Full Attention: best scene from The Social Network

Silicon Valley Man meets Legal Man -- my favorite scene from The Social Network. Yes, Zuckerberg comes off as an ass, but it's what real startup guys think and feel.

You have part of my attention. You have the minimum amount. The rest of my attention is back at the offices of facebook, where my colleagues and I are doing things that no one in this room, including and especially your clients, are intellectually or creatively capable of doing. Did I adequately answer your condescending question?

Hedonic treadmill alert: bad enough that Zuckerberg is the youngest billionaire ever, Sean Parker is also worth nearly a billion!

I notice the movie didn't give out all the details of the Saverin settlement (rumor has it he got about $1 billion as well). See here for more background. Was it just me or did the whole thing seem like an advertisement for Harvard?

Creeping Facebook

Because of my age group my earliest Facebook friends were Silicon Valley types, or other U Oregon professors. Recently, though, all sorts of classmates from high school and college have started to appear. Many of these are people I thought I'd lost track of forever.

The discovery process is classic network-traversing: get a friend request from someone I haven't seen in 10 years, approve the request and then discover several friends of theirs that I want to connect with. It's all happening at a few per day rate at the moment.

Anyone who reads this blog and is on Facebook should friend me -- be sure to tell me how long you've been reading the blog, or how you found it :-)

LinkedIn is ok too !

Books and IQ

Here's some research which correlates books with the IQs of their readers :-) Now you can check quantitatively whether you have highbrow or lowbrow taste! The method attempts to estimate the midpoint IQ of people who list a particular book as their favorite, using Facebook and university SAT data. It craps out at the really highbrow end, due to low statistics; see below.

Many of the books appearing at the center of the distribution are typically assigned as required reading (A Farewell to Arms, On the Road, A Tale of Two Cities, etc.), hence are likely to be mentioned by low-scoring students who don't read very many books. Their ranking here is probably deceptively low.

List of schools ranked by SAT (Caltech #1, of course), with links to 10 most frequent Facebook "favorite books" at that university. Click the image below for a bigger one.

Some notable results:

Harry Potter is the most popular book. The Bible is the second most popular book. At least among college students, Harry Potter is, like the Beatles, indeed bigger than Jesus. Harry Potter still wins even if you add "The Bible" and "The Holy Bible" together.

Although I had no idea at the beginning of this project, I was ever so pleased to discover that Caltech is the smartest school in the country (on average).

The smartest religious book is "The Book of Mormon". The dumbest religious book is "The Holy Bible". I'm sure this pleases the Mormons immensely.

The dumbest philosophy book is "The Five People You Meet In Heaven" and the smartest philosophy book is "Atlas Shrugged".

"Lolita" is the smartest book.

The top/bottom 20 books are remarkably stable. I tried 5 different weighting algorithms and their only variation was in the middle. The dumbest books were always at the bottom, and the smartest books were always on top. This is even further corroborated by the fact that the extremes change remarkably little with increasing m.

Do people with SAT >= 1400 just not read books? Yes, they do read books. Just look at those schools' facebook profiles! However, there often aren't enough schools with high SATs to have reliable statistics for these high-ringing books. So it goes.

Methodology:

Get a friend of yours to download, using Facebook, the ten most frequent "favorite books" at every college (manually -- as not to violate Facebook's ToS).

These ten books are indicative of the overall intellectual milieu of that college.

Download the average SAT/ACT score for students attending every college.

Presto! We have a correlation between books and dumbitude (smartitude too)!

Books <=> Colleges <=> Average SAT Scores

Plot the average SAT of each book, discarding books with too few samples to have a reliable average.

Post the results on your website, pondering what the Internet will think of it.

Yes, I'm aware correlation ≠ causation. The results are hilarity incarnate regardless of causality. You can stop sending me email about this distinction. Thanks.