Not as ugly as you look

Kaiser asks the interesting question: How do you measure what restaurants are “overrated”? You can’t just ask people, right? There’s some sort of social element here, that “overrated” implies that someone’s out there doing the rating.

7 thoughts on “Not as ugly as you look

  1. Some years ago an Indian restaurant opened in town and for a while it was always packed. It was still popular a year later, although the buzz had died down. A friend said “You know, I’ve been there several times, and it’s OK but it’s nothing special. I’m not sure why people talk about it so much.” I said “I dunno, I’ve never been,” and he said “YOU”VE NEVER BEEN??!! You should go!”

  2. There is no true meaningful way to circumvent philosophical conflicts; close examination of any so called “methods of resolution/reonciliation” will inevitably throw up their fallacies and ironies. Peace.

  3. One comment at Kaiser’s blog is worth highlighting because it involves shrinkage estimation in the context of a fan site’s rating of anime shows. The fan site present the shrinkage estimate as the site rating; if there are few user ratings but they are consistently higher than the grand mean of show ratings, then the difference between the site rating and and the show’s user rating mean will be large. The site labels such shows as “underrated”. I think this is a canny move because I expect it will get people watching and rating “underrated” shows, thereby clarifying whether they were genuinely underrated or if the “underrated” label was just due to chance or a small idiosyncratic fan base.

  4. If you think defining underrated is hard, how about overrated? A lot of the attempted definitions of underrated seem to essentially talk about the counterfactual: if people were more aware of this restaurant they would enjoy it. But there is no such sensible counterfactual for overrated at least not on an absolute scale.

    Perhaps we could have something like people would not rate this restaurant as highly if they were aware of the underrated restuarants.

  5. If you have acccess to a big database of ratings, the way Yelp does, you could try looking for restaurants which were rated more highly by people who gave few ratings than by people who gave a lot of ratings. Here “rating a lot of restaurants” is supposed to be a proxy for “has tried a lot of restaurants” and even “has more reliable views about restaurants.”

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