upon finishing it thought to yourself, "Wow. That was terrible. I totally feel dumber after reading that."? I know I have. Well, like any good scientist, I decided to see how well my personal experience matches reality. How might one do this?

I came across the Booksthatmakeyoudumb project thanks to Kottke, and it's pretty entertaining. Virgil Griffith compared the top 10 favorite books for college's on Facebook to the average SAT scores for those colleges. On the high end, you've got Catch-22 and Freakonomics. On the low end, The Holy Bible and "I don't read."

I found it interesting to look at the list of schools. RIT is number 183, in average SAT score, but I was surprised to see that The Bible is the top book for the school. If you're logged into Facebook, you can see all our stats and learn, like I did, that Boondock Saints is the most popular movie at RIT.

1 Comments

In regards to correlation vs.

In regards to correlation vs. causality, someone should do a breakdown of where these books fall on a reading level scale. I would expect that books with more difficult vocabulary would be found on the right side of the graph.
(posted on LiveJournal)

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