Senna Jawa
Literotica Guru
- Joined
- May 13, 2002
- Posts
- 3,272
This topic comes back, while the real interesting artistic questions are not discussed. I'd like this thread to be the last one about voting, Hs, and all this silliness which wastes time.
Here I will explain why there can be no perfect way to rate poems.
A rating of a poem means a single real number assigned to it. When ratings of poems A B are respectively rA and rB then:
or in short: ratings are linearly ordered. But poetry is multi-dimensional. You cannot order poems linearly, according to their value. This alone shows the futility of the rating once and forever.
Thus ratings can be still fun, while it's totally idiotic to treat them seriously
In the next posts I'll write more about the Literotica rating story, which is even more silly.
===
Rating is important to the professional chess players. Their invitations to the tournaments, hence their living, may depend on the rating. For a long time some cycles were known of the type:
As you see, it's impossible to assign rating to them which would reflect who beats whom.
What is the result of a rating function? It becomes a goal on its own. It does not measure (not perfectly) how well players play chess, but how well they optimize their rating! Two correlated but different skillls: chess and rating.
For chess it still works pretty well. But for poetry???? Poetic skills and ratings are NOT well correlated. It's well documented. The results of many poetic competitions show that jurors often fail. The Literotica poem ratings and poem value are often in the reverse relation (rating shows some social and manipulative skills, alien to poetry).
Here I will explain why there can be no perfect way to rate poems.
A rating of a poem means a single real number assigned to it. When ratings of poems A B are respectively rA and rB then:
rA < rB or rA = rB or rA > rB
or in short: ratings are linearly ordered. But poetry is multi-dimensional. You cannot order poems linearly, according to their value. This alone shows the futility of the rating once and forever.
Thus ratings can be still fun, while it's totally idiotic to treat them seriously
In the next posts I'll write more about the Literotica rating story, which is even more silly.
===
Rating is important to the professional chess players. Their invitations to the tournaments, hence their living, may depend on the rating. For a long time some cycles were known of the type:
player A beats B, who beats C, who beats D, who in turn beats A
As you see, it's impossible to assign rating to them which would reflect who beats whom.
What is the result of a rating function? It becomes a goal on its own. It does not measure (not perfectly) how well players play chess, but how well they optimize their rating! Two correlated but different skillls: chess and rating.
For chess it still works pretty well. But for poetry???? Poetic skills and ratings are NOT well correlated. It's well documented. The results of many poetic competitions show that jurors often fail. The Literotica poem ratings and poem value are often in the reverse relation (rating shows some social and manipulative skills, alien to poetry).
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