Sunday, April 23, 2006

When All Movies Are Smashes

Garrison Keillor will always be famous for his "all children are above average" line. But as I was looking at our Netflix account the other day I was struck by the ratings--we liked everything we saw (at least 3 stars, some 4 and a few 5)!

Why's that? In part because we're generous graders but mostly because of the way we choose movies to watch--we don't waste our money if there's a good chance we won't like them. What that means is that instead of having a 5 star range in our rating system, we've only got 3. I think it also means that the Netflix ratings carry less information--our "3" doesn't really tell you that much, our chosing the movie in the first place is the most informative data Netflix has on our preferences.

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