Music that makes you dumb
Source: musicthatmakesyoudumb.virgil.gr
From one brilliant use of the internet (see 2 posts back) to another… a rather fantastic guy called Virgil (a name close to my own heart) at Caltech came up with the frankly genius notion of using Facebook to find out the ten most frequently-mentioned artists for each college, worked out from working out the averages of users’ favourite music sections in their profiles. Armed with a top ten for each college, he then correlates the data with the college’s average SAT score, resulting in a graph that plots musical tastes next to intelligence.
OK, so it’s not the most scientific algorithm ever conceived, and I’m pretty sure the SATs are more of a measure of the ability to learn rather than anything related to intelligence… but it does give remarkably predictable answers. The majority of the sub-950 crowd are subjecting the paltry remainder of their brain cells to ‘musicians’ like Lil’ Wayne, Beyonce, Jay-Z and Akon; those with scores closer to the 1071 average are rocking out to Linkin Park, Nirvana, Green Day and Dave Matthews Band; but the highest scoring average musical tastes feature Ben Folds, Radiohead, Counting Crows and, way out on his own around the 1371 score, Ludwig Van Beethoven. So, apparently at least one of the world’s big questions has been answered: what is the opposite of Beethoven? That’s easy – Lil’ Wayne.
All in all, this makes me feel pretty good about my own musical tastes; but as Virgil himself (the website author, not the epic poet) states in a bold disclaimer:
Yes, I’m aware correlation ≠causation. The results are hilarity incarnate regardless of causality. You can stop sending me email about this distinction. Thanks.
Now, what makes me think that rather a lot of those emails were from disgruntled Lil’ Wayne fans?
Wherever your tastes lie, take a look at the stats on the site. You’ll be entertained, though probably not too surprised.
