Rate and Rank

Good and bad days make no news and are soon forgotten. But the best or worst moments in you life are memorable, worth mentioning and indeed ranking. The same applies to books and DVDs, restaurants and hotels, sofas and lamps, jokes and quotes.

We love ranking because it’s fun and because it takes away the unpleasant doubt that accompanies every daily choice. It’s a mental-energy short-cut that can make you laugh (“what’s the most embarrassing thing Bush ever said?”) or get you through the roundabouts of life more smoothly. “This is the best fridge you can buy for that price” doesn’t get any straighter (http://www.pricerunner.co.uk/).

Ranking used to be done with friends in a pub or other social occasions, but the Web is clearly the perfect arena for the ranking aficionados. They can go global, harness whole databases and never miss a niche of interest. Web ranking has transformed the word of mouth to a word of mouse. And with the ease and transparency of the web, there emerges a sociological picture of a humanity incredibly colourful and variegated, with plenty of time to waste in pursuit of the most extraordinary interests in the ultimate ranking experience.

Indeed, there are so many sites devoted to this sport that you need metasearch engines just to keep track of them (try http://www.ratingparadise.com/). Then courtesy of RaitingParadise, for example, one may discover that the top-ranked, ranking site is called “My Orgasm Face” (porn-free, but don’t ask further questions).

Of course, ranking requires rating, and it is unclear whether rating may be done better by the heavy fists of groups and popular votes or the dexterous fingers of an expert and authoritative evaluations. Which philosophy department should you choose? The ratings, rankings and hence answers change, sometimes substantially, depending on whom you ask, Leiter or the RAE (http://crookedtimber.org/).

When it comes to rating, we often trust the masses and hardly swim against the current. It is hard to tell when we should consult the experts. Throwing people’s choices at a problem may be wasteful, and yet, these days, most websites (Amazon, Download, Expedia, Flickr and so forth) offer a chance to their users to express and compare their ratings. It’s a good practice, with a certain feeling of interaction in it, and the tips can be very useful. I chanced to trust Expedia and got a fantastic hotel in San Francisco for a very reasonable price. Likewise, if you like beer, for example, http://www.ratebeer.com/ might be an interesting site to visit.

The received feedback, in all these and similar cases, is supposed to be informative, to make a telling if small difference. These ratings are bits of information that come from people who have already been through the experience, bought the object, or used the service, sleeping in that hotel or renting from such and such car service. Best scenario, contributors wish to share their findings, pass on their experience, save your skin or wallet. So you may be inclined to trust more users’ rather than experts’ evaluations on Download, for example, because you know that the former are the ones who, like you, will live with the software once it is installed.

But things change when rating is anonymous and concerns other human beings. Then rate-and-rank becomes a sub-genre of FPS (first-person shooter) games, only less graphically sophisticated. If you check http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ you will find (more than six million) merciless vendettas and wide-eyed eulogies, by students who anonymously rate (more than half a million) professors of American, Canadian, British, New Zealand, and Australian institutions. It can be fun to read the embarrassing comments about that brilliant colleague of yours. But this is it, and the utility of the exercise is close to zero.

Not the danger though. How long since an academic committee will be silly enough to take these ratings and rankings seriously, or candidates so desperate to think they might make a difference in their applications? Better check your scores and put in a few good marks on your behalf, just in case. The beauty of RateMyProfessor is that they couldn’t care less about who is rating you. It’s a game anyway.