So far, seems only Gamine picked up on the first major flaw in this "study" (quotes indicate I am using the term loosely, which I am still loath to do because frankly, even the sarcastic use is giving this garbage too much credit). This correlates music preference to SAT scores, a test that has been shown to be:
1. Almost completely inaccurate for actually assessing a person's intelligence or capacity to learn.
2. Inherently racist in design, representing mostly knowledge of DEWMH (for future reference that acronym stands for Dead European White Males and their Hobbies).
3. A tool used by large universities to quickly trim the amount of applications they actually have to take seriously so they can have a "manageable" number of applicant forms to sift through.
The second major flaw is the author's bias or in this case, blatant fart-sniffing smugness that rears it's ugly head in the first couple of lines. Case in point:
"I've listened to artists who after listening to I thought to myself 'Wow... loving this rubbish says a lot about someone and how much they got going on in their head.' Could one's musical tastes say something about intelligence? How about SAT scores? Well, like any good scientist, I decided to see how well my personal experience matches reality. How might one do this?"
Language says a lot, how you choose to make a statement says a lot about you. Examples here of pure ivory tower pretension include, but are not limited to:
1. "'Wow...loving this rubbish says a lot about someone and how much they got going on in their head.'" - First, "got going on" is grammatically incorrect, "have going on" would be right. Second, music is a love of personal experience and upbringing. Certain music speaks to people, and some takes time to find meaning. To claim that a person's musical preference represents their level of intelligence is akin to saying economic or racial background affects indicates inherent intelligence. This is incorrect, all it indicates is cultural influence, which represents intelligence and value to that culture. If you are not a member of the dominant culture but live in a country where the dominant culture is different from yours then you will seem inferior in ability (cognitively) to the dominant culture. There was a guest recently on "The Colbert Report" who examined this with Celine Dionne (who I personally abhor, but his explanation of musical preference was far more intelligent than mine or this idiot's).
2. "...like any good scientist" - I would like to see some credentials please. That "Junior's First Chemist Kit" does not make you Edward Jenner, moron.
3. "...I decided to see how well my personal experience matches reality" - Oh man, so many things could be said about this. I'll try to be brief, you cannot represent "reality" scientifically unless you prove your theory to be a law. Also, the correlation of music to intelligence is a study in psychology, which any high school psych student could tell you is a fringe school of thought that spends much of it's professional time trying to prove that it is a true science representing experiments resulting in factual and bias-free results. This is a struggle psychology as a practice continues to fight.
I can only conclude that this study is...a terrible joke. The graph looks like it was made by a graduate of the University of Passable Microsoft Paint Skills (UPMPS for short). There is no validity here, I'd trust the Moral Majority to be more objective about the effects of same-sex parents on adopted foster children.
I'm out.
PS - This post written while listening to "Blame It" by Jamie Foxx ft. T-Pain
