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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."
that the use of the word arbitrary twice in the article and the description of the "method" - "Not-Very-Scientific" which was also used as the article title (basically picking stuff at random) sheds a "few" question on this "survey" (don't think I could have used any more quotes). I would rather have another article on SCO or the RIAA.
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
By looking at the list of results, I can tell you right away that by "best album" they don't necessarily mean "best music".
that was used as a part of my technical writing class (under the heading "How to lie with statistics"). "Some people use statistics like a drunk uses a lamp post. For support rather the illumination."
The dogcow says "Moof!"
So when they say "best albums of the year" they actually mean "most admired by critics." Gotcha.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
True that. The whole list seems to be devised of how many times an album was mentioned. Let's put it this way (with no offense to the WS):
"Elephant from the White Stripes was horrible."
"The new White Strips album, Elephant, came in, and man is it bad.
"Elephant seems to be the weak link in the otherwise strong chain of White Stripes albums"
Etc, etc. Even though all of those are bad, sinse it's mentioned so much the list catagorizes it as good.
Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers.
Who listens to the latest music anyways? It all sucks. I gave up on pop in 1995 and have never looked back. Besides, if you think about it, the latest music they play on the radio isn't necessarily good anyways. Fate will decide that. If you listen to classic rock and oldies, you are guaranteed the best music from that era. Instead, people who listen to what's on the radio now are merely guinea pigs for deciding what will become classic music. I have no patience for this and prefer to wait for this all to get sorted out. I guess that's why this list could be useful, but I think I'll wait for it all to get consolidated into a best of 2003 CD for 10 bucks :)
So these guys basically admit just everything is arbitrary with numbers pulled out of their asses, and still manage to get on the front page of /.
Genius. Pure f'ing genius ;^)
They simply quantified references to certain artists/titles within a small batch of source material and then declared it to be a top-10 list. What would be a more accurate description of their list would be "most often referenced albums in music editorials". Trying to quantitatively rate music based upon the analysed opinions of the music press is pointless. Music itself is a very intimate and personal medium, experienced differently by all listeners. Trying to rate a particular albums's ability to reach its listeners requires a much deeper understanding of psychology than is currently possible. That being said, the top-10 list has value in that it's quite good at showing what is en-vogue at present. Atleast, in the opinion of the music media. Then again, my favorite music is sugary JPOP and trance as found in Dance Dance Revolution, so I won't venture an opinion as to the music selected by the list :)
------- "From bored to fanboy in 3.8 asian girls" ----------
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.
It's like the TV commercials for bad movies. Across the whole screen it says "AMAZING". The original quote is "It's amazing this film was actually given a theatrical release."
-B
~jeff
Best album in 2003 was my family photo album.
I am sorry, but the music industry is beyond rescue. When there are songs people don't even bother kazaa-ing for free, you know the industry is dissolving to hell.
Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they hide is vital.
We Build Beautiful Websites
(and appreciate one of them)
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
that scientifically Led Zeppelin 4 is the best album of all time. Therefore the best album every year. But White Stripes are pretty good. Even Jimmy Page likes them.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
Now come on the RIAA put out way more crap than that this year!
True, but these were the cream of the crap.
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
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. ]