Virgil Griffith, a student at Caltech, embarked on a most interesting project to seek whether there’s any connection between the music you enjoy and, uhm, your intellectual abilities. Griffith used aggregated Facebook data about the favorite bands among students of various colleges and plotted them against the average SAT scores at those schools. This allowed him to make a very rough connection between musical taste and intelligence.
The favorite musician of the smartest students was Beethoven, with an average SAT score of 1371. Also on the “smart” end of the scale were Sufjan Stevens (1260), Counting Crows (1247), and Radiohead (1220). At the other end of the spectrum, artists like Lil Wayne (889) dominate the “dumb” side.
Griffith says he came up with the idea to highlight how two separate sets of data can sometimes come together and actually tell a story.
“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,” he added.
Check out the graph below. Prepare to grind your teeth and send hate mail to your friends to ruin their day. By all means, however, try not to take this personal. Correlation does not equal causation.
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