I am pretty sure BillyHardball will find this interesting, he loves collecting data etc etc

http://musicthatmakesyoudumb.virgil.gr

http://booksthatmakeyoudumb.virgil.gr

Well, here's one idea.

1. Get a friend of yours to download, using Facebook, the ten most frequent "favorite music" at every college via that college's Network Statistics page on Facebook (manually -- as not to violate Facebook's ToS). These ten "favorite musics" are perhaps indicative of the overall intellectual milieu of that college.

2. Download the average SAT/ACT score (from CollegeBoard) for students attending every college.

3. Presto! We have a correlation between musical tastes and dumbitude (smartitude too)!

Music <=> Colleges <=> Average SAT Scores

4. Plot the average SAT of each "favorite music", discarding those with too few samples to have a reliable average.

5. Post the results on your website, pondering what the Internet will think of it.

Look where the Holy Bible is.

Note where Beyonce and some other rapper type music sits

haha, awesome concept.

good to see freakonomics is pretty high up there

I always feel dumberer after listening to Rap music.

SAT numbers are meaningless to me, I get that the lower score is worse but at what number does it start to be considered a respectable score?

iirc SAT scores are out of 1600 - there's 2 sections each worth 800.

i vaguely remember being told once that to get into an ivy league you're aiming for 700+ on each section, 1400+ overall.

a quick google should tell you whether my brain remembers goodly or not :)

edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT#Structure - wiki says it's 3 sections of 800 not 2 so that would make it out of 2400.

last edited by taggs at 18:45:08 17/Mar/10

How do I make facebook display my top favourite songs? I want to display my s***ty taste in music for the entire world to see.

freakonomics is such an awesome book :D

It's late, and I've been working since 8am, so I didn't go to the links. However, the quote you put in seems dodgy. Why are they saying that it's music that makes you dumb, rather than being dumb makes you listen to that music?

If this is totally out of context, ignore. I shall look into it more tmro.

Seriously one of the more retarded things I have seen on the internet.
I actually feel a bit dumber having looked at those "graphs".

Note where Beyonce and some other rapper type music sits

Wow, I bet you're glad you stuck to Counting Crows huh?

typing that response was quicker than clicking on a link? =/

correlation =/= causation and the author is well aware of that - had you clicked on the link one of the first things you'd have seen would be this (in big ass bold letters..):

Yes, I'm aware correlation ≠ causation. The results are hilarity incarnate regardless of causality.
You can stop sending me email about this distinction. Thanks.

they've run this regression for a bit of fun, not for super serious inferences.

edit: oh noes, teh graphs don't like my particular type of music... it's the worst thing on the intertoobs evar!!@#1

last edited by taggs at 08:23:50 18/Mar/10

I guess it's not for everyone is it taggs, ya know reading, it's hard and all.

typing that response was quicker than clicking on a link? =/

I would have typed it anyway. It's an important distinction, whether he made it or not :P

That said, it's good to see that sci fi books by averages are close to the top.

The music one wasn't that interesting - not enough range, they mostly seem to be in the middle.

this is stupid. it doesn't prove a thing. I go and look through all the music and whilst i find most of my tastes are often on the right hand side of the graph (mainly bearing to the fact that i don't like rap music) however there are other extreme anomalies, ie i like aerosmith and i also like the counting crows, same genre, complete opposite ends of the spectrum.

dumb graph is dumb.

Apparently relatively stupid people like jazz too.

Notice how all the musicians on the RHS are white?

Graph is racialist.

we're all guilty of being racialist once or twice in our lives..

No Koran? does that mean that mulims don't even qualify for SATs?

I would of expected a broader range of musicians.

Errors of sampling... erroneous