For some reason I believe ordering things has fascinated humans and modelled human reasoning for a long time. Why do we order things? Why the inherent craving for IQs? Why find a sense of achievement in transforming an art like gymnastics into Gold, Silver, Bronze and others? I'll skip all these questions for now and agree that for some reason we are hard wired to see things as an order.
I think we humans have an intrinsic need to know that we understand things, understand them enough to be able to judge them. This need often overshadows better judgment (sic) and we give in to judging anything and everything. You can still define certain objective parameters against which gymnasts can be judged; but how in this world do you judge art? It is one thing to have an opinion and even express it, but to say "X is better than Y, period" is totally not called for. Who is better: Michelangelo or Picasso or Husain? Mozart or Beethoven or Metallica? Yes, I'm sure you've an opinion about these, as do I. But please try not to impose your opinion on me -- I promise to reciprocate.
The question then is how do you ensure such an ordering is fair? Can we order the orderings based on some criteria like fairness?
I do not have an answer, I do have a couple of questions though. Why should we be fair? What is fairness in this context?
I hope everybody is familiar with the rules of the game of tennis. I propose a mild variation to those. If in a set both the players end up at 6-6 (6 games each) then instead of playing a tie breaker call the set a tied set and break it only when after five sets none of the players is leading. Now both my rules and the rules of tennis ensure a fair ordering (ATP points can be computed the same way) but which is better?
The variation you propose is quite interesting! But I think which is better is quite subjective -- depending to a large extent on the playing style of the players.
The other slightly more relevant case is that of search engines. Yahoo! or Google which is better? And tomorrow there is a new search engine which claims its results are better than both. On what basis can you believe?
We need to start by defining what better means. If better means that the user's need is fulfilled by a higher ranked result, for example, there exists a simple statistical method to go about the ranking; this could probably be objective to the extent possible.
Side note: This has been a question which is not new to OSL I'm just echoing back some ideas discussed in the past. It is important for us to consolidate our discussion so that we can look back upon those ideas.
For those not familiar with it, OSL stands for
Open Systems Lab at IIIT Bangalore. It is run by
sri and a lot of us on this forum have been there or still are.
http://osl.iiitb.ac.in/Another side note: One of my friends was great at ordering the world around him, he could even order his colleagues! I hope he shares his secrets here.
Do I know this friend?
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