Books and Music That Make You Dumb

Anyone who has ever sought to justify their own musical or literary taste may find some solace in the side project of Virgil Griffith, a 25-year-old Caltech graduate student known for embarrassing numerous corporations with his WikiScanner, a database that tracks the sources of anonymous edits to Wikipedia entries.

With his two Web sites (which have crashed from too much traffic), Booksthatmakeyoudumb.com and Musicthatmakesyoudumb.com, 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.

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