The other day I came across a blog post ranking academic fields by hotness. Important data for sure. But something about it was gnawing on me for a while, some connection I wasn’t quite making.

And then it hit me. The rankings looked an awful lot like another list I’d once seen of academic fields ranked by intelligence. Only, you know, upside-down.

Sure enough, when I ran the correlation among the fields that appear on both lists, it came out at r = -.45.

I don’t know what this means, but it seems important. Maybe a mathematician or computer scientist can help me understand it.