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by dietr1ch 480 days ago
Reviews probably have too much noise. It's not only the food that gets rated and people taking the time to rate a place might be doing so because of a particularly good or bad experience they just had. It's not really a day to day thing.
2 comments
serial_dev 480 days ago
Reviews have a lot of noise, but it feels like it’s still the best source, unless anyone can recommend a better alternative.

Reviews are the worse way to test this hypothesis except all the others.

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dietr1ch 479 days ago
> Reviews have a lot of noise, but it feels like it’s still the best source, unless anyone can recommend a better alternative.

I honestly hate this take, sure, it might be the best (easily available, broad enough thing), but it's not my point, I'm not shutting this down, but giving a remark on what kind of drawbacks should be considered when analysing this, not because it's probably the best you should assume it's perfect.

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crazygringo 480 days ago
Not true -- restaurant reviews have a lot of signal. Generally an average score is quite reliable once you hit 100 or so reviews. Even 50 reviews is a pretty decent signal.
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dietr1ch 477 days ago
Maybe, I've heard statisticians say that 30 samples the mean is pretty much unlikely to change, but that's not the issue here, but that what we are measuring goes beyond food quality and gets skewed towards experiences
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arccy 480 days ago
not always... the data is skewed by non natives, e.g. a high concentration of americans will typically result in junk food scoring too high, high scoring asian food in the west tastes nothing like what it should, for authentic tastes the scores will be quite mid
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crazygringo 480 days ago
> the data is skewed by non natives

That's not skew. That accurately reflects "non-native" clients, who are people too.

> a high concentration of americans will typically result in junk food scoring too high

You do realize that America has the highest number of Michelin-starred restaurants per capita? Way to stereotype

> high scoring asian food in the west tastes nothing like what it should

Are you also going to criticize Japan for not making American BBQ like "what it should"?

You're showing yourself to be extremely prejudiced against all sorts of other nationalities, and against the creative outcomes when nationalities mix. But people have different tastes from whatever you think is "right", and that's OK.

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csrse 479 days ago
>You do realize that America has the highest number of Michelin-starred restaurants per capita? Way to stereotype

How did you find this data? A quick google says that France has about 630 Michelin restaurants and the US about 230 (and obviously fewer people live in France). It looks like Switzerland has the highest per capita with 143 for about 9 million people. The US has a lot of good eating places, but let's stick to facts.

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