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Comment by dudul | Hacker News Reader

What really bothered me in this story is that the crazy used a 1-10 scale. Everybody knows the best scale is 1-5.

The problem with 1-10 is that the middle of the scale is 5.5, so you can’t give a neutral rating with a whole number.

But 1-5 is often insufficient resolution (unless you do decimals, in which case it’s too much resolution), so the best scale is 0-10.

For rating media I (internally) do 1-10 with 5 in the middle!

1 is worst, 5 is neutral, 9 is best and 10 is "personal favourite". This goes really well with the fact that not everything I really like is actually great so I can acknowledge that by giving it a spot to the side in its own category :)

0-10 is exactly like that, but with the matching acknowledgement that sometimes a thing just deserves no points and scoring it a 1 would be too generous.

If there's 100+ dimensions, quantizing to ~2.3 bits might be fine.

As an avid reader of nineties gaming magazines the real life scale is 0-100 with middle somewhere above 75.

Or as a Google Maps user, the scale is 1-5 with the middle being 4.5.

it's good not to be able to give a neuteral rating, if there is a center lazy raters skew neutral.

Women are faced with being rated as sex objects usually out of 10. It is in the language "she's a 10" there are films [1]. Likely this is the point.

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078721/?ref_=ttfc_fc_tt

She used 0-10. Source passage:

> It’s all just numbers. It’s all just 1 to 10 (besides the 0 I got for math).

(Your attention to detail: 2.0. Protagonist's math rating, at that point, was clearly justified too.)

Is it really 0-10 if you also use decimals? The protagonist got a 6.5 for love-making.

At that point you might as well use a 0-1 scale (0.65), or a percentage (65%).

It's a precision illusion. Obviously there's no actual a 100 (or, technically, 101) levels of lovemaking skill that the rater is able to recognize and meaningfully distinguish. However, having a 6.5 seems like it was well considered and thought of in detail while just 6 looks like sloppy "barely better than absolutely mediocre". So, the person using 6.5 is pretending (unwarrantedly) to be very knowledgeable and precise in these evaluations. This is, btw, a very realistic part - a lot of people do this in real-life contexts, much different from rating girlfriends.

1-10? I was under the impression that when people use 10-based scale, it’s 0-10.

One to ten is more typical? For example, I don't think I've ever heard someone say "on a scale of zero to ten, how would you rank X" but "on a scale of one to ten" feels normal and common.

1..10==0..9

You also think the imperial system is the best I guess?

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