Rated O for Out-of-File

Remember my discussion of metrics a few days ago? No? Why not? Don't you read this blog religiously, then memorize its contents for further rumination during the long hours of candlelight vigil you spend hunched over an altar depicting what you imagine my face to look like? Darn.

Okay, well, it's here. You can still ignore it, but you have less reason to do so.

Well, the long and the short of it is that I've discovered yet another metric, and this time it's fun.

Apparently, I included the word "sex" in my blog one too many times for public consumption.

My questions are myriad, but mostly boil down to: "Are you a complete idiot?" Because my blog includes words which are way worse than "sex" (and by including that word multiple times, I might just change my rating). In fact, I've cursed up a blue streak, talked about intimate bodily parts, and lacked support for my troops (how they became mine I'm not certain).

But the other aspect of this metric is that it seems to only measure the front page of the blog, and so I imagine that the rating would change over time if a particularly spicy entry was posted. I don't know for sure, and they don't seem to be interested in making that disclosure. Which is why you can't trust metrics.

While this is all a thinly-veiled attempt to recount an amusing thing, it does get me thinking about movie ratings. They're decided by an industry body, did you know that? No government regulator there. And they're completely relative; I've seen movies get PG ratings for things which nowadays would earn an R, and vice-versa. They're deliberately vague, and the categories are so few as to lump many smaller phenotypes together under an umbrella of "caution."

Why do we pay any attention to movie ratings? They're no more reliable than the local paper as far as content-judgement is concerned. If you're the type of person who doesn't want your children to be exposed to exactly three or more instances of cursing, then I guess you might have a little use for ratings, but like I said, there's no published rule-set for what constitutes what rating as far as instances of cursing are concerned. So you're out of luck.

The metric of movie ratings is a case-study in how to obfuscate metrics: don't tell us how they work, determine them yourself for your own products, make them vague, give them enough categories to make it seem like thought went into their production, but not enough to tell anything substantive to the user... the list could go on and on. I know it's probably possible to discover information about rating rules and so on, but how many average movie-goers will? Or will they just trust the system because it seems right? I bet the latter, myself.

So don't trust metrics, especially metrics derived from computer-parsing of text, because computers are really very bad at figuring out context. If you think this is all overkill for something which was obviously designed as a joke, just consider that more and more schools are relying on computer programs to evaluate students' essays. I know that teachers are overstretched, but come on.