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The Key to Disseminating Life as Fiction Ratings The reason I started doing ratings was because I wanted to remember, in a quantifiable manner, how I felt about a film. Considering the amount of films I see every year, it becomes almost necessary to be able to recall the degree to which I enjoyed something. However, it is and has never been a perfect science. They're just shortcuts for me and for the reader, and shortcuts are often a risky way to get to the final destination. Update on February 13, 2007: Having now done 120 commentaries, I've finally started understand how I view the ratings. So, here's a simple update that should be more useful than what was here before.
Ratings are skewed due to a survivor bias: I usually only watch films I'm interested in, so a natural distribution occurs but is skewed towards a rating of 3.0. This signifies that I will like most of the films I watch (or else why watch them?), and will undoubtedly differentiated from a mass market distribution that would be attained at a website such a rottentomatoes.com or metacritic.com. For example, with 100 films watched in 2006, the ratings breakdown has been roughly: As as result of the above survivor bias, there is heavy frequency in the middle but with steep drop-offs at the ends. For those interested, the average of the first 100 films from 2006 is 2.85, the median is 3.00 and the standard deviation is 0.81. |
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