Booksthatmakeyoudumb
Of course it's not scientific, but it's fun. Virgil Griffith:
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?
Well, here's one idea.
- 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.
- Download the average SAT/ACT score for students attending every college.
- Presto! We have a correlation between books and dumbitude (smartitude too)! Books <=> Colleges <=> Average SAT Scores
- Plot the average SAT of each book, discarding books with too few samples to have a reliable average.
- Post the results on your website, pondering what the Internet will think of it.
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