DISQUS

David · 1 year ago

Very humorous! I liked the bit about "I don't read" being associated with higher SAT/ACT scores than the Holy Bible.

Chris Jara · 1 year ago

The Books page suggests that the genres were description from by LibraryThing

bcc · 1 year ago

This is fun, but anyone who tries to read much meaning into the results should relax. This isn't serious (at least, I sure hope not!). Wikiscanner was serious, this looks like recreation.

Doc · 1 year ago

Its a good thing there is no SAT requirement for heaven

Cod · 1 year ago

That means there is no SAT requirement for going to hell also.

M@ · 1 year ago

But there seems to be an upper limit SAT score for believing in that nonsense.

Statistics_geek · 1 year ago

Oh that's silly - the Bible was required in 800 schools - more than any other single book, so what you're seeing is the mean of the entire Facebook population.

M@ · 1 year ago

It was a joke dude, like this website. Calm down.

Zack · 1 year ago

Would it be possible to do plots that break it down by SAT component? I suspect a lot of the effect here has to do with books at the high end being books that you need a bigger vocabulary to appreciate, which should correlate more with SAT-verbal than SAT-math.

snowqueen · 1 year ago

The funniest thing about this is the rampant lack of sense of humour among most of the commenters.
The saddest thing is what a limited reading list this is even among the clever end.

Thank you for not putting the Alchemist into 'philosophy'!

brady · 1 year ago

hey wheres your sense of humor you elitist asshat

Dave · 1 year ago

"limited reading list" - this has nothing to do with "limited reading lists" - only which books are listed most often as favorites by those who attended different schools with different average SAT scores. For example, I've read at least a thousand books in my life, but can only list one as my favorite. If I list some obscure book, no matter how good, it won't make the list. Those listed as favorites are bound to be the most popular, well-read books.

"the clever end" - interesting you should shorten "the books preferred by those with higher SAT scores" to "the clever end," as if acing the SAT is about outsmarting it.

Roderick De Jesus · 1 year ago

To be fair, a lot of the middle score books are required reading in a lot of classes.

meredith · 1 year ago

I wondered about that -- the "favorites" at the lower end of the scale include things like The Color Purple and Their Eyes Were Watching God and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, all pretty standard high school (or earlier) required reading. Would maybe a larger list (than just the top ten) yield more results like The Purpose Driven Life (ugh) and similar, or more of the latter?

meredith · 1 year ago

Um, I meant former. More of the former. Clearly my own SAT verbal score is not predictive of my actual verbal ability. :)

CO149 · 1 year ago

Neat study, thanks. It's apparent that folks who have a problem with the results haven't figured out what you're doing. Too bad, it's all there on the page to be read. (I know, I know, we're all graduated now and don't NEED to read!)

Of course, they're free to do their own studies. Easier to sit in the dark and bitch than to light a candle...

Suetsumuhana · 1 year ago

Hey, this was pretty interesting to see. I think agree with the placement of most of the books. I work in a library and they kind of match the judgements I make of people reading certain kinds of books (yes, we are judging you in the library based on your book choices) .

I do agree with the others that your categories are a little weird, though. Especially 'chick lit'. The only book you put in that category that really is 'chick lit' is The Devil Wears Prada. P&P is classic, Little Women is classic/juvenile fiction, and Nicholas Sparks, well I've never read them, but I'm told they're really depressing love stories and chick lit is supposed to be -fun-. I think the only thing all those books actually have in common is that they tend to be favorites of women more than men, which =/= chick lit.

xlh · 1 year ago

john hartnup makes a good point.. this study isn't designed to show causality.. the most you can say about the results is correlation. another point made by kthejoker is that SAT scores are more correlated to socioeconomic status than intelligence.

interesting study, though. especially where you 'stack' the books by genre. one could be tempted to say that classics make you smart... but the only thing you could say is that statistically, people who go to colleges with higher SAT medians also tend to claim that classics are their favorite books. this could be due to numerous factors, such as the milieu of the university, or the curriculum. hopefully people won't be tempted to look at this study in the wrong way.

read most of em · 1 year ago

as everyone else has pointed out, this is no more than a playful graphing of data with no real correlation. I assume that the person that made this is well aware of that and is just playing around with all the social constructs 'books that make you dumb' hits on. Ie. the SAT is not a guage of intelligence but a gauge of how well you were able to access mainstream education before college; your favorite book is by no means a representation of your 'smartness' nor does it directly relate to your analytical capacity, it only reflects on what book you want other people to associate with you; and finally there isn't even an assertion of a correlation other than the title which is clearly just to draw you into the website. I'd say the site is moderately successful - stimulates conversation on the constructs - but fails to isolate them enough for viewers to recognize the point.

brady · 1 year ago

i like how you start, "as everyone else has pointed out"
makes it easy for me to not read your comment

right · 1 year ago

Damn i feel dumb after reading this.

Luke Welling · 1 year ago

I am too lazy to run the experiment, but I wonder if there is a correlation between endumbening books and books that have been made into movies. It is hard to see by eye, because most of the books on the list have.

Adam V. · 1 year ago

You may want to consider applying "PNGCRUSH" to your images:
http://pmt.sourceforge.net/pngcrush/

As a sample, bymydStaircaseLarge.png was shrunk from 641KB down to 456KB, about a 29% reduction.

Given now "digg"-able this project will be, you'll probably want to take all the bandwidth savings you can get.

romanpoet · 1 year ago

Adam,

Images are now pngcrush'ed. Thanks for the tip! I owe you one.

kthejoker · 1 year ago

The SATs are culturally biased against race and socioeconomic status, and are a pretty poor signal of raw intelligence. You could argue the same thing about literacy, which is more a product of environment than innate ability. Considering Freakonomics is near the top of the "smart list", it's surprising that this statistical "study" does such a remarkable job of ignoring the basic principle of ceteris paribus.

Matt · 1 year ago

"The SATs are culturally biased" - against recent immigrants I presume. Not against people who grew up in the US.

Alex · 1 year ago

To all the "SATS are culturally biased" people:
Why don't you learn some fucking English so you can read the damn things.

romanpoet · 1 year ago

First Post!

Durova · 1 year ago

Hilarious. I'm so glad I read Gabriel Garcia Marquez as an undergrad; it must have sprouted three new brain cells.

bfg · 1 year ago

Third post!

John Hartnup · 1 year ago

I'm curious as to why you treated "The Holy Bible" and "The Bible" as two different books. I guess if treated as one book, it'd be at around the median SAT where 'The Bible' is. I wonder whether making the distinction tells us something about the kind of education that leads you to use the title 'The Holy Bible' instead of the more prosaic 'Bible'.

Dangerous title you've chosen there -- inferring the direction of causality.

John Hartnup · 1 year ago

Note - I did read the Q&A about the bible, but I don't understand the point you're trying to make. You have different Amazon links for 'The Bible' and 'The Holy Bible', but I note that both have covers which read 'The Holy Bible'. If you're saying that you've chosen to split your data based on the words chosen to refer to the book, then say it explicitly rather than inferring it with some comparisom to Mohammed.

abscondment · 1 year ago

John, I had the same initial reaction as you until I dug into the data on Facebook. If you go to a given network's statistics page, you'll see that this is how the Facebook users themselves entered the book. For example, Sam Houston State University students (http://www.facebook.com/networks/stats.php?nk=1...) most commonly listed 'The Bible' as a favorite, while third place went to 'The Holy Bible'. The difference is in the data from Facebook.

Some people called it 'The Bible', and some 'The Holy Bible'. Statistically speaking, people at schools with higher average SAT scores called it 'The Bible' more often.

He didn't choose to split the books, but he could have chosen to normalize them. Some information is lost in normalization, so I think he made the right choice. This way, we see the data as reported by Facebook users. If he did normalize the titles (treating 'The Bible' and 'The Holy Bible' as the same), the overall rank of the book would be an average of the independent titles' ranks, effectively dropping the ranking of 'The Bible' and raising the ranking of 'The Holy Bible'. It's a null sum operation.

LafinJack · 1 year ago

Thank you for actually putting some thought into this, unlike our friend John.

Sebatinsky · 1 year ago

Only 6 comments?
This is awesome - a lot of work, but an excellent product.

@ John Hartnup:
While Virgil has conducted an excellent study with excellent results, the internet at large is not exactly a scientific journal, so I think he has some room to wiggle as far as inferring causation with limited evidence.

Helge · 1 year ago

nice datamining idea. what about schools in other part of the world?

cyf · 1 year ago

Interesting...after seeing the results, I immediately thought along the lines of kthejoker. This is just a graphical representation of how biased the SAT testing truly is...

rwhtx · 1 year ago

I must have only read the dumb books, because I can't figure out what the vertical scale represents. I try again after reading the Book of Mormon.

Jess · 1 year ago

The vertical scale doesn't represent anything. It's just there to prevent overlaps.

f@shion@ble · 1 year ago

Dude, The Devil Wears Prada is perhaps the best book on the list.

anon · 1 year ago

Holy Ecological Fallacy, Batman!

Charlie · 1 year ago

I've read nearly all the books on the list (yes, including the bible, Nabakov, and the book of mormon and no I'm not going to start ranting about religion or pederasty) and the categorization is... interesting.

I personally feel that reading "100 Years of Solitude" made me much stupider - what a waste of paper and brain cells that was. I'd rather read Ayn Rand's puerile fantasies.

Penny · 1 year ago

Where is "The Fairy Queen " by E. Spencer? Where are the works of Spengler or Thucylides or Einstein or Wittgenstein?
These are things that people with 1300+ Sat scores read in High School.
I read all of the drivel ( that existed at the time) listed here, when I was an elementary school student.

Jess · 1 year ago

And I am sure you read "Lolita" in elementary school too.

Mental wankery and the use of the word drivel is not brilliance. It is, as Daniels says, asshatery.

G. Daniels · 1 year ago

Great to know you could bare to comment among us mortals.

Jesus. Asshat.

SeanSeanABoBon · 1 year ago

While we are all very impressed at your elementary school decision to lower yourself to the point that you would read "the drivel listed here". However, if you would have taken an extra 8 seconds to read anything else about the project then you wouldn't need to ask why your preferred list of books and authors is sadly absent. The books listed here were taken from Facebook profiles and grouped by school. If you want to list your favorite complex and toilsome authors and works to read then you can go to blogger or livejournal. Start a blog so I can never read it.

P.S. It's spelled "The FAERIE Queen. Surprised you didn't know that. So is your face. Pwned.

A.Alaalas · 1 year ago

From your scatter diagram, there appears to be no co-relation between SAT and reading choice. Perhaps matters of taste have nothing to do with intelligence but a lot to do with snobbishness.

pepper · 1 year ago

pretty accurate in general, the books i liked were in the SAT range i scored..pretty funny

Rick · 1 year ago

Putting the title "Books That Make You Dumb" on this may generate hits and links but is, but the author's own admission, wildly inaccurate and takes away much of the value this little data munching experiment might have. If you really believe correlation doesn't equal causation then why chose a title that indicates exactly that?

Mackenzie · 1 year ago

fun?

Nate · 1 year ago

please do the same thing for music. radiohead would probably be the choice of the most intelligent.

jeff c · 1 year ago

Don't you think this data is seriously distorted by the inclusion of required reading from standard freshman English classes?

Books that are assigned to bright & dumb alike, across the board, will have even less correlation with intelligence than books chosen voluntarily.

thescientist · 1 year ago

No. The study doesn't care about reading experience, it cares about reading preference (as stated by the reader). Everyone who put "B More Careful" as their favorite book could, in theory, have read "100 Years of Solitude." If we assume that is true, the point is that those readers identified the former as their favorite instead of the latter. There are probably only a handful of H.S. graduates in the U.S. who have not read Huxley's "Brave New World," but apparently no one liked it that much ....

Cesar · 1 year ago

hey - did you include the spanish name (cien años de soledad) too? that's how it's listed on my facebook :)

asefawef · 1 year ago

Virgil didn't choose the tags. It says in the FAQ they're taken from some book website.

Rob · 1 year ago

This is really cool and makes me strangely proud that my only favorite book listed is Catch-22.

I'm sure you are busy with other more important things, but I'd be interested to see results from my alma mater, which is the uillinois facebook group.

David · 1 year ago

Can't you just view the details for UIllinois yourself, if that's one of your Facebook networks?

Raag · 1 year ago

What a Great Idea, and some great effort put in.
Come to think of it, it does reflect the intellect in its own way.

Zach · 1 year ago

How hard would it be to do the same thing, but with favorite movies? I think that would also be a really interesting list, and I'm guessing it's not nearly as much work since you already did it with books. Any plans to do it for movies? I'm sure that would boost your google rank too.

James D. Newman · 1 year ago

Interesting, the whole list strikes me as a snapshot of mediocrity. (with a couple of notable exceptions.) I'm shocked at the rank of "Purpose Driven Life" -- utter drivel. Anyone reading it outside of a Junior High should be ashamed. My list (for comparison -- so that you can see what a bigoted asshole I am) : Building Scientific Apparatus, Infinite Jest, The Feeling of What Happens, Ka, The Society of the Spectacle, Emerson's Complete Writings, Demian, Strunk and Whites Elements of Style, The Iliad, Geek Love) -- just the first 10 books on the top shelf. I promise you a 10 point lift in IQ if you finish them all within the year.

Dave Whittle · 1 year ago

Those might make you smarter, and better able to score well on SAT tests (which has significant knowledge components), but how would they help on an IQ test, which supposedly separates intelligence from knowledge?

And one man's drivel is another man's manna. No, I haven't read Purpose Driven Life - I just know some people I respect who have and said it gave their life new meaning. Ashamed? Of believing that life has purpose and meaning? Color me red as a beet in your eyes, then...

Dave Whittle · 1 year ago

Those might make you smarter, and better able to score well on SAT tests (which has significant knowledge components), but how would they help on an IQ test, which supposedly separates intelligence from knowledge?

And one man's drivel is another man's manna. No, I haven't read Purpose Driven Life - I just know some people I respect who have and said it gave their life new meaning. Ashamed? Of believing that life has purpose and meaning? Color me red as a beet in your eyes, then...

James D. Newman · 1 year ago

I hope that thinking that Purpose Driven Life is anything other than drivel isn't a requirement for believing that life has purpose and meaning. Just because I think it's a stupid book (astonishingly stupid book, by an astonishingly stupid man -- Rick Warren. Not one ounce of intellectual integrity.) doesn't make me a nihilist. In fact, I think having an appreciation for the purpose and meaning I have found in better books is part of why I am upset that his book is out there wasting paper.

As far as giving peoples lives new meaning --as Nietzsche says (who, by the way, Rick Warren thinks has more influence than Islam on Al Qaeda -- hey man whatever) "We are all greater artists than we realize."

I don't really believe that reading any list of 10 books will necessarily increase anyones score on anything by 10 points. It was a quip -- kind of like this site is a quip. In fact, my quip was kind of obviously playing on this site's quip. That is an example of analogical thinking, like the Miller Analogy test. But for all that, I don't think an IQ test has been invented that can totally separate knowledge and ability. I suppose when we get one then we'll start making headway on what IQ really is (or for that matter when we get firm and uncontested definitions of things like "knowledge" and "ability".

I'm sorry I offended your friend -- but do this for me -- recommend any biography of Thomas Edison for them. Any one at all -- I promise it is more inspiring than Warren's book.

Keenan Pepper · 1 year ago

Fahrenheit 451 doesn't make you dumb. It's only on the dumb side because of two very highly weighted schools: Miami Dade College and Broward Community College. Other than that, the list seems quite significant and accurate.

C · 1 year ago

You know, Dan Brown wrote 'Angels and Demons,' so it's interesting that someone reading Dan Brown (all of his books?) would get a lower SAT (995) than someone who read one of his books (1090). Or maybe that's about right.

Le Mango · 1 year ago

I think that's about right. You might read one Dan Brown novel because you were gullible/susceptible to cultural influence, but you would have to be plain stupid to read two.

Daniel · 9 months ago

LOL

Dave · 1 year ago

Interesting graph, if I understand it. It would help if there were a straight forward explanation of how you got an SAT/ACT score for a book. I didn't see any books in the room when I took those tests, but that was many years ago. Maybe they're in there with the students now. Maybe ebooks can take tests?
I read your attempt at an explanation, but not being a statistics wizard, it didn't make much sense. I am a graduate of the Colo School of Mines and I've taken and taught basic statistics, so I'm certainly far more knowledgeable on the subject than most. But nowhere could I find an explanation of how you made this leap. Do you have a basic write-up anywhere of how you did this? Something less involved than why there should or shouldn't be a "Beynsian" correction? Just something saying, in as plain English as possible, how this was done.
I'm also curious about the difference between "The Bible" and "The Holy Bible". I know there are different versions of the Bible, i.e, King James and the Catholic version (is it Phillip somebody?), but I thought that all bibles were supposed to be holy. Some clarification would help here. Is this just what's on the cover? Or something more?

Mackenzie · 1 year ago

He took the top 10 books from each school on Facebook (as reported by Facebook students as being their favorites), compared those book lists to the schools' average SAT scores, and plotted it. The Bible and The Holy Bible are listed separately because that's how the students themselves choose to list them. So, it shows that students who list "The Holy Bible" on average have lower SAT scores than students who just call it "The Bible."

quercus · 1 year ago

The vertical axis shoud be the n of each book.

Obama · 1 year ago

I guess Muslims and Jews don't use Facebook.

James D. Newman · 1 year ago

They are listing the top 100 books out of a few thousand -- Muslims and Jews make up a small (but significant) percentage of Americans, so their preferred scriptures would not likely be in the top 100 overall books, even if they were present on Facebook in equivalent numbers to their representation in overall society.

Phil S · 1 year ago

What do the SAT scores tell us about the average facebook user?

rohan · 1 year ago

Most of the books here are books US students are required reading in high school. It's not a very good correlation.

David Niall Wilson · 1 year ago

I have to say that there are some surprising placements on that list...and maybe a larger spread of data is necessary to really capture it...

For instance, just to read "A Clockwork Orange" takes extra effort - you have to be willing to use the glossary in the back of the book to figure out what they are saying...that excludes a number of lazy readers. I'm happy to say I've read nearly everything on the high end of the list...and a lot of the middle, and very little on the left....weird.

DNW

Big Jimbo · 1 year ago

Very interesting! I especially like it because i have read and liked a number of the books at the top end, therefore i am smart.

I havent done any bayesian statistics since i was in college, but i think basically what you are saying is the bigger the sample set, the narrower the bar. So books like Harry Potter and The Bible would have narrow bars. It seems like a greater number of the books at the top end of the distribution have wider bars(maybe there are less smart people). It would be interesting to see the vertical axis sorted sorted by # of observations, so you could look at the correlation especially among very popular books.

I guess now ill go get copy of Crime and Punishment from the library to make myself even smarter.

psqwan · 1 year ago

pynchon>= 1150

mk · 1 year ago

I am rather surprised that the University of Arizona isn't on your list--I find it hard to believe the Collegeboard doesn't have reliable SAT scores for a major research institution of its size, plus Arizona has a large Facebook network.

BostonBarrister · 1 year ago

The prior iteration of the SAT was a good correlation to IQ - if you leave out the writing sample it's still not bad (it was even better pre-calculators and with the antonym section). Whether IQ measures anything in particular is what some of you are trying to argue.

Also, I don't think it matters whether the books are included as required reading for freshmen - this is a list of preferred works. A lot of high school students are required to read Hamlet; many don't like it.

For those disappointed that some harder books aren't included: what did you expect if he was looking for a statistically significant sample from top-10 lists that are aggregated for schools on Facebook?

Forrest · 1 year ago

It does matter whether books are included as required reading. It is more statistically significant when a book that is NOT required reading appears on a top 10 list.

Josh English · 1 year ago

I'm not sure it's fair to use SAT scores. SAT scores are limited in measure. All they measure is a high school student's abilities for academic achievement in the first year of college.

James D. Newman · 1 year ago

That is not strictly true -- like the assumption made in a previous comment that IQ tests measure ability and not knowledge. Sure the tests are supposed to measure some things and not other things, but SAT scores certainly go up with vocabulary. Vocabulary is got by reading, so if you start reading earlier, or come from a house with books, you are going to do better on the SAT score. Also, it takes intelligence to read and understand a question -- people who are either just plain stupid, or who are awkward with the language of the test (imagine taking it in Sanskrit!) are both going to be penalized. I believe (although I can't point to the study so take this with a grain of salt until you find the reference for me) that SAT scores actually do track IQ scores over some domains. Please don't take this post as evidence that I am taking this exercise at all seriously -- I just want to clarify the terms in your question.

John Doe · 1 year ago

This is hilarious. My one complaint though, is that none of the books labeled "philosophy" are philosophy books.

Forrest · 1 year ago

Books are over-represented on top 10 lists in proportion to how often they are given as assigned reading for classes. Ideally you would account for this in your analysis. I conjecture that controlling for the "assigned reading bias" would make some of the trends you are finding even more pronounced.

ANTON LAVEY · 1 year ago

But I love A Purpose Driven Life! You are a dum dum.

AS · 1 year ago

Yikes! The alchemist scoring so high must mean the dumbing down is taking place only after people hit their facebook update button. All those holy bible readers must have read the alchemist first.

linde · 1 year ago

this is great, let me know if you want help culling the other media types. i would love to know which movies and musicians make your dumber.

bob · 1 year ago

I can't believe Michigan State isn't listed - it's the largest state school in Michigan. The College Boards must have reasonable data for it.

Jack Mehoff · 1 year ago

Funny... so many books listed are those that people read because they are required to do so for college credit, not out of pleasure.
Your results are quite skewed and your sample, faulted from a limited population.
All in all, about par for the course for some kid from Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
Yee-haw!

Mackenzie · 1 year ago

Um, these were listed *by the students themselves* as their favorites. That means that if you're required to read it, but you don't like it, you're probably not listing it anyway. That just leaves "books you like enough to read for pleasure."

Rrr · 1 year ago

Can you do the same for movies (and tv shows)?? Pleeaaasseee??

Christine · 1 year ago

I think this is an interesting idea. Although I do think that it does not accurately represent the "dumbness" of people. I say this because I think most people's lists of favorite books on Facebook, Myspace, etc. are just lists of every book they've read. For those who don't really read for leisure will have only read books that were on the required list of books to read for high school. I really don't think classics such as A Farewell to Arms and Hamlet should even be within the same range as Dan Brown. But, whatever, it's still really interesting. Cheers

Sonny Day · 1 year ago

I think the African American section here is problematic. First I think the creator of this site is (humorously?) reversing the direction of causality here - Really it's implying that "Dumb people read these books - smart people read these other books" And - oh look - dumb people read African American lit. With the implication that most of the people reading African American lit are.. African Americans.

There's a few problems with this 1) African Americans can can be scoring lower on SATs for a variety of reasons - social, economic, systemic. 2) There is much debate as to whether standardized tests like the SATs really measure anything meaningful at all. The only thing this site really supports is that people who *score higher* on the SATs read certain books more than other people who don't. The fact that you score higher on your SAT though is not some absolute measure of intelligence or even that you will do better in college than someone who doesn't. 4) I imagine there are other confounds, schools that demand higher SATs for entry are more likely to be more expensive schools, so it could really be that RICHER who can afford to go to these schools and pay their children to take SAT prep courses, like certain books more than POORER students who don't. I'm sure there is a positive correlation between greater wealth and greater SAT scores so it could just be that rich people like 100 years of solitude, and poor people like The Colour Purple.

James D. Newman · 1 year ago

It also does happen that African Americans read good old fashioned vanilla lit. Like 100 years of Solitude. Oh wait... how white are we talking here? ;) And is Nabokov really white? I mean -- he's a slav, isn't he? Is that white? James Joyce is white -- he's a mick and all, but he's white. Would you say Invisible Man is African American literature?

I just thought it was fucking great literature, but I'm white, so maybe I'm being racist.

How come there is so little literature from people from Edmonds here?

Jess · 1 year ago

Actually that is a conclusion you drew on your own. The books are well classified as African American lit, but that doesn't say much about who actual reads them and lists them as favorite books.

You could see if these books are only popular in historically black colleges to confirm if your assumptions are true. Of course, slandering someone who just ran scripts pulling from three sources of data is more fun and cathartic.

Sonny Day · 1 year ago

I think if he had just said "Ok here is raw data I have pulled from various sources I offer no judgement please make your own" but by calling the site "books that make you dumb" it's quite obviously he's really saying "These are books stupid people read."

I don't think anyone really thinks that if you forced Stephen Hawking to read The Colour Purple it would MAKE him dumber, the inference is that because Stephen Hawking is smart he's not going to WANT to read the colour purple because that's something stupid people read.

I don't think it's a stretch either to say that a higher proportion of African Americans will read African American lit than would other racial groups.

Put these things together and it seems like the site is saying; African Americans are dumb. Not so cool.

Karl · 1 year ago

It looks music taste would also be interesting.

whitequeen · 1 year ago

Thanks this was very interesting and a bit of a laugh too!

...from an international point of view though, do remember that everyone doesn't know/have SAT's. I had to go away and research to work it out . I'm in Australia.
Perhaps a little explanation?
Cheers and thanks

Christiana · 1 year ago

I contend: that not reading makes you dumb. If you can't learn from each book that you read then I believe you are dumb.

Toasty · 1 year ago

Virgil: You're analysis is 100% correct.... Those people have no sense of humor.

rivka · 1 year ago

How can you classify Pride and Prejudice and Little Women as 'chick lit'? surely those are classics.

seanachie · 1 year ago

I agree with kthejoker about the unreliability of SAT scores and the way they are skewed on class and racial lines, not to mention other factors. For instance, is the popularity of Their Eyes Were Watching God an indication of dumbness, as the graph seems to suggest, or does it simply say that it might be popular with a number of bright, diligent teenagers in inner-city public schools? Conversely, two supremely idiotic books, Atlas Shrugged and The Alchemist are high on the list, but not surprisingly, as Rand and Coelho's cod philosophy tends to be appeal to pretentious but confused teenagers deprived of the real thing. It's a phase most of them go through; those that continue reading either after their twentieth birthday are dumb.

Read most of these.... · 1 year ago

I'm just going to repost what I said to my friend that sent me this link:

...I'm with everyone complaining about Lolita being listed as Erotica. Considering there isn't any sex in the book AT ALL (it also happens to be one of my favorites), I'm confused. Also, same with The Color Purple and Their Eyes Were Watching God; I don't know if it's because I'm African-American that I'm offended or what, but seriously, what? Those should be listed as Classic as well, if Wuthering Heights and Gone with the Wind aren't listed as Chick Lit. Part of this list does seem to have quite of bit of racial and gender bias, but I don't particularly blame that on the people that made the site; a lot of that already comes from the American school system as a whole anyway.

Also, I don't think it's so much the books make you dumb; it's how seriously the instructors that make you read the books for your Lit classics take the material and when you read the books.

Jimmy Havok · 1 year ago

Amazing! I would have listed Freakanomics and Atlas Shrugged as books that make you dumb...of course, we only know that students at higher-scoring schools read them, not the actual effect they had on the students.

Neil · 1 year ago

Brilliant!

Ringo · 1 year ago

Interesting and amusing.

Why are "The Holy Bible" and "Bible" considered two different books? Presumably they are the same, regardless of the way people list them on their facebook pages...

betty · 1 year ago

The Bible and The Holy Bible are the exact same thing, why are they counted differently?

laura · 1 year ago

You're a jerk. I'm sure the reason you wrote this is because you can't read/comprehend the written word. Which I guess DOES make me dumb because although I've read a lot of these books and felt better about myself for having done so, I'm telling you in a message that you won't be able to read or understand.

Pauli · 1 year ago

Nice job, very innovative methodology! However, nobody seems to be discussing the issue of nonresponse bias - the fact that the data includes only those who use Facebook. Well, almost every college kid is on Facebook these days, you say. Well, while that's certainly true, I know some very bright people who refuse to join. Let me illustrate my point. Back in 1936, the Literary Digest survey suggested that Alf Landon would beat FDR hands down. As it turned out, the data were based on phone calls and mailing surveys to registered automobile owners. The folks who had phones and cars tended to be much more affluent than the constituency in general and thus more favorable to Republicans. FDR became president and Literary Digest went bust shortly after. You get the idea.

I think there's two fast-track options to make this study more valuable.

1) Discuss the possibility of nonresponse bias. Would it be possible that the sampling methodology does not enable us to capture the big picture? How big of a bias are we talking about here and how should we estimate it? I stress that I am not suggesting that there IS nonresponse bias here: I'm saying that based on the data and methods presented here, it is impossible to evaluate whether there is. And that's not good.

2) Limit the scope. Try to generalize findings to the population as a whole, but to the Facebook using population. Maybe a less interesting claim, but that's how science works - interestingness without rigor is nothing.

Pauli · 1 year ago

Correction

My second suggestion (point 2) should read:

2) Limit the scope. Try NOT to generalize findings to the population as a whole, but to the Facebook using population.---

mudder · 1 year ago

the "claremont" network actually refers to the claremont colleges, not just claremont mckenna.

G. Daniels · 1 year ago

Concerning Lolita, why exactly do WE lack a sense of humor because YOU categorized it as erotica? What the hell?

BUT. This is a fascinating list. Thanks.

Erin · 1 year ago

This is an interesting comment on the culture of schools that require high SAT scores. They also only require students to read books written by dead/old white men. This just means that they are reinforcing a bogus social hierarchy.
I hope you realize that by making this association you are reinforcing the idea that literature written by women (chick lit) and African Americans indicates dumbness and reinforcing the same bogus social hierarchy. (That being said, a lot of current chick lit promotes female shallowness.)

Prodigal · 1 year ago

It's interesting that books from the "african american" genre scored so dumb. If those books were popular at traditionally black colleges, it might show the SAT's white/asian bias.

adea · 1 year ago

I think you have to put The Secret up there as Dumb Dumb Dumb
I didn't see it on the list...

of course, I've never read it
funny, but just remember SAT scores are not the end all of intelligence

caynazzo · 1 year ago

Hamlet, okay, but Shakespeare is not a book.

Name * · 1 year ago

PLEASE! Change the names to protect the innocent and get to writing dude! It's bound to be a bestseller on the lowside of the scale.

rob · 1 year ago

Atlas Shrugged may be on the far right side of the list, but it will still make you dumb.

Terry · 1 year ago

This is brillant and I often wonder how lit majors can live. without a sense of humor

James D. Newman · 1 year ago

OMG -- I did some quick data-mining and found out that 100% of the comments which registered offense at the title of the site were logged from bottom scoring schools domains! What does this mean? ;)

Riku · 1 year ago

LOL, well then, I guess I better complain about the title of the site. I initially found it quite funny, but after a few minutes thought ended up agreeing with the poster who said it implies African-American's are dumb, which really isn't all that humorous. I'm writing from my home computer, but am a Harvard alum. Happy now?

MGMead · 1 year ago

So... brilliant people don't read?

Juan · 1 year ago

Ah, I'm so proud that the book 100 Years of Solitude by the great Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez is right up there on top!

erika · 1 year ago

the bell jar is not a biography

Nan · 1 year ago

I'm surprised that Douglas Adams isn't on this list. Don't kids read him any more?

Rj · 1 year ago

This was great. I'd love to see a "Movies" version.

The Orpheus · 1 year ago

There can't be spirited disagreement without raw data. Kudos for compiling!

Nicole · 1 year ago

Am I missing something? SAT scores are determined before college, not after. How would there be any correlation? Besides, the most popular books are just those assigned by English and Comp Lit classes, not what students choose.

sierra · 1 year ago

These books do not "make" you dumb; rather, they correlate with dimbulbery. The name of the site is thus rather dumb.

Sarah · 1 year ago

The basis of your website is flawed because you make the two following assumptions:

1. People have actually read the books that they put as their favorite books-- unfortunately, oftentimes titles make these kinds of lists in order to impress others. (For example, how many people do you think can name the protagonist and theme of Atlas Shrugged without giving a cliched, "it's a great testament to the wonders of capitalism" response? Probably not many.)

2. Correlation implies causation. As you probably know, that is not at all the case.

Henry · 1 year ago

The real question to find out if a person read it is "roughly how long is Galt's rant on the virtues of money?"

Dana (SAT=1340) · 1 year ago

A trick question! It was Francisco who gave the money speech.

Craig · 1 year ago

Hi - very neat idea. Well done.

One question - you do have a few instances of authors being listed rather than books, and yet having examples of their books listed (e.g. C.S. Lewis/Mere Christianity, Dan Brown/Angels & Demons) - is this intentional? Are they merely groupings of 'all other' books by those authors?

Thanks for the clarification, and the interesting read.

Kevin · 1 year ago

Do you have the listing of the top ten books for each school anywhere?

Whatever · 1 year ago

You are clearly very dumb and quite frankly people like you make me sick with their racist and elistist mentality. I am not even African American and I find it offensive the way you categorize certain books in that African American literary canon.You think you are so witty and smart coming up with you little charts & graphs. Get a life and go get some therapy.

Name * · 1 year ago

Why does the bible show up as both The Holy Bible and The Bible? The Amazon links are to two different versions.

Jess · 1 year ago

I find this information a tad flawed, but a whole lot of fun.

emc3 · 1 year ago

This is why stats are classicly non-predictive.... hilarious but it makes it seems like the more books read correlates negatively w. high SAT's....A person could think they only need read three books to get a good score, of course if you thought that you probably wouldn't be able to get through 100 Years of Solitude

emc3 · 1 year ago

Just read "Atlas shrugged is "smartest philosophy" book. Um...kids need a bit more of a challenge...

wheelnut53 · 1 year ago

you have way too much time on your hands

check your grammar · 1 year ago

it would be nice if the author of this page proofread for errors.

asdf · 1 year ago

Wow. That was terrible. I totally feel dumber after reading that.

brosinski · 1 year ago

I love it! You should do the same thing
with social networking sites. Social
networking sites that make you dumb,
now that would be interesting. I wonder
if facebook is really full of Einsteins or
idiots?

Jason · 1 year ago

FYI: Life of Pi is contemporary fiction.

Joy · 1 year ago

This is hilarious. And truly fascinating, no matter which way you slice it. And people who keep referring to this as a "study" and acting all serious-ass about it have obviously read too many books at the low end of the scale - I wonder if there's a correlation with humor-impairment?

Mike · 1 year ago

The "claremont" network on Facebook is not exclusively for Claremont McKenna College. There are five Claremont Colleges, and they comprise the Claremont University Consortium. They are Claremont McKenna, Pomona, Pitzer, Scripps, and Harvey Mudd. FYI

Eva · 1 year ago

There's nothing shown for SAT scores 1400 & up. Which of the following is the most likely reason?

A Really smart people go to small colleges that don't produce significant sample sizes
B Really smart people like a wide variety of books
C Really smart people don't use Facebook
D All of the above

Soren · 1 year ago

Another factor to take into account is that the "favorite books" doesn't necessarily reflect what each person's favorite books actually are, but rather which books they want to show as their favorites on their Facebook profiles. For instance, I think that students at religious universities are much more likely to list religious books as their favorites than are their equally-religious peers at non-religious universities. So these results are not a perfect reflection of what students at a given college read and enjoy, but are still valuable as an indicator of what students at a given college want their friends to know that they've read and enjoyed. Kind of like the Facebook equivalent of reading through TONY's Book Bracket ( http://www.timeout.com/newyork/file/features/bo... ).

Nita · 1 year ago

Even as a joke I don't think it's funny that you correlate African American literature (like The Color Purple) with stupidity (it's on the lowest end of the scale!)

audie · 1 year ago

After viewing how about starting the site ...internetsitesthatmakeyoustupid.

fdf · 1 year ago

someone should do a study of all the douchebag comments people have left.

Bolobilly · 1 year ago

I have a sense of humor and I love the whole concept. Still, I couldn't help noticing that all the books classified as "African American" were well towards the bottom of the scale. Maybe a little unintentional racial bias in your method, do you suppose? Or do you really think that "African American" books make people dumb?

HumbertLover42 · 1 year ago

FINALLY THE TRUTH IS OUT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

LOLITA ROXORS!!!! ALL YOU MARQUEZ FANS CAN SUCK IT!!!!!

Aldous · 1 year ago

Hey,

Great job on this devastatingly funny study. I've always been looking for confirmation that Farenheit 451 is more lowbrow than 1984 and Brave New World, by far; you've validated my existence, or rather, Facebook has. Just one question: can you comment on the substantively and statistically significant difference between "The Bible" and "The Holy Bible"?

CJR · 1 year ago

Combine the Bible and Holy Bible.

Jordan · 1 year ago

Where's Hardy and Wilde! Rrr.

Casey · 1 year ago

Neat site! I am impressed with the statistical analysis and the description of how the data were collected. The whole thing is a great, fun joke with a lot of interesting sociology in it. Now analyze whether the SAT and ACT are really a measure of intelligence. I'd say Lolita is an erotic classic!

Vincent · 1 year ago

What a wonderful idea! Do you know Edward Tufte's "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information"?


http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/

websitesthatmakeyoudumb · 1 year ago

Since when does Tuesdays with Morrie qualify as philosophy????

Hans · 1 year ago

Psychographic profiling about what kind of people are most likely to list favorite books on their facebook profile might be interesting. I prefer a clean facebook page and don't list any favorites of any kind on my facebook page. I'm glad to see, as a Caltech alum, that I'm not competely ashamed of the books listed by my fellow techers. (I do think however that Atlas Shrugged should be listed under "Erotica", that book is simply porn http://www.theonion.com/content/node/33186 I think that sums it up)

People list their favorites so that people will think more highly of them, and to belong to the community of people who like that book. No doubt there are books that people love, but don't place in their favorites because they are suspicious about what others will think.

jak321 · 1 year ago

I kind of wonder about correlating data about a solitary, often introverted activity through a social, often extroverted activity. It seems like the systems would fight each other and you're going to loose a lot of data at the edges.

MNine Nine Nine Nein · 1 year ago

I'm looking; I don't see any Joyce, Beckett, Pynchon, or Capote on this list. And you have Lolita, but what about Ada? Pretty crappy list.

veronica romm · 1 year ago

I like this list however I am a bit disappointed that I have read the majority of these. I don't feel dumber, but what do I know. This is a great research subject. The facebook application that allowed for this is precisely why people are all worked up about our privacy. This is a great example of how it can help and also be humorous.

Lazlo · 1 year ago

What we have here is an asshole selection bias. The same kind of competitive asshole who would put Atlas Shrugged would also post their SAT score. Opposite for the Bible: the better you understand it, the less likely you are to post your SAT scores.

Mackenzie · 1 year ago

The people DIDN'T post their SAT scores. Did you even read how it was done? Just about everyone on Facebook is in their college's network. He took the school's average SAT score, the most common books listed on that schools' students' profiles, and matched it all up.

Lazlo · 1 year ago

No. I don't read.

Actually, I still hold for the asshole selection bias for Atlas Shrugged, but for other reasons.

Joe · 1 year ago

Rightly so. Atlas Shrugged is the pseudo-philosophical, pretentious ramblings of a bitter woman to make insecure, yet self-aggrandizing young elitists feel they have something above the common man.

Zero X · 1 year ago

"I don't read" correlates with an average SAT score of 968.

Congratulations!

Pwn This · 1 year ago

So the results suggest that of college students with low SAT/ACT scores, the readers of black women's fiction have favorite books that are also the favorites of many other people. Whereas the readers of manga or of Robert Ludlum novels have not coalesced in quite the same way. Should we redress this with a named chair of Bourne Conspiracy Studies?

Pwn This Again · 1 year ago

I should have added that the black women's fiction genre is relatively small in terms of the number of well-known published works. That would explain plenty of the convergence among that fan club. Compare this to the case of detective novels, by American authors of any color: we know they're extremely popular, yet not one detective novel makes this list of Facebook favorites, presumably because there is no shortlist of contemporary detective novels that everyone would regard as the primary ones.

Nick Chancellor · 1 year ago

The only comment I would make regards private versus public schools. I would like to know how it was you treated teh fact that some schools have requirements on the entry SAT scores, thus I would think, skewing the data in favor of some books. Also, did you plot other religious book? I notice the Bible was low, and I have to think (given some of the truly deep philosophy dispersed thruout) that may be related to low SAT score requirement public institutions...just curious. Thx!

Enrique · 1 year ago

This is as scientific as trying to determine penis size by looking at a foot or hand. I think this site should be added to the list of things that make you dumb by looking at.

mrsd · 1 year ago

Funny how a great deal of the 'dumb' books are in Oprah's Book Club......she got people to read 4 sure...but only dumb books...the dumming down of American women 4 sure

H · 1 year ago

Interesting. Here’s my thoughts on what I see as a telling correlation. Interestingly, many of the classics tend to be low-middle SATs. My guess is that attendees of the intellectually superior schools either (a) Think that admitting to liking the classics is somehow bourgeois, and tend toward the books that are commonly associated with “an effort to read”, like 100YoS or Atlas Shrugged, and/or somehow complex theory like Freakonomics which, while indeed covering a complex subject, is what I would consider a 10th Grade read; or (b) Given that the top schools may tend to draw from more progressive prep schools, maybe they never read the classics.

It seems as like the “middle-of-the-road” folks enjoy reading for the sake of reading, and cover a good cross-section of what’s out there. The folks at the top tend to favor those books that people like to brag about reading. I’m surprised Ulysses isn’t there. Moreover, I wonder how many of the people who listed these books as their “favorites” have actually read them. As Jamie Lee Curtis so succinctly put it in A Fish Called Wanda, “Apes do read Nietzsche. They just don’t understand it.”

Finally, let's not forget that the entire population are people on Facebook. Which, in and of itself, means that the entire group here are pretentious handjobs who feel it necessary to flaunt their reading to the world. I'd rather go with the guy that is reading a bestseller and enjoying it, than some pompous ass who who puts Altas Shrugged on his list because he feels he has to.

Jon · 1 year ago

It'd be interesting to allow people to copy and paste their favorite books/music from Facebook and project what their SAT score was based on their tastes.

A simplified algorithm wouldn't be that hard. The input would already be comma-separated, so you'd just have to go through, check to see if each item is in the list, and do an average.

If you don't feel like doing it, with your permission, I'd be delighted to tack a whack at it using your data.

False Prophet · 1 year ago

Correction to The FAQ: The SATs are not used in Canada, nor are the ACTs. Canada doesn't have a standardized college or university admission test (yet).

Tomofseattle · 1 year ago

I am DEEPLY offended—Zane, John Grisham, James Patterson and C. S. Lewis are NOT books!

MarkVestibule · 1 year ago

Black literature without The Song of Solomon? For shame.

rvoltaire · 1 year ago

oh my god... i feel more dumberer for visiting this most stupidest of websites...

your analysis completely does not support your hypothesis... your method does not correlate intelligence with the books they pick as favorites...

get a brain morans...

Maurice · 1 year ago

A few points:
1. A book cannot make somebody dumb. Certain kinds of people will like certain kinds of books and will have even read certain kinds of books, but that doesn't determine how intelligent they are. A proffessor in engineering could love Harry Potter, while a kid in High school will love (and understand) something like Stephenson's Cryptonomicon.
2. You have listed the Bible twice, with two different results even.
3. You've also listed Authors, even though your results are based on specific books and again, the authors themselves are in different positions from their actual books (Lewis, Brown, Shakespeare)
4. And that Eragon is so high on the list is yet another mistake. That book is cliched and written by a wannabe hack.

Anon · 1 year ago

Hey!
"The Bible" and "The Holy Bible" are one and the same book!
Please correct and re-run your analysis.
BTW: Where's the other major religious tomes in this list? The only other one I see is "The Book of Mormon" which is probably BYUs contribution to the list.

dumbAsYourMomma · 1 year ago

For this chart to be even slightly meaningful, only books read before taking the SAT would count as "making you dumb" since clearly anything you've read since taking the SAT has no impact on your score.

gcb · 1 year ago

I have to wonder if there is a strong statistical correlation between people who say "This is bogus" and where their favourite book fell on the charts...

Yes, the title "Booksthatmakeyoudumb" is misleading. But if you actually read the rest of the site, you understand his methodology and intent. The results, while not exactly a steadfast predictor of intelligence, are nonetheless interesting.

Scott · 1 year ago

Wow, I had no idea that Cal Tech students had such a poor grasp of statistical test methodology that they would actually try to pawn this off as valid in any way. The methodological flaws in this approach are so many it would take an entire book to list them all.

I wonder where such a book would fall on this list...

Dana H. · 1 year ago

Jesus, lighten up! This is a fun web site, not a paper in the Journal of Applied Statistics.

Dank Underlord of the Nuggs · 1 year ago

So doesn't this really state that bad taste and low SAT scores are related?

Thanks for making fun of so many people. Made my Friday.

NonEuclidian · 1 year ago

What a load of excrement.

No correlation whatsoever, plus you have to drop it 400 points to include the stupidity of people that use FaceBook in the 1st place.

mike · 1 year ago

There's no University of Arizona. :(

Amy · 1 year ago

For me the main take-home message from this graph was that I'm at one of the edges of the bell curve. I do see potential confounding factors that point back to the question of whether SAT score actually reflects intelligence.

Officer Barbrady · 1 year ago

"Atlas Shrugged" belongs in the science fiction genre. "Galt's Gulch" couldn't have existed without his "motor", which is clearly a perpetual motion machine.

And, despite the number of comments to the contrary, reading "Atlas Shrugged" doesn't make you dumb; but you have to be a masochist to like it.

mordwen · 1 year ago

Very interesting. I note, however, that Go Ask Alice is *not* a children's book. It's a book for teenagers/young adults about drugs. I'm not saying the book needs to be moved from its category but perhaps the category could be clarified into children's/young adult.

Scott Martin · 1 year ago

I would classify The Alchemist as "Religion"

dagi · 1 year ago

I think if there was a book "Abusing statistic in 50 humorous ways", this one should be in top 5 right after the explanation that murders are caused by bread because most murderes have eaten bread in some form at least 24 hours before the actual murder.

Fish · 1 year ago

Guess that means all of Oprah's book club scored more than 1300 on their SATs.

Susan · 1 year ago

Nice idea, but I don't think your results are valid. Perhaps people at those "smarter schools" are listing things titles such as "Atlas Shrugged" to appear more learned?

My husband and I are outliers to your chart as well. We're avid Bible readers with respective SAT scores of 1600 and 1500. My husband went to an ivy league school, but I went to a "dumber" school [with a lower mean SAT score] because I chose to enjoy a free ride.

Fletcher · 1 year ago

Most amusing. I'm curious as how Hamlet apparently makes you dumber than reading Shakespeare as a whole.

rubberfrog · 1 year ago

That list is quite interesting. I'm kind of assuming that the scores represent the prestige in the institutions, as in that people coming out of those universities would have a higher change of becoming with in the sphere of people in power be it influence or otherwise. So in a sense the books of the favorite lists represent somewhat of a direction of where academia would choose to lead to the country. interesting how lolita and freakonomics where on top.

Paul Fletcher · 1 year ago

I need to know where Bukowski and Kafka are. I really do.

Rhonda · 1 year ago

What a dumb way to spend your time. If you read books and they make you feel dumb, that has nothing to do with the book.

Bernard · 1 year ago

I wonder if the upper limit ("the clever end") really reflects books read by the smartest people... or the titles that sounded best to the pretentious people? No, that's not sour grapes...I scored in the clever end and read three of the five books listed there... (pretentious bastard, ain't I?). But seriously, we're talking college students; particularly with those at the more prestigious schools, it seems likely that more than a few would put on their Facebook pages whatever books make them seem most intellectual. Like my friend Debbie who became "Debra" when she went to B------- University (a very prestigious school).

Vince · 1 year ago

Add any book that spouts evolution as fact to the ''Books that really make dumb'' category.

Tod · 1 year ago

Uhh - what? Yeah, I umm, what? I don't umm... huh? I don't get it. ? So, these are the books that you have to read to go to a colledge? Right.? huh> ? yeah. oh... ok... I better go now.

Techer · 1 year ago

I think you should apply for funding to continued this illuminating research....there are thousands of private foundations out there who would be interested......

MJ · 1 year ago

Fascinating study. Don't think I would classify "The Alchemist" as science fiction, though. As a parable, it would probably fall more aptly with philosophy.

Marcos · 1 year ago

You should have labeled "The Bible", the "Book of Mormon", and "Purpose Driven Life" as fiction!

Veronica · 1 year ago

I noticed that although you did this for fun you have taken some statistical evidence rather seriously, i.e. running t-tests etc. I was wondering how you could consider your evidence marginally accurate when you have not taken time into account. If you are compiling lists of books from over four years of students shouldn't you take into account the fact that every year the SAT scores a school accepts increases at different increments? That is I'm a senior now, the SAT required of me was different than the students after me, besides the fact that they took a different SAT than I did. The students before me had an even lower requirement so how do these books accurately correlate to their SAT score?

Jo · 1 year ago

You can learn even from stupid books! How else could u have acomp tween good n bad lit.

dan · 1 year ago

Yes, "Dan Brown" ranks well below either of Dan Brown's books, and this tendency is much more striking on the Music list, namely, ALL of the genres rank below 50th percentile, and "Classical" is especially low, while Beethoven, the only classical composer on the list, is at the very top.

The reason for this is simple. You get higher test scores if you answer exactly the question that was asked. Some people habitually do that, others don't. The question was to list your favorite books/musicians, not your favorite authors/genres.

This just makes me sad to think of all the bright people who could be doing better in school if somewhere along the line someone had convinced them that it is a good idea to answer questions as asked.

Meghan · 1 year ago

Hey, I just wanted to let you know that I think this is an awesome graph. When I found about this I let all my classmates in my library science class know about this, and they thought it was cool too.

mike · 1 year ago

this is an interesting list and all, but i'm kinda pissed off that Moby Dick didn't make the cut in there somewhere - if there's any book i've ever read that made me feel dumber when done, that woulda been it

oh, and The Red Pony

now i'm curious where such literary giants as Douglas Adams, Daniel Quinn, Tom Robbins and P.G. Wodehouse would end up placing here...

prustage · 1 year ago

One of the problems with this list - and with lists of favorite books in general is the effect that non-readers have on the results. For many people who have never read a book since school, their response to "what is your favorite book?" is to quote probably the only book they have knowledge of - namely the one they HAD to read at school. This will usually be a classic. As a result of this, the non-reading population create an unrepresentationally high apparent populaity for the standard classics. It is ironic that the lower the level of literacy of the surveyed population, the more likely it is that Dickens, Shakespeare, Austen etc will figure prominently in the list.

Nate · 11 months ago

Interesting study. I'm glad for your disclaimer about causation vs. correlation.

I was a bit curious as to why you don't have any data from Notre Dame University in South Bend, IN. Are the data not available, or just misplaced?

Bob · 9 months ago

There's no way that Freakonomics makes you smart. At best, that's a spurious correlation. I was so disappointed in that book.

Garret · 9 months ago

What am I doing wrong that I can't find any of the facebook network statistics pages that he used to get the data from? When I click on any of the links to facebook it just takes me to a page that lists the networks I'm in.

Aaron Davies · 9 months ago

Any chance on getting a more recent version? I'd love to see stats with Twilight included. ;-)

Suzie · 9 months ago

Well, I'm Canadian... but still, this information is quite informative!

J R Stewart · 9 months ago

Good work, appreciate

Thanks

Have Fun, Stay In Trouble

shawn · 8 months ago

with enough data you can discover as much "logic" as you desire

ANTIMETAL · 8 months ago

YOU SUCK MY DICK MOTAFUCKA SON OF A BITCH,YA REALLY HAVE SHIT I YA HEAD, I SWEAR TO GOD TAHT IF A SEE U ONE OF THIS DAYS I WILL RAPE YOU IN THE ASS. SO ROUGH IT WILL BLEED FOR THE REST OF YA MOTAFUCKA LIFE

Michelle · 8 months ago

As a graduate student, I would think you would know that the SAT is not an intelligence test! The material it tests obviously favors some books, books that are considered "classic" by "intelligent" white males. During SAT prep in my summer at Yale, it was revealed to me that the test does indeed test the way the test makers believe the average highly intelligent white male would respond. This is not my take on the matter, but what was told to me by several white instructors, both male and female. Thus, I find this and your music study to be, how did you say, "dumb!" They merely confirm what was told to me and support your white supremacists views.
FYI, I found out about you through your music comments. I have a 150 IQ and happen to adore Beyonce! Lil Wayne, I will not defend, nor I will you!

Michelle · 8 months ago

As a graduate student, I would think you would know that the SAT is not an intelligence test! The material it tests obviously favors some books, books that are considered "classic" by "intelligent" white males. During SAT prep in my summer at Yale, it was revealed to me that the test does indeed test the way the test makers believe the average highly intelligent white male would respond. This is not my take on the matter, but what was told to me by several white instructors, both male and female. Thus, I find this and your music study to be, how did you say, "dumb!" They merely confirm what was told to me and support your white supremacists views.
FYI, I found out about you through your music comments. I have a 150 IQ and happen to adore Beyonce! Lil Wayne, I will not defend, nor I will you!

yipee · 7 months ago

Perhaps someone pointed it out, but iteration is such fun ++

Atlas Shrugged is not philosophy. Teology is not philosophy, at least not before and since a certain dark period of time. Furthermore, philosophy isn't a literary genre.

But all in all, amusing.

a person · 7 months ago

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a classic.

Ben · 6 months ago

So, all the African American-authored texts "make you dumb" or are chosen by "dumb" people...
...and Ayn Rand is "philosophy"...
...AND Atlas Shrugged, a poorly-written bit of pro-exploitation propaganda, ranks near A Hundred Years of Solitude, a well-written attack on exploitation...?

What I see here is 1. another demonstration of the racial stratification of higher ed--if not in fact, then at least in what gets taught or read; 2. how confused the students at elite colleges must be.

S · 6 months ago

I hope this is a joke because fiction isn't meant to increase your IQ. It's meant to entertain and tell a story.

rindaja · 4 months ago

....i'm 13 and i've read alot of the books in the middle like pride and prejudice,harry potter,the da vinci code, my sisters keeper, and the coldest winter ever is that a good thing(sorry for seeming stupid)

Juan · 1 year ago

Absolutely brilliant. Thanks!

eom · 1 year ago

"Lolita" as erotica? "Pride and Prejudice" as chick lit?

Who is dumb now? Have you read any of the books you've plotted? That's just embarrassing.

gcb · 1 year ago

And you DID see the part where he says that he didn't classify any of these himself, right? If not, then who's the one being embarassing? To educate you, the classifications were mostly pulled from LibraryThing.

shellweb · 1 year ago

I've read most of these books...in Jr High and High school...not college, and I was not a Lit major in college, or anything close. It would be interesting to see how many of these used to be below the standard of teaching for college level courses.

Amy · 1 year ago

shellweb- what does this have to do with the standard of teaching for college level courses- have you never read something light in your free time?

Dave Whittle · 1 year ago

Very clever methodology - but your logic is deeply flawed. There is no such thing as any book that makes you dumb - and just going to an elite college doesn't make you smart. I was married to a woman with an IQ that was literally off the charts high, and yet she was perhaps the dumbest person I've ever known because she had no idea how to be happy, had been a crack whore, and used her brilliance to manipulate people. The title you've chosen is beyond arrogant - it's stupidly so. Think about it until you overcome your prejudice that would lead you to create a title like that. Other than the causality-challenged title, it's fascinating information. Thanks.

And in case you're wondering, I have an IQ of 165 and The Book of Mormon is my favorite book - because it's either the word of God or it was written by a true genius circa 1830 who makes Einstein look dumb. Any honest scholar who spends more than a few hours studying it comes to the same conclusion. So go ahead and dismiss me for not adhering to your prejudices...

david · 1 year ago

> There is no such thing as any book that makes you dumb.

Haven't read any Ayn Rand yet, eh?

Dave Whittle · 1 year ago

Yup. I've read most of her stuff and it made me smarter by forcing me to identify what to accept and what to reject.

drapeau06 · 1 year ago

ROTF,L! Looking to Ayn Rand as the ultimate authority on philosophy! Thanks for the best laugh I've had all day...

Dave · 1 year ago

Ha ha ha. Jokes on you for making an inference like that, which is materially different than the one I made you're apparently trying to spoof...

Steve · 1 year ago

Exhibit A: Atlas Shrugged

studying psychology in EU · 1 year ago

the highest meaningful iq result in typical real scales is under 150, read the wikipedia page on the tests

Dave Whittle · 1 year ago

ROTF,L! Looking to wikipedia as the ultimate authority on intelligence! Thanks for the best laugh I've had all day...

akbiv · 1 year ago

Is "I married a crack whore" a book yet?

Dave Whittle · 1 year ago

Someday! When she dies. :-)

mink · 1 year ago

LMFAO

Jimmy Havok · 1 year ago

Well, you've provided a couple of interesting data points for a future study. If your experience is typical, it seems that The Book of Mormon fits into the category of books that make you dumb, rather than books that dumb people read.

Dave · 1 year ago

Best post yet - at least it's logically consistent.

However, it wasn't The Book of Mormon that made me that dumb, I'll assure you of that.

Terry · 1 year ago

seriously, dude get laid, I know a pretty smart crack whore who might be interested.

Jess · 1 year ago

"And in case you're wondering, I have an IQ of 165 and The Book of Mormon is my favorite book - because it's either the word of God or it was written by a true genius circa 1830 who makes Einstein look dumb."

I thought excessive pride was still a bad thing in LDS.

Dana H. · 1 year ago

As evidenced by your crack whore wife and your own love of the Book of Mormon, being smart and being rational are two different things.

Bernard · 1 year ago

Whoa... Dave... take five, ok? You're like the critic who blasts Disneyland as being crass entertainment... what did you expect, it's *Disneyland*....

Dr. Conquest · 1 year ago

Visit www.whats4me.com for all your condescending needs!

Dave Whittle · 1 year ago

Thanks for the plug, Dr. Projecting.

Ann · 1 year ago

It's an interesting premise, but aren't SAT/ACT scores collected before the students have read the books in question?

Shouldn't you either be using high schools or test scores taken after college, such as GREs?

Or are you claiming that books are so powerful they can reach through the fourth dimension and make you dumber or smarter before you've read them?

romanpoet · 1 year ago

Yes. I am claiming that books are so powerful they can reach through the fourth dimension.

In seriousness though, GREs are problematic because only a very skewed sample of students go on to graduate school. Furthermore, as far as I know there is no repository of average GRE scores by undergrad institution.

Ann · 1 year ago

Was there not enough data to study it by high school?

It may take longer, but its infinitely more relevant. What you've discovered now is not books that make you dumber, but books that dumb people read.

David Lynch · 1 year ago

Wow, this is amazingly methodologically flawed. Why don't you just come out and say that melanin makes you dumber? That's obviously the conclusion you're grasping towards.

Allison · 1 year ago

Cute, but correlation doesn't prove causation as your catchy title would imply.

a*

Bruce · 1 year ago

Sorry, but Lolita is definitely not "erotica". I'm pretty sure there are cookbooks that are more erotic.

Matt · 1 year ago

I must add my confusion that you categorized "Lolita" as erotica. Have you read the book? It has very little to do with sex, and a lot more to do with the unreliability of memory and a narrator who lies to you.

Rebecca · 1 year ago

Yeah I'm going to back up everyone here who said that Lolita shouldn't have been categorized as Erotica. Not at all.

Rachel · 1 year ago

If you're such a smart guy, Caltech, shouldn't you have read Lolita? I'm going to go ahead and agree with the other posters that it belongs with the other classics, not with the smut.

Rachel · 1 year ago

On second look you do seem to be confused about a lot of the genres. It's extremely telling that you have a separate category for "Dystopian," though, yet you lump together memoir and biography. Oh well.

romanpoet · 1 year ago

Rachel,

Yeah -- in terms of following the trends of the Stacked graph, on second look it looks like Lolita falls better within the Classics category. Fair enough.

Many of these books are hard to classify. For example, obviously The Bell Jar isn't a really biography, but you can only have so many categories and you must do the best you can with them. As for Memoirs, there weren't enough books to give it it's own category, so they had to be crudely lumped into the closest one -- "Biography".

Gabriel · 1 year ago

atlas shrugged, more pertinent today than ever.

gnarbucketz · 1 year ago

why's the bible on there twice?

Dave Whittle · 1 year ago

Because some people listed "The Holy Bible" as their favorite book and others listed "The Bible" as their favorite book. The person doing the study didn't presume to merge the two.

mdrew · 1 year ago

Jane Austen is ChickLit, but Sylvia Plath isn't !?

John · 1 year ago

It would make more sense to classify The Bible as science-fiction than to classify Lolita as erotica. This alone makes me totally discredit your work here.

James D. Newman · 1 year ago

What is this credit of which you speak? Are you on his advising committee?

John Mayer · 1 year ago

What the hell is an "African American" genre? I don't remember seeing that category in my bookstore. Oh wait, did you invent it to show how dumb black people are?

mmmmmmmmno · 1 year ago

Where the fuck is the NON-FICTION SCIENCE LITERATURE?

Le Mango · 1 year ago

Apparently none of the NON-FICTION SCIENCE LITERATURE is anyone's favorite book.

Earl · 1 year ago

It's an interesting idea, but poorly executed- why do different books have different plotted apparent widths? Normally this might indicate something like error or std deviation, if however here, like the vertical axis, it indicates nothing, you might consider plotting them all as points or shapes of the same size, and printing the text at an angle to fit it. Additionally, the vertical axis is way too large for a meaningless dimension- by making smaller plot points, you can also be more precise about your plotted value and fit more in the same space, obviating the need for such an extended y axis. SInce this is some mining and a lot of plot playing, you might want to rethink your plot organization. -regards

Jess · 1 year ago

It is called the *range* of results. If 20 schools have it as a top 10 you'd like to see their range of average SAT scores.

You apparently are not as bright as you think you are if you couldn't figure that one out on your own.

Dana H. · 1 year ago

Actually, it's the standard error in the mean, not the range.

Peter · 1 year ago

Hey, this is a really cool way of showing how culturally disadvantaged black americans end up doing poorly on the SATs. Plus, the name "Booksthatmakeyoudumb" shows just how short sighted and witlessly insulting this project really is. Awesome graphs, dude!

sam · 1 year ago

I'm sorry, but you're a dumbass.. I feel dumber after reading this site!

Anton · 1 year ago

Why are you racist against African Americans?

frank · 1 year ago

lolita erotica? must be americans commenting that...

scsigrrl · 1 year ago

Interesting nuggets! I actually have a BS degree in Literature, Art and English. (At the time I completed my degree, If you did NOT have a year of "foreign" language, despite your other courses, you were awarded a BS, not BA, or a BFA). I completed a 499 independent course (just shy of grad work) on Victorian/Edwardian works. DUH. Because I was lazy. I was assigned to read 2 novels of the genre and write an 30-page paper on comparison/differences between them. I read the books, wrote the paper, in the last 2 weeks. I passed the course.

As a pre-teen, I read Herbert Spencer. Darwin was so pedestrian.

Currently, I read things like" The Medico-Legico Investigation of Death"

I enjoyed "A wrinkle in time" and *some* of the "Dune" series (the original ones, anyway). The others on your list that I read bored the crap out out of me...or I didn't bother with after one chapter, because they were boring/and or useless.

Arco · 1 year ago

Pride and Prejudice is a Classic, not "Chick Lit." Boo!

Zathras · 1 year ago

"The SATs are culturally biased against race and socioeconomic status, and are a pretty poor signal of raw intelligence." That is pure bullshit. People in the ghetto are complete retards compared to the other areas. Your logic ignores cultural diversity, which is much different from one culture to the next.

^classic high schooler · 1 year ago

sounds like you haven't left your little haven in the woods.

C F · 1 year ago

Your logic is perverse and racist. Your study does much more to reveal the race/class biases in test scores and college admissions than to speak to intelligence and the intellectual value of literature. It would be a more interesting study if you would analyze it in that vein, rather than simply using half-assed "science" to reinforce your own elitist and backwards thinking.

James D. Newman · 1 year ago

Sorry to keep saying the same thing over in different ways... when did this become a "study?"

KS · 1 year ago

I find it really disingenuous that "African-American" is a genre but no other racial category is. Why not a category for South American literature for Garcia Marquez, or Russian literature for Dostoevsky and Nabokov? I know, the genres aren't your invention, but I'd appreciate those being put under the genre of literature which they are, be it contemporary fiction or classics or whatever other genre might apply. While black literature does have its own cultural milieu, I think singling it out as a genre gives the appearance of racism (no matter where the books chart on the graph), though I'm sure it's not intended.

PS: I would rather be reading almost any of the low-end books than 'Atlas Shrugged.' Ayn Rand: writerthatmakesyoudumb.

CO149 · 1 year ago

Picking a genre is a judgement call. You can fault Virgil for picking LibraryThing as a source of genres or you can fault LibraryThing themselves for making bad judgements but you can't fault Virgil for adding his own subjective view to the data. Or for adding anyone else's subjective view to the data. One subjective view (LibraryThing) is bad enough :-)

So, photoshop the chart and move Lolita out of erotica and break up the African-American books into some other genres and see what you get. Please post your results and give us the address here.

And maybe someone can tell us why LibraryThing doesn't have "White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Lit" or any other similar category. Subjective observation: African-American social and political orgaizations have for years insisted on the creation of special categories to get themselves more visibility. This is probably a good thing in general, but a real data-skewer on exercises like this one. Perhaps we should revisit the data in 50 years and see if there are any changes.

Thanks!

CK · 1 year ago

a respectful quibble... I think Ayn Rand is a writerthatmakesyouanasshole, rather than dumb. :D

JB · 1 year ago

why quibble? Ayn Rand is a writerthatmakesyouadumbasshole

lolcat · 1 year ago

Why wouldn't you just combine "The Holy Bible" and "The Bible" together...? And since when is "Tuesdays with Morrie" even vaguely like philosophy? Shouldn't you just categorize it under "Shit"?

Trigger · 1 year ago

Dumb? THIS "study" is dumb! SAT's have no bearing on intelligence - I remember struggling and doing mediocre on my SAT's back in the day, and now I'm about to finish a PhD program with distinction. Furthermore, even if this is meant to be "playful" and isn't "establishing correlation" it seems pretty racist to imply that books written and read more frequently by African Americans "make you dumb". I'd say The Color Purple is a WAY better book than Lolita. Actually I've heard it argued by many that if you read it closely Lolita is not only a misogynist book, it's also a fascist book. So if that is "smart" I'd rather be "dumb"!

Ian · 1 year ago

I've read Lolita, and I don't think that it's either misogynist or fascist. The main character is quite misogynist, particularly in his words and actions toward Lolita's mother (although, to be fair, his motivations in that regard are primarily that she is in his way and not so much that she is female). But do remember that these are the acts of a tragically deranged person, not any hero or role model. The author himself described Humbert as "a vain and cruel wretch" and "a hateful person".

It's hard to comment on a possible fascist connection, because I don't see it. But it seems unlikely that Vladimir Nabokov would have written such a book. He was the son of a liberal politician who fled the communist revolution in Russia with his family and ended up in Berlin. As an adult, Nabokov married a Jewish woman and fled from the Nazis to Paris and later to New York. He also had a brother who died in a Nazi concentration camp. It would seem a major contradiction for Nabokov to have written a fascist book after those experiences.

James D. Newman · 1 year ago

Poof! Your dumb. Don't forget to say "Thank you."

thescientist · 1 year ago

"Your dumb."
How entertaining; thank you. You may purchase your T-shirt at bustedtees.com (except it reads, "Your Retarded." Close enough).

LafinJack · 1 year ago

"SAT's"? SAT is what?

Ali · 1 year ago

I love the concept, but the way you've categorized the books is atrocious. "Pride and Prejudice" is a classic, not chick lit. (I won't argue about Little Women being in that category, although I think it's probably better suited to the young adult genre.) I think you should just take out the genres and let the results speak for themselves - or at least rejig them.

Also, there's a huge anomaly because "Atlas Shrugged" really DOES make you dumb and also shouldn't be categorized as simply "philosophy"; maybe "economic philosophy" or "political philosophy" or "philosophical fiction", since it is fiction. At my (high SAT and 90%+ entrance average required) school though, there are a lot of morons who see Ayn Rand as a near religious figure. I would argue that it particularly makes people geared towards high SAT scores and upper-tier colleges dumber.

To summarize: WTF Pride & Prejudice?! IS NOT CHICK LIT. And great idea.

Chickpea · 1 year ago

Rand was a messed up "Queen Christiana" fan who wrote stilted romantic fiction, not philosophy. If you want to see eyes roll, mention her name to anyone who teaches the subject. Her "philosophy" appeals to kids who haven't yet learned that life can't be put in neat little "good" and "bad" boxes. The whole schtick could have been avoided if someone had taught the poor woman set theory before she started writing. I question whether reading her tomes makes anyone dumber, but I'd hate to meet a crowd of her self-centered ego-whiners vying for a prize.

What is mildly surprising to me is that science fiction seems to have dropped off reading lists almost entirely other than the tedious F451 tract. Did Travolta and Lucas damage its reputation that badly?

dc · 1 year ago

In what universe is anything written by Jane Austin not a classic?

Petrus · 1 year ago

Probably the same universe where Jane AustEn lived. Who is this mysterious Austin woman, anyway? I keep seeing her name here. Was she married to that $6M guy in the 70's? Perhaps she's from Texas, or maybe she's a crack whore who reads the chick-lit edition of The Holy Book of Shrugging Mormons Whose Eyes Colored Purple from Watching One Hundred Years of American Idol. I hope she got a great settlement for being so carelessly treated, almost as much as that Nabakov dude. Was he some sort of erotic chef? His buddy Nabokov should have written a pnice story about him, but he couldn't spell. In fact, I think he flunked the SAT because he was a misogynistic fascist with a room temperature IQ and a PhD from "my humor-impaired school isn't mentioned here."

I considered dynamiting this post to preserve its artistic integrity, but explosive allusions are not really my...idiom.

Funny site. Great idea. Priceless comments.

bpo · 1 year ago

Lolita is NOT erotica!

CO149 · 1 year ago

Well, it should have been!!

James D. Newman · 1 year ago

ROFLMAO! But you really have to have read all the comments through in a line to get the full effect.