Top 20 movies at IMDB

"Chelsea Christenson" <Chelsea.Christenson RemoveThis @nospam.com> wrote in message
news:4016C19B.6020604@nospam.com...
> James Neibaur wrote:
>
> > I have always insisted that women in general are too intelligent to like
> > Sleepless in Seattle and intelligent enough to appreciate The Three
Stooges,
> > despite the contrary stereotype.
>
> Appreciating The Three Stooges requires intelligence?
>

Only if you turn your intelligence off for the duration.


--
Jette Goldie
jette RemoveThis @blueyonder.co.uk
Some people are like Slinkies . . . not really good for anything, but you
still can't help but smile when you see one tumble down the stairs.

Brenda Selwyn
> >The formula for calculating the top 250 films gives a true Bayesian estimate:
> >
> > weighted rank (WR) = (v ÷ (v+m)) × R + (m ÷ (v+m)) × C
> >
> > where:
> > R = average for the movie (mean) = (Rating)
> > v = number of votes for the movie = (votes)
> > m = minimum votes required to be listed in the top 250 (currently 1250)
> > C = the mean vote across the whole report (currently 6.9)
> >
> > note: for this top 250, only votes from regular voters are considered.
>
> I'm sure there's some statistician here who can pull this apart.
>

There is nothing to pull apart. This is merely an unbiased measure of
a movie's ranking against all other movies, given the unequal number
of votes each is likely to get. Of course, it assumes/hypothesizes the
existence of an independent observer, a mean of all men and women.

Here is why it is flawed. Suppose you allowed the population to vote
for the "greatest" physicists or mathematicians who ever lived.
Einstein and Newton would get high marks, but those in the know would
also give Max Planck and Samuel Eilenberg good marks as well. Thus, a
top 10 list from the general populace is meaningless.

If imdb were sensible, they would restrict voting on a top 100 list to
people who saw 80% of the movies in the voting pool. For instance, you
might have a master list of 1000 films that you want to skinny down to
100. To vote for the best 100, you'd have to prove you saw 800 or more
films from the list of 1000. Since gaza would not be able to provide
such credentials, he'd be eliminated from the eligible voters. I think
he is really about 16 or 17 years old, and could not possibly have
seen this many movies, even on an absolute basis. Why, only recently,
he saw 2001: A Space Odyssey. Well, he is not really that unique. You
can bet that most Academy members do not watch all the movies (and
performances)on which the nominations are based. Shoot, it's like
asking someone to watch all the presidential-candidate debates, before
voting. Don't bother me with the details.