Friday, January 25, 2008

Books that make you dumb

A chart of which are the most popular books at colleges, by SAT score. [Link]
  1. Get a friend of yours to download, using Facebook, the ten most popular books at every college (manually -- as not to violate Facebook's ToS). These ten books are indicative of the overall intellectual milieu of that college.
  2. Download the average SAT/ACT score for students attending every college.
  3. Presto! We have a correlation between books and dumbitude (smartitude too)!
    Books <=> Colleges <=> Average SAT Scores
  4. Plot the average SAT of each book, discarding books with too few samples to have a reliable average.
  5. Post the results on your website, pondering what the Internet will think of it.
Yes, I'm aware correlation ≠ causation. The results are awesome regardless of direction of causality.
You can stop sending me email about this distinction. Thanks.
Awesome.

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