Science Sez: Lil Wayne Makes You Stupid, Sufjan and Radiohead Make You Smarthttp://www.pitchforkmedia.com/node/149493
Congrats, nerds.
Virgil Griffith is a 25-year-old grad student at Caltech, and in his spare time he makes elaborate charts comparing people's SAT scores to their tastes in music and books. And you know what that means: Caltech grad students have way too much spare time.
That's the main thing I've learned from Music That Makes You Dumb, Griffith's latest viral info-bomb. According to this Wall Street Journal blog post, Griffith "used aggregated Facebook data about the favorite bands and books among students of various colleges and plotted them against the average SAT scores at those schools, creating a tongue-in-cheek statistical look at taste and intelligence." (He's also done the same for books.)Griffiths' site is currently totally overloaded, but you can view the whole chart here.
For example, the school with the highest average SAT score happened to be Caltech, shockingly enough. And Caltech students' favorite band, as indicated by their Facebook pages, is Radiohead. But since Caltech has fewer students than plenty of larger schools, Radiohead doesn't get too huge of a bump on the big chart.
According to Griffith's chart, the smartest kids' favorite musician, by a ridiculously huge margin, is Beethoven (average SAT score: 1371). Other smart kid favorites: Sufjan Stevens, U2, Radiohead. The dumbest kids' favorite, meanwhile, is Lil Wayne (average score: 889). Other dumb kid favorites: Beyonce, T.I., Ludacris.So: Judging by this chart, I am basically the dumbest person in the world. Hi.
Look. It's science. You can't argue with it. Or, OK: You could point out how these results indicate how hopelessly Eurocentric the SATs actually are, with the whole chart practically cleaved in half between black and white artists. Or you could argue that really smart people don't necessarily brag about their musical tastes on Facebook, or that when they do list musical tastes they usually just try to out-obscure each other by naming individual guitar solos or whatever. But no. Science.
For his part, Griffith doesn't claim that the chart is any sort of definitive IQ-map: As he told The Wall Street Journal, "Their unity is hilarity incarnate. This is to inspire people to think creatively about the data sets that are on the Internet ... Of course there is the whole correlation is not causation thing, but, I mean, duh." Spoken like a true Sufjan fan.
Griffith's research has turned up some truly puzzling results. For one thing, kids with high SAT scores tend to listen to some truly godawful whitebread bullshit: Counting Crows, Guster, Ben Folds, Norah Jones. For another, kids who list "rap" as their favorite music tend to score slightly higher than people who list "hip-hop." People who list genres instead of individual artists usually don't do too well. Zeppelin owns Queen and Bowie. John Legend effortlessly beasts Justin Timberlake. Nirvana beats Journey but not Pink Floyd. None of this makes any sense whatsoever.
Meanwhile, anyone who seriously thinks Yellowcard is better than Nas or Johnny Cash is invited to compare SAT scores with me.
now, where would that put folks like us?? hmm....
