Via Crooked Timber. Books that Make You Dumb did some calculations on Facebook and did some cross analysis between most popular "favorite books" by school and the average SAT scores. The creator of the site acknowledges that this is more of a correlation than a causation, but says that nonetheless, "The results are awesome."

Before we get into how smart people are who read One Hundred Years of Solitude and how dumb people who read The Holy Bible are, I'd argue that again, this isn't really a study into how smart people are. SAT scores aren't the ultimate measure of intelligence. They're one arbitrary measure of how well you, um, take the SAT. What's more, those that even take the SAT are skewed toward white, upper and upper middle class people. There are plenty of people (myself included) that didn't take the SAT.

Additionally, the biggest reason people read books is because their friends recommend them. This has more to do with the social structure of how people choose books they read. Some of the schools with lower SAT scores could require different reading than those with high SAT scores. It also has to do with how much reading was emphasized in households where these people grew up. Furthermore, as Jill noted yesterday, leisure reading is on the decline among Americans, especially among the college age group.

Granted, this site seems to be just for fun and more or less a way for certain people to affirm that they're smarter than everyone else, but with the distasteful IQ race analysis lately, I'd rather not see stuff like this be in the limelight.

Matt Zetlin (who I’m glad finally decided to join us on CP) has challenged me by straight up calling me a racist or a conservative without actually calling me one. I didn’t think that by suggesting that blacks weren’t, in fact, dumber than whites that such a thing might be suggested. I think that Matt missed the point I was making. I wasn’t saying that “black culture” made people dumber. I know nothing about Flynn beyond the way he has been injected into the debate, and I have no reason to assume that he’s some kind of magical saint when it comes to the study of intellectualism, but I thought he had some fair points when it came to the IQ test. It’s not unreasonable to assume that the IQ test itself may be flawed. The IQ test is buried in a very specific (white and western) cultural perspective.

I don’t blame hip hop or other “black culture” for anything—in fact, I find it an extremely important part of our culture. But when I was rewatching The Wire season four this weekend, I was reminded of the fact that our entire education system is built around a very specific perspective. Students dozed in a class as they crammed for the No Child Left Behind evaluation as Mr. “PrezBo,” as the kids called him, asked a question involving Dionysus and Polymnus. It’s hard for kids to relate to stories that seem to have nothing to do with them.

Maybe I’m wrong. I’d love to have someone of color weigh in and tell me what they think about all this, but the very fact that we have two white (wannabe) intellectuals arguing over this tells you something in itself.

I was horrified when I recently saw a weird debate on the blogs that was pretty much boiled down to: Black people don't have as high IQ scores as white people. Does that mean they're just dumber? Thank goodness for Amanda Marcotte. Finally, she (and Malcom Gladwell through a recent book review) brought some sanity to this debate.

It’s quite timely now that the racists are trotting out their favorite theory that gets trotted out every few years, smacked down, and then trotted out again once they figure everyone has forgotten the last smackdown, the theory that the IQ gap between whites and blacks must reflect fundamental, immutable, genetic traits, ergo a racist caste system is organic and not the product of oppression.