5 ms·
Books and Music That Make You Dumb
- carterschonwald 18y agoThe website seems to be down, are there any mirrors available? The article title seems to be linkbait, the interviewer explicitly mentions that correlation isn't causation
- chris11 18y agoMirrors Music:http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_j0_WBUT8_cw/R89cubH01_I/AAAAAAAAADg/uS2GmyCaH-o/s1600-h/musicthatmakesyoudumb http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_j0_WBUT8_cw/R89cubH01_I/AAAAAAAAAD... Books:http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_j0_WBUT8_cw/R89cgrH01-I/AAAAAAAAADY/_aUS3tqara8/s1600-h/booksthatmakeyoudumb http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_j0_WBUT8_cw/R89cgrH01-I/AAAAAAAAAD...
- tptacek 18y agoHello, selection bias! There are books that make you dumber than not having reported reading any books at all? How about, there are books and music that correlate with being underprivileged, and being the likely product of a crappy school system?
- tlb 18y agoPresumably, most of the effect is due to socioeconomic correlation and I'm sure Virgil understands that. It's interesting how big the correlation is. I might have expected only a few percent WRT music. I want to see the correlation between Ayn Rand books and number of friends.
- tptacek 18y agoYou think music is a weaker socioeconomic correlate than books? I think it's trickier to name a stronger one. Music is entirely subjective and subject to peer pressure.
- tlb 18y agoI would have expected music to be more weakly correlated with intelligence than books. Smart people can enjoy low-brow music as well as high-brow music. But smart people rarely read low-brow books, and dumb people rarely read high-brow literature. However, I guess he wasn't looking at their whole collection but just the stuff they mentioned on facebook, which reflects their social aspirations. So, for example, I have both Lynyrd Skynyrd and Chopin in my iTunes collection. But people who mention one of those in their facebook profile are probably very different from those who mention the other.
- Radix 18y agoI agree. This quote from him makes it explicit. “Of course there is the whole correlation is not causation thing, but, I mean, duh,”
- mynameishere 18y agoThe "but" seems to imply that he nonetheless thinks that intelligence is effecting taste. I don't know. I've been shocked by some relatively intelligent people with atrocious taste in things, but it wouldn't be a shocker if the idiots really did like "Lil Wayne" because they're idiots. I mean, jesus fucking christ: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owwSHg1fivM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owwSHg1fivM
- scott_s 18y agoI read it in the opposite way: it's so obvious that this is just a correlation and not causation that he feels silly explicitly stating it.
- dublinclontarf 18y agoI just finished Atlas Shrugged(one hour ago) :-D
- lsb 18y agoThe SAT has been accused of bias itself (to get the analogy runner:marathon::oarsman:regatta, you need to know what a regatta is -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT#Bias http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT#Bias ) and this is pretty well-known. That's why it's a small part of an entire applicant's college submission. To correlate against the SAT is an implicit bias.
- tokenadult 18y agoI would like to see the critics of the SAT present actual bivariate plots ("scatterplots") of all the SAT scores found at each self-reported family income band for SAT test-takers. As it is, looking closely at the charts shown in the same link kindly shared above http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT#Bias http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT#Bias suggests a rather disturbing issue about what preparation students bring into the testing room when they take the SAT. The lines on the charts (you can click on them to see them at a more readable size) by ethnic group are from a College Board report that was apparently only issued in that format once, so disturbing are the implications of the differences among test-takers shown there. College Board gathers that information every year, but it's not presented in such convenient visual form in the official College Board reports. The repetition of the "runner:marathon::oarsman:regatta" question item (which is based on a whole question type that has not been on the SAT for years now) as an example is suspect too. When I took the SAT, far inland, I had certainly never seen a regatta, because I had never seen a coast. But I had read about a lot of things I had never seen. (I had never seen a marathon either, but I knew what one was from reading.) In general, why should a college actively prefer a student who scores lower rather than higher on the SAT? But maybe this kind of serious discussion of issues is just what the submitted article was NOT meant to elicit. Some of the comments seem to be missing the evidently humorous point of the man mentioned in the submitted article. He's having fun with ideas that people get very worked up about.
- brandnewlow 18y agoWhen I worked in college admissions we'd get a report from one of the standardized testing companies every year that basically showed that black and hispanic people scored lower than whites and asians across the board, everywhere. You hear about this stuff on the news and assume it's true. But then you see graph after graph after graph displaying the gulf and it's a still a shocker. We'd probably not have standardized tests anymore if the average Joe was able to see at a glance how much worse blacks and hispanics do on them in every part of the country and under every possible set of testing conditions. That said, I'm white, and I also learned about regattas by reading about them in a book somewhere. I was bummed out when they got rid of analogies on the SAT. I studied hard to learn new words so i could do well on that part, which I found difficult.