Books to read to make you stupid.....

(i) Its just interesting..... If you want to hothouse your kids then the way to go is Freakonomics, Ayn Rand, Dostoevsky and....Lolita. Oh, and easy on the porn and religion.....

(ii) This is just one of the many delightful data minings that is being done right now, by organisations fair and foul, on your social media data.

(iii) We can already start to argue about metadata - Brave New World is filed under Sci Fi, but 1984 is under Dystopian genres.

This is a horrible use of data and I'm surprised you would propagate it on a blog like this. Even if the books people read were correlated with their SAT scores there are almost certainly other factors at play here. For example:

1. Look at the average lower SAT scores of African-American literature. The SATs generally do a poor job of measuring the intelligence of African-Americans (who likely comprise a larger segment of the population reading these books).

2. The Bible is read by such a broad audience that it probably correlates weakly to any measure of intelligence compared to a book like Freakonomics would (which is more targeted at the general demographic that does well on the SAT).

A much better measure would have been to put together a graph showing the correlation of various books to SAT scores. That will would not establish causality but at least you could draw some statistically relevant conclusions from it.

The only thing that might be useful about this chart is that it demonstrates how amazingly easy it is to misuse the abundance of data we have available on the net to wrongly draw conclusions or confirm predispositions.

Aw man, a Dan Brown book is on the upper end of the SAT scores? Really? We're in trouble. Start stockpiling water and cans of food NOW