Making yourself dumb

Very much in line with my belief that everything in life looks cooler when graphed, which led me to Graph Jam, here are two of the coolest little websites I’ve seen in a long while: Books That Make You Dumb and, for people who don’t like to read, Music That Makes You Dumb. The idea behind these sites is to take publicly available data about colleges’ average SAT scores and graph it against similarly public data about students’ favorite books (and music) at those same colleges.

The results are interesting enough to sap at least a half hour of anyone’s time.

Could you have guessed, for example, that “The Holy Bible” is considerably dumber than “The Bible” and that both of those are dumber than “The Book of Mormon” (!!!!!)? I wouldn’t have – but I was not surprised that all three of those are dumber than “Atlas Shrugged.” I also love that “I dont read” is smarter than a good several books, including “Fahrenheit 451″ and a few in the “African American” category that I’ve never heard of.

On the music side, “Beethoven” is way smarter than “Classical,” which I suppose means that it takes a bit of brains to name even a single classical composer. Also, “Rap” is smarter than “Hip Hop,” but “Oldies” is dumber than “Rock.” It’s pretty cool also to break things down by genre. I am amused at how much smarter “Outkast” is than “Lil Wayne,” and also intrigued by the gradual shift in intelligence by genre from Hip Hop toward Indie.

This is totally fun and I could spend a day on it. Maybe I will some time.