[ExI] sat scores and musical tastes

spike at rainier66.com spike at rainier66.com
Sun Jun 7 15:51:36 UTC 2020


 

 

From: spike at rainier66.com <spike at rainier66.com> 



 

 

> On Behalf Of John Clark via extropy-chat
Sent: Sunday, June 7, 2020 8:07 AM
Subject: Re: [ExI] sat scores and musical tastes

 

>…Where is Weird Al Yankovic on this chart? He should be somewhere to the right of Beethoven but I don't see him.

John K Clark

 

 

I am thinking of that chart again, and how to use it.  We don’t need to be told how smart we are, since we already have our SAT scores (or ACT or equivalent.)  We want to use the chart to figure out who would be a genre of music we might like, as I did with Sufjan over on the right side of the chart.

 

We could expand that concept and use it to sell music to people who usually aren’t in the market.

 

Rather than correlate music genres with SAT scores, we could correlate it with taste in cars, political attitudes (that one might be really interesting) favorite sports, personal wealth, favorite foods, and so forth, but really what we need is some way to reduce each of these things to a number.  SAT scores do that for us, but how would we reduce any of this other stuff to a single number so we can graph that metric on the horizontal axis?  

 

Even SAT score is multidimensional (more than just the two main ones, math and English skill) so it could be we are mostly fooling ourselves if we pretend that can be effectively reduced to one number.  How can we express favorite sports in one number?  Of those categories I named, personal wealth might be the one which most readily reduces to one number.

 

This looks like a terrific sociology experiment: get a bunch of undergrads to choose a factor, try to correlate music groups with it.  Then we create a multi-dimensional matrix with their data, use our mathematical tricks we enginerds worked so hard to master, let proles find themselves in that multi-space by entering in the computer their favorite sports, their favorite cars, personal wealth, political preferences and so on, then calculate music groups they might like.

 

In the meantime… we now have in our extremely valuable database… some extremely valuable data.  We know their favorite cars and how much money they have.  We have their email @.  We send the richest proles focused advertising for their favorite cars, we make a cubic buttload.  Or rather I do, but I will say nice things about you for giving me the idea to start with.  Thanks BillW!

 

spike

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