What a bizarre culture we live in. I just spent an hour rating t-shirt designs on Threadless (which, in case you didn't notice, is preventing me from doing anything productive since about two weeks ago), and it occurred to me, everywhere you go, people ask you to rate things in these weird, semi-meaningless scales.
Rate t-shirts, rate songs in your iTunes, rate movies, give (and receive) grades on a scale from F to A, from 0.0 to 4.0.
"Rate your server on a scale from 1 to 5, five being the best service you've ever received"
"Rate your pain on a scale from 1 to 10, ten being the worst pain you've can imagine" (Complete with weird little frowny-face chart)
"Rate your level of volunteer experience from 0 to 5" (on grad school aps, as if you have any idea what 2, 3, or 4 actually signify, 0 being "heartless cad" and 5 being "living in hut in darfur, handing out MREs and AIDS meds")
We evaluate our courses and professors on a sliding scale; everyone knows those little "never, hardly ever, unknown, often, always" scales... How often do you listen to this music? How happy are you with your job? How likely are you to shop online? Haw satisfying was the cheesecake?
You know what? NONE of these sliding scales actually represent the way I feel about ANY of these things. They NEVER do. I'm done with sliding scales.
Seriously, I have the hardest time with these things. When you have a blinding migraine, and all you want is for someone to induce a coma, do you say 8.5 because you can imagine that yes, if you also had a broken leg and a burst apendix, it might be worse? What if I like the idea but the design is shit? How do professors destinguish between an 89 and 90? What's the difference between 2 1/2 stars and 3?
Bullox. That's what I say it is.
Somethings simply don't fit on a sliding scale. Some things have more dimensions than that. On a scale of 0 to 5, the quality of our qualifying system is about a 1, and it's tiresome.
That's it. That's all I have to go on about. This has been one of those funny little epiphanies that don't fit into of the shoeboxes where I keep the things that fascinate me.
On a scale of 1 to 5, (Known in the Psychological world as a "Likert Scale", after some guy named Likert) your Blog, is as usual, off the scale. And just because I rate the cheesecake a ten today, does not mean I will rate it a ten tomorrow. So who cares? You are right, this is a strange culture. If you have not seen "Borat" yet, you must. I rate it a ten on a scale of one to ten; you decide which is best. It was the funniest, tackiest, most horrible movie.
ReplyDeleteI love you,
Me
On a scale of one to ten- I say eleven. I feel like I just met an anarchist who loves jigsaw puzzles.
ReplyDeleteLove,
Dad.
Stop thinking in three dimensions. You make the rest of us look bad.
ReplyDelete