It’s like for everything else, there’s good and bad science, good and bad maths, and I can’t say enough bad things about this new graph published here and reported by Consequence of Sound and probably other websites…. Virgil Griffith took his data from Facebook, he downloaded the most frequent favorite music at every college ‘via that college’s Network Statistics page on Facebook’, then downloaded the average SAT/ACT score for students at every college, and then, plotted the data with this fantastic and perfectly fantasized correlation: your SAT score versus your musical taste!! And as much as I want to like the results — Beyonce Lil Wayne, Jay Z and most hip hop score badly while music I listen to, like Radiohead, The Shins, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Beck score pretty high – this is a very sad graph, so flawed I don’t even know how to start with this thing!
First of all, why did he include genres and artists? This doesn’t make any sense as ‘Beethoven’ (curiously put in the Misc category) corresponds to the highest SAT score while ‘Classical’ corresponds to a low score? The same thing happens for ‘Alternative’, low as a genre, while some of his members (Radiohead and Beck) score high! The least I can say is that it looks very inconsistent…
But here is the most important part: SAT scores are highly suspicious and controversial as a measure of intelligence, many studies have demonstrated that there is a significant gap between black and white populations that sit for the SAT, for so many reasons, education and environment being the main ones…SAT scores are so bias for minorities that, it is ridiculous to consider this exam, conceived by rich white males, as an intelligence test… More than everything else there is a strong correlation between SAT scores and income, that’s why it is sad to see hip hop, gospel, R&B, rap (obviously music types which have a large public of minorities) sitting at the bottom of the SAT scores…
But the worst oddity of this graph may well be the Jazz location which scores very badly! Isn’t it intellectuals’ favorite music? And to finish with that once for all, I have met very intelligent people with horrible music tastes, it happens!