Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by camillomiller 1065 days ago
> America’s favorite holiday, Thanksgiving, enjoys 82% popularity according to a 2023 survey by Statista. Memorial Day comes in second at 77%.

> The three most popular movies of all time on IMDB are The Shawshank Redemption, The Godfather and The Dark Knight. They have ratings of 9.2, 9.2 and 9.0 respectively.

These examples are so orange and apples it’s baffling the authors even came up with them.

You compare the most advanced personal pocket computer of all time with a patriotic holiday (assuming patriotism as an absolute value) or a movie about inmates escaping a prison. Like, really?!

1 comments

That's not what's being compared. It's the rating those things received compared to the rating of the phone.

I think it's fair to include the ratings of the highest rated [whatever] to compare to the ratings of another [whatever].

The author is saying "even people's favorite things don't get such high ratings."

Better would be to ask everybody who watched Shawshank Redemption: ‘were you satisfied with the movie?’. A 9.2 on imdb is not equal to 92% satisfaction due to granularity in the answer options
Also satisfaction doesn’t mean you’d rate something a 10/10.
It’s a completely different methodology!!! Are they comparable just because they express the final value as a percentage?