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A comment on She Gave a Hotel a Mediocre Review. Then Came the Badgering. Parent comment

Re:She Gave a Hotel a Mediocre Review. Then Came the Badgering by Eisenstein on Tuesday December 19, 2023 @02:08AM (#38692744)
You expect that people will rate most things to be 5s based on averages, since if you aggregate your best experiences as 10s and your worst as 0s, then most everything is a 5, right?

But human brains don't work like that. We don't compare a dinner at a restaurant to literally the best dining experience we ever had or a trip to a theme park with the birth our child, so you can't realistically expect people to operate in that way when filling out a review form.

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Re:She Gave a Hotel a Mediocre Review. Then Came the Badgering by fsckboy on Tuesday December 19, 2023 @04:17AM (#38693476)
yes, and that's why figuring out the distribution of your opinions and normalizing them to convolve them with the rest of the raters will extract useful information from your ratings.
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Re:She Gave a Hotel a Mediocre Review. Then Came the Badgering by Eisenstein on Tuesday December 19, 2023 @04:33AM (#38693591)
According to your logic we should be failing half of all school classes because half the kids shouldn't be above average.

Not many people are going to think that a system which weights everything to be distributed that way is useful as a metric for evaluating human experiences.

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