Virgil Griffith has put together an interesting data correlation: books and SAT scores. His goal: find out which books make you dumber.

Check out his website to see the results:

Booksthatmakeyoudumb

Ever read a book (required or otherwise) and upon finishing it thought to yourself, “Wow. That was terrible. I totally feel dumber after reading that.”? I know I have. Well, like any good scientist, I decided to see how well my personal experience matches reality.

With all of the data floating around in webspace, projects like this are becoming more and more common. I’m not sure I would want to draw too many conclusions from this, but its fun to look at and definitely not something I would completely discard. More interesting to me, at least, are the methods and means by which the information was gathered and correlated.