Let’s start this month off with a rant. While surfing earlier today I ran across what must be the single greatest conversation starter I’ve ever seek. Virgil Griffith of CalTech has conducted a study to chart out books as SAT Scores in order to find books that make you dumber for reading them.
According to his website BooksthatMakeYouDumb, Griffith compiled a list of the favorite books of a number of Colleges from Facebook and correlated them with SAT Score using each college’s average school-wide admission score. The results are utterly fascinating.
I’ve already pick fights over the results on servers across three MMORPG’s with players spanning five continents this morning alone. It turns out that the general consensus is, I’m embarrassed to say, that many people credit the relatively high ranking of juvenile fiction, such as Eragon and Harry Potter, as the direct result of the study being conducted in the United States.
At first, I completely denied such allegations, but as time has past, I’ve begun to lend the theory some credit. How else do you account for Eragon being placed neck-in-neck with a cerebral masterpiece like Dune? Only an illiterate or American would list Eragon as one of their top ten favorite books by the time they’re in college. It just reflect the nature immaturity of our nation as a whole. Or does it?
It’s days like this that I wish I had a forum-style comments form because I would love to hear what you have to say on the subject. Does the study give these books their respective due or is it bullocks because it takes the measure of great literature from the standpoint of a culture rapidly descending into a state of mental decay?
Personally, I’ll be hanging this one up for when company comes over, because it’s certain to rile anyone who really treasures literature.
Source: BooksthatMakeYouDumb via SF Signal
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