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I am a big fan of the review aggregation site MetaCritic. It is really useful for me to quickly get an idea of what the critics thought of a movie, music, etc by looking at the aggregated score. In the page outlining how those scores are calculated, they explain that they don’t do a simple average but instead aggregate using a top-secret formula that weighs some publications more heavily than others. This makes sense because there’s no reason why anyone should trust anything NYPost says.
But it also suggests a natural extension. Why should I let MetaCritic decide how the reviewers’ opinions should be weighted? I should decide that. I think it would make sense for them to allow users to register and create a profile that specifies the weighing formula. For example, I should be able to decide that I trust NYTimes 3 times more as I trust The Onion, and filter out anything Roger Ebert says. So I enter 3 for NYTimes, 1 for The Onion, and 0 for Chicago Sun. So the formula for calculating MyMetaScore would be [(3 * NYTimesScore) + (1 * OnionScore) + (0 * SunScore) / (3 + 1 + 0)]. Seems simple enough, and if you let the weighing factor to be any rational number, then the formula could also be quite robust.
I’m sure this would take two seconds to program. If MetaCritic makes their data available, I’d do it. But since they guard their trade secrets oh-so-closely, here’s hoping that they take this suggestion.
This past weekend I traveled to Kalamazoo to attend the Western Michigan University Graduate Conference. It was again a great experience. Bell’s Brewery is a cool hangout, I must say. Thanks to Alison Niedbalski, Marcus Adams, and Fritz Allhoff for organizing the conference and Kevin Dewan for letting me stay at his place, as well as Indian cooking tips and very good coffee.
I was really ecstatic to finally meet Shaun Nichols, whose work on imagination has influenced me a lot. In fact, the paper I presented was a defense of his view against a recent argument from our immersive experiences in pretense, and showing how we can adequately explain such experiences without postulating a new cognitive function, namely desire-like imagination. There were very useful comments and references for my talk, which will hopefully help me improve this work. Ali’s comments on my paper especially forced me to make an important clarification and suggested an aspect of the dialectic that I had not previously thought of.
Of the other engaging talks, I found Jonah Schupbach’s experimental results on the conjunction fallacy most interesting. Apparently, there is a recent line of argument that explains why people err with probabilities of conjunctions by appealing to Bayesian confirmation. Jonah conducted some experiments and shows that this may not be what is going on. I thought that was really cool.
Overall, it was a neat experience, if not a bit tiring and anxiety-inducing as well. (I tried to talk through, rather than read, for the first time in public, so that was pretty scary. I think it ended up being alright.) So, I hope the graduate students at WMU decide to do this again next year. If they do, you should of course submit something!
