Books that make you stupid?
219 words(I hesitate to use the word ‘dumb’ to mean ’stupid’, since I am an English speaker).
BooksThatMakeYouDumb is someone’s attempt to correlate favourite books (as claimed on Facebook) with academic success (as measured by average SAT scores at American schools). Not that I really know what a SAT is, nor exactly what is meant by ’school’ in America.
They are interesting results, and it’s a fun bit of data gathering. But crikey, it’s going to be easy for some people to leap to conclusions, especially when the title of the site (probably knowingly) makes one such oversimplification.
The FAQ addresses the question ‘Correlation is not causation blah blah’, with a pat answer:
“That’s true. However in this case it’s an awesome result either way, regardless of whether A causes B or B causes A.”
… and this misses the point entirely. Let’s hope this bloke’s not aiming to become an economist any time soon. The very simplest alternative is that A and B are both caused by an unmeasured factor C. I invite you to speculate about this for yourself. Pick a book and reason it out. The Color Purple is a good one to start with.
I’m also going to pick on the fact that they’ve classified Lolita as erotica. Bloody hell, has he read it? If that’s erotica, it’s the worst erotica ever.
January 25th, 2008 at 20:21
The SAT is used in America as a college entrance examination. It was an acronym for “Scholastic Aptitude Test” for years, but (like many “intelligence” tests) was scientifically shown to have zero correlation to scholastic aptitude. Colleges continue to use it because it’s the status quo, and they have no better ideas. A “School” in this context (as far as I can tell) is an American college that has a Facebook network. All of the ones that I saw on the list are 4 year colleges, but it seems feasible that a 2 year college could be included.
While it’s an interesting data mining exercise, I wholeheartedly agree that it produced a largely meaningless set of results. The SAT tests your ability to take a standardized test, and is only a good predictor insofar as standardized test taking is concerned. Since the data are grouped by school, average SAT scores are used; this introduces an incredible amount of imprecision. Without considering the standard deviation (or a higher granularity) of scores from a given school (for example, my SAT score was nearly 350 points higher than the average at my school), it’s silly to attempt correlation. It’s also silly to take the top 10 books from a given school, since this method effectively limits us to popular fiction and required high school texts.
This worst assumption is that enjoying certain books and being smart have a causal relationship. This doesn’t take into account the fact that some books impart knowledge to the reader without the reader’s enjoyment. It begs the question of intelligence and artistic taste, rather than investigating it properly.
The actual data samples are so opaque (it’s like comparing averages to averages) that the end result is slightly humorous, but ultimately meaningless. I’d be loathe to put my name on a study like this.