FAQ for Musicthatmakesyoudumb

Answers to common questions about Musicthatmakesyoudumb

See also: Booksthatmakeyoudumb FAQ

Why did you make Musicthatmakesyoudumb?

Because after I made Booksthatmakeyoudumb people sent me email asking for a music version. However, I do not plan to do any more.

How should I link to your homepage to maximize your Google linkage-love?

Thanks for asking! Link to me with: <a href="http://virgil.gr">Virgil</a>

I really, really, really hate your genre categorizations.

Ignore them then. They are only used for the color-coding on the graphs--they don't affect the results.

What are some notable results?

Well...

There were 3,164 distinct favorite books, but only 1,455 distinct favorite musics. College students have far more diverse tastes in books than they do in music.
With the smartest genre overall, those indie kids are (on average) pretty clever! Science says so!
For generic types of music people list as their "favorite music" they are ranked:
Soca < Gospel < Jazz < Hip Hop < Pop < Oldies < Raggae < Alternative < Classical < R&B < Rap < Rock < Country < Classic Rock < Techno < Indie
Counting Crows is an interesting one near the top of the list. However, when Princeton, Duke, Williams, and Upenn make up ~20% of the weight you'd expect a high average score.
Beethoven wins by a LAND SLIDE of about 120 points. Further, the difference between "Beethoven" and "Classical" is about 400 points.
Unbeknownst to me when beginning this study, the California Institute of Technology actually has the highest average SAT score of any institution in the world. As a Caltech Ph.D. student, this pleased me immensely. MIT, at #6, can suck it.
Tool is a little above average. Pink Floyd enjoys massive popularity across the board, but in the end comes out to only slightly above average.
Most of the musical artists are popular across wide SAT ranges. However, Jars of Clay is not. Their fans cluster quite regularly around the mean. Oddly enough the same goes for Casting Crowns.
My roommate opines: "I don't want to be smart if I have to listen to Counting Crows"
For more, see The Comments

Do people with SAT >1400 just not listen to music?

They do listen to music -- just look at those high-tier schools at The Schools. Averages are being plotted. So even though high-scoring schools are included in this average, the average is pulled down by the less selective schools.

Do you have a press photo?

No I don't. But I do like this one.

Why did you make Booksthatmakeyoudumb and Musicthatmakesyoudumb?

I made both of these projects as a demonstration to the data-mining and mashup community that you can take two data-sets that by themselves are "boring", and combine them into something interesting.
To further my quest be #1 on Google for the search term "virgil".

Do you actually believe that there's a connection between people's intelligence and what the listen to?

It doesn't matter what I believe. The data says there undeniably is a connection between what students report is their favorite music and the selectivity of the school they attend.

Why do you think people have a more diverse taste in books than in music?

I don't think this, I know this. I know this from looking at the raw data. There were 3,164 distinct favorite books, but only 1,455 distinct favorite musics from the same sample size (10 entries x 1,352 schools). The only way that can happen is if schools have more homogeneous music tastes than in books.

Could you do this for international schools?

This could be done internationally, but I don't know of any central repositories for college entrance exam scores other than Collegeboard.com, which lists only the ACT and SAT for colleges in the United States. If Europe/Asia has a website listing the typical entrance exam scores for their schools, you could do the same analysis for those as well. If you do know of a website with entrance exam scores for other parts of the world, do send me an email and we'll see!

Could you do the same study with movies or tv series?

No, I can't do this study with movies or TV series because facebook no longer provides aggregate data about each network.

Why isn't artist _______ in your list?

To be listed in Booksthatmakeyoudumb or Musicthatmakesyoudumb, that book/music must have been listed on the top-10 most popular list for at least 10 schools. You must do this because you're averaging across schools instead of people. A sample size of 10 schools is large enough sample size for the result to be meaningful. Books/Musics with more than 10 schools have a more reliable average and a smaller standard error.

How old are you?

I am 26 years old at the time of this typing (2009-3-12).

Correlation is not causation blah blah.

That's true. However in this case correlation is enough -- the results are provocative (not to mention hilarity incarnate) regardless of whether A causes B or B causes A, or even an unknown C causes A and B.

What is the SAT, ACT?

The SAT and ACT are respectively the most and second most common college entrance exam in the United States. The ACT is scored from 1-36. The SAT was until very recently scored from 400-1600. A few years ago this was changed so that the SAT is now scored from 600-2400, however, most schools on collegeboard.com don't yet list statistics on the new 600-2400 scale. So I used the older 400-1600 scale.

Is the facebook data from each person's profile. Isn't that a selection bias towards people that have their profiles visible to everyone?

No, it is not. I collect the data from Facebook's "Network Stats" page for each college. This makes a selection bias towards people that list their favorite books, but there is no selection bias towards people that have their profile publicly viewable. If you list it on Facebook, Facebook counts it. And if your books make the top 10, it then I can (and do) count it.

Why isn't school _______ in your database?

I tried to include everyone. Really, I did. But if your school isn't listed, it's either because I couldn't find your school's network on Facebook, or Collegeboard didn't have reliable SAT/ACT scores for that school.

What music on that list do you listen to?

My favorite band is Daft Punk, but there's not on that list. My favorite music on the list is Tool, Radiohead, and Metallica.

How is the weight of a "favorite music" calculated?

Every school moves the average SAT of a "favorite music" in its top 10 closer to its own SAT score. How much does a school move the average? It depends on: 1) the # of undergrads at that school (big schools count more than small schools) and 2) where in the top-10 list the book appeared (being #1 at a school is worth more than being #10). If you want to know the full formula, it is:

schoolweight_i = #ugrads * (11-bookrank)/10
totalweight = sum{ schoolweights }

This is a regular linear falloff and is the most reasonable one I could think of, however, I tried 4 other functions including exponential and logarithmic falloff and only the books in the middle changed much at all. The same 20 "favorite music" were always the smartest, and the same 20 "favorite music" were always the dumbest.

How is the Adjusted Average SAT calculated? // What is m ?

The Adjusted Average SAT is a True Bayesian Estimate -- it's the same way IMDB uses to calculate their Top 250 movies. In short, the true Bayesian estimate is the weighted average with an additional term 'm'. Increasing m takes books with a small number of samples (weight) and moves them towards the mean. The justification behind this is that if a book doesn't have very many samples we can't trust its mean as much as books with many samples. However, there's a problem with this -- what value should m be? You never know. IMDB arbitrarily sets m=1300. With Musicthatmakesyoudumb you can set m to be whatever you want and see the new rankings. However, since we are only looking at music favorites with a high sample size (>=10 samples and totalweight >=10,000), the raw weighted average is well representative and leaving m=0 is probably the right thing to do. Not that it matters much though, if you look at the musicdetails page you'll see that the rankings change very little with high m.

Doesn't this violate Facebook's Terms of Service?

No. It doesn't. Facebook prohibits the "use automated scripts to collect information from or otherwise interact with the Service or the Site". A friend of mine manually collected our books data.

The data you scrape from Collegeboard doesn't give you the mean SAT/ACT.

That's true. Technically it's the average of the 1st and 3rd quartile. Unfortunately, there was no data available on the raw means, and the average of the 1st and 3rd quartile isn't going to be the mean or median unless the distribution is roughly symmetric (which may be true for most schools, but probably won't be true for high-scoring schools). However, even in the worst cases the average of the 1st and 3rd quartile is still decently representative of the center of the distribution. And even if it wasn't, there's not much worry about -- the top/bottom of the rankings (which are pretty much all people care about anyway) are exceedingly robust (see above).