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Best Albums of 2003, Scientifically
thdexter writes "Two guys statistically analyzed the best albums of 2003, from some thirty top-10 lists, giving value to how often an album was mentioned by editors and recording its mean place. White Stripes came out on top, with Outkast below. Full results are available on the site."
Looking at their 'scientific' analysis and method, perhaps "most critically acclaimed albums of 2003" would be a better.
Critical acclamation may be a proxy for what the critics think is best, but beauty, including musical beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.
karma karma karma karma karma chameleon, you come and go, you come and go.
Metacritic.com compiles up to 30 reviews for a particular video game / movie / CD and averages the review score. Here are to true top albums of 2003 as rated by nearly everybody: http://metacritic.com/music/bests/2003.shtml
Note that the list does change as more reviews come in. This list actually has good music like The Shins or The Notwist.
While I think the original post makes a good point, it should be noted that other traditionally "scientific" studies also use fairly arbitrary measures.
... all the tools are there to adopt different choices and see how the results change.
Take the case of (new) drug-testing: the statistical tests used are often arbitrary, both in the chosen significance level and the statistic itself. The former is well discussed (why is 5% or 1% necessarily the proper cut-off point for rejecting a null hypothesis) but the latter receives much less attention. Many of these statistics have known distributional properties only under assumptions that are either unverfiable or, worse, not bothered to be verfied by the researcher. I have seen statistics conducted on results from experiments where the underlying phenomena can only take positive values yet the researcher assumes it is governed by a Normal distribution (whose support is the entire real line)
Lastly, I think the researchers on the top 2004 recordings should be commended for following the spirit of science. They clearly explain their objective, the data they used, and their chosen method of analysis. Their work can be replicated from what they publish on their website. This is something that cannot be said of many experiments conducted in the finest university/industry labs by Ph.D. researchers! Truly in the spirit of scientific discovery, if one has problems with their "arbitrary choice"
[ That said, I wish the researchers had spent a bit more time explaining the motivation underlying some of their "arbitrary" choices. ]