Ratings

sjh wrote "this of course has me wondering where exactly on Michael's scale, using the numeric units 1 to 5, does the point a must read fall?" in reference to my book review yesterday.

This made me laugh. I'm been saying stuff like that for years - it's non-sensical of course, but it's my way of saying a scale of 1 to anything is essentially useless. Using "must read" is a much better indication of value. Are rating scales linear? Most often not - if you looked at the distribution of values of book reviews, say on Amazon, you'd probably find lots of 1's and 5's, but not many 3's.

Tangentally, S asks me to rate the dinners she cooks, so she can know if it was a success with me or not. My rating scheme is hevily weighted towards the top end - you'd never want to tell someone that the food they cooked for you was a 2 out of 10! (but that'd never happen as S is a great chef!)

tech/misc | 04 Mar 2005 | #