> That it's disrespectful to users to inject unvetted machine scoring into book reviews
Very, very far from being unvetted. This algorithm has been used, unchanged, for the 50 years since Flesch–Kincaid was developed. I've used this metric for my entire life as a rough indicator of difficulty, and it is widely accepted. But it's a limited metric: it has two factors for difficulty that generally rate text as more difficult if it has more words per sentence and more syllables per word. It's a good heuristic, but as with all heuristics, there will be edge cases, and Ulysses is one of them.
As I do with all critiques, I guess I'd ask you to make a better suggestion for Standard Ebooks. Given their resources, and the available alternative of "have a panel of diverse humans read every book and grade its difficulty", your position is dangerously close to letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Is your argument that Standard Ebooks would be a better product if they didn't include reading ease metrics? If so, I respectfully disagree.
> Treat the human user with awed respect; where you can help them, help, and where you don't know, say nothing—don't let loose some talking Python script. The user doesn't know the limitations of your script; the user doesn't know the language you posted on your page isn't authoritative language and is prone to major errors.
I don't think this is fair. Reading ease has flaws, but is widely accepted (although seemingly poorly understood, despite its simplicity). The guy who runs readable.com (DaveChild) responded to a post on Reddit about reading scores a few years back (that thread was also filled with tons of misinformation about how this is some black-box AI algorithm that's making everyone stupid), but his comment was quite well-grounded:
> Readability scores are fairly crude, almost by design, because they were all created at a time when they had to be worked out without computers. But they do give a decent idea of the overall readability of a piece, and that helps you to see if your content is too wordy. They are not, by themselves, an indicator of quality. They are not a substitute for proofreading and editing. But they are a useful tool to have in your arsenal.
This is a balanced, practical opinion. Life is filled with proxy metrics that are flawed, from insurance risk and credit ratings to SAT scores and the ability to do whiteboard-coding. In context, I think Standard Ebooks made exactly the right choice to incorporate some measure of reading ease in their offering, even if it doesn't get it 100% right 100% of the time.