Books don't make you dumb

From AJS.COM

Books That Make You Dumb is a site created by Virgil Griffith[1][2] and it makes some very interesting correlations between testing scores of colleges and the books that their students list on Facebook. In the author's words it's "a correlation between books and dumbitude (smartitude too)."

I'd just like to set the record straight: books don't make you dumb. More importantly, books don't make you smart. What books you claim to have read on Facebook is even less interesting (self selecting "for the lose" as they say in video games).

What this data tells us is that people who go to the best colleges are more likely to publicly claim to be readers of classic literature, while those who attend underfunded schools are more likely to claim to be readers of African American literature — just by way of example. Gosh, there's a shocker, given the current state of U.S. college funding.

There are some true gems, but of course the fact that authors and specific books are inter-mingled makes it harder to tease them out. I'd say that that the fact that "Zane" (a pseudonymous author of romance novels) ends up dead-bottom is quite interesting, not in that this is an author (or team thereof) that will make you dumb, but that people who make a point of claiming to have read what is generally considered a non-intellectual genre in public are probably not going to be the people getting into the best schools. Do some women (and even some men) in top-ranked schools read romance novels? Probably, but they're probably much less likely to brag about it because their peer groups would consider that beneath them.

Conclusion

So, take this with a grain of salt, but do peruse it. It's good data, but just a little bit misleading. If you want to know what students from the best colleges (or worst) feel is worth touting in public, then this is the data-set for you!