Don't read these books if you're stupid

Virgil Griffith has used Facebook users' favourite books combined with publicly-available college SATS averages to work out which books make you stupid. Follow the link to see the interesting chart.

Some results that didn't surprise me: the Holy Bible correlating with very low SATS scores and Dan Brown's outpouring of puerile conspiracy theory scoring pretty low too. Freakonomics, Atlas Shrugged and Catch 22 coming out very near the top.   

Some results that did surprise me:  Life of Pi and the Book of Mormon scoring so high.

Some results that disappointed me: that Ender's Game didn't score even higher (if I'd had to guess in advance what reading correlated most closely with the highest SATS I'd have gone with an interest in futurism and game theory).

Some results that seem entertainingly likely to cause contention: Lolita scores higher than anything else at all; the books grouped by the study as "African-American" - The Colour Purple, The Coldest Winter Ever, Their Eyes Were Watching God and others - cluster at the bottom of the scale. I can pretty much write that headline myself - "New study claims paedophiles most intelligent, African-Americans least intelligent book readers"... 

Comments

[Rick]

It strikes me that what Virgil is actually measuring is how popular books are. Everyone reads 'Catcher in the Rye' because it's famous, and since most people are fundamentally stupid it will therefore get a low score.

Intelligent people are usually the first ones on the curve when a new book comes out - Life of Pi, say - and so it will start out rated high, and then as more and more people read it, the average intelligence of its readers will fall.

Still: it's surprising Freakonomics is rated so highly, given I thought everyone had read it.

[Seamus McCauley]

Still: it's surprising Freakonomics is rated so highly, given I thought everyone had read it

Everyone you know has read it, Rick...

[August]

Alternatively, you could call your local library and ask them which books get stolen or damaged most often. This list tracks quite well, probably because you have to be pretty stupid to steal a library book.