Caltech student Virgil Griffith downloaded, using facebook, the ten most popular books in each college, and correlated it with the average SAT score of the students in that college. The results are funny and interesting. Of course, it is not a scientific survey and not meant to be taken too seriously.
Reading the Bible makes you dumb
February 4, 2008 by Abhishek
4 Responses to “Reading the Bible makes you dumb”
Leave a Reply
-
Calender
-
Recent Comments
Robin on Nudge to aim 
Quirky Indian on Nudge to aim Howard on Awaiting Obama’s accepta… Ban all stem cell re… on The dangers of Obama’s n… Awaiting Obama… on Tomorrow is make-or-break for… Categories
- belles-lettres (4)
- education (11)
- imported-from-old-blog (15)
- India (47)
- libertarianism (128)
- math (9)
- miscellaneous (43)
- news and links (99)
- on certain arts, writings and performances (22)
- people (59)
- personal (28)
- photos (3)
- politics (106)
- quote for the week (28)
- sci, tech and gizmos (22)
- sports (14)
- travel and getaways (11)
- uncategorized musings (22)
-
Selected longer posts
Archives
- August 2008 (56)
- July 2008 (54)
- June 2008 (56)
- May 2008 (48)
- April 2008 (54)
- March 2008 (32)
- February 2008 (25)
- January 2008 (15)
- December 2007 (13)
- November 2007 (6)
- October 2007 (11)
- September 2007 (11)
- September 2005 (1)
- August 2005 (2)
- July 2005 (6)
- February 2005 (2)
- November 2004 (1)
- October 2004 (1)
- September 2004 (2)
Tags
anti-discrimination blog censorship civil liberties clinton death democratic nomination discrimination drugs economics election 2008 freedom freedom of expression freedom of speech free speech funny government health humor ideology India laws libertarian liberty life mccain music nanny-state obama offended feelings paternalism people personal political correctness polls public health quote reason religion science sex speech video volokh war on drugs-
Friends' blogs
-
Some nice links
-
Meta
-
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
You are free to copy, reproduce, distribute, transmit or adapt anything written by me on these pages, provided you give proper attribution.
-
Disclaimer
-
Spam Blocked
-
Funny. Of course, there are other, better explanations for the results. Smart people often feel driven to read the “hard” stuff. Only smart people care about the more difficult ideas. Because of course we all know that no book makes you dumb or smart. It just adds to the information you have. I’ve read Lord of the Rings, yet I tested in the 99.5 percentile, so no correlation at all.
As for reading the Bible, I suspect that the reason more people at lower levels are reading it is that smart people tend to rely on their intelligence, even when they’re in situations that clearly are beyond their own resources, where as people who aren’t quite as smart tend to admit earlier that they need outside help — for example, God. I know that, as a high-IQ person, it’s a struggle for me at times to hook into the spiritual dimension of life, and yet I realize that I need to, because some stuff just isn’t intellectual.
And given that almost all literature written in English, including many movies, alludes at some point to the Bible, I’d say that, rather than making you dumb, reading the Bible makes you smarter than just about anyone else. As E. D. Hirsch, author of the Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, asserted, “No one in the English-speaking world can be considered literate without a basic knowledge of the Bible.”
A few comments to waltzingaustralia-
My choice of title for my post, just as Virgil’s choice of his website header, is merely meant to be provocative and not intended to be an absolute statement of fact.
Of course there are better explanations for the results. It is by no means a scientific study. For instance, the low placing of ‘Color Purple’ has a lot to do with the economic status of African-Americans. Nevertheless, it is amusing, and interesting.
The chart isnt about who reads what books but who rates these books as their favourite. Their is a big difference between having read the Bible and considering it your favourite book. Actually I am not too surprised that there is a correlation between students with low SAT scores and those who tend to rate the Bible as their favourite piece of literature.
Sorry I didn’t make it clear that I understood all that. That’s why I started with “Funny.” I did think it was amusing and interesting. And you’ll note that I didn’t disagree with you as to favoring the Bible correlating to lower SAT scores. So I’m not entirely certain what you’re disagreeing with.
And even if it were scientific (which I agree with you it’s not), it still wouldn’t preclude their being aberrations.
So we have not disagreed.
Conceded :)