[godelski]

> if they are represented as cardinal somewhere I wouldn't agree with that.

I'd disagree. While in a well defined ordinal metric you can always map to a cardinal system by means of grouping (losing precision), but that well defined condition is a bit of a killer. Certainly in language it is not true and I'm suspicious that one could find well defined metrics with global optima that account for all reasonable variables. This is why cardinal systems are highly effective for voting systems (social choice) as it is accepting that the conditions that one is ranking preference on is not universally agreed upon and thus is baking in a noise term to the model. Not to mention is far more computationally efficient (fuck man, we gotta rebuild the entire self-made graph every time someone enters or leaves the list and an entire recompute when metrics/variables change (and they will)).

> I assume that "I think it would be __difficult__ to claim that Soros is highly self-made" has a missing not somewhere?

Ops, yeah, that is correct. Soros is one of the clearer examples of someone being self made. But we can see the other examples are far less clear and understand how someone my place significantly different weightings on the various variables at play. But I think with the exception for holocaust deniers, people are going to generally agree that "Jew during Nazi occupation" trumps almost anything else.