So you'd rather sort by variance?
I don't see why (outside of security issues) we can't just define our own sorting functions for a site.
I don't see why (outside of security issues) we can't just define our own sorting functions for a site.
Maximize $, and don't ask stupid questions like "Would you rather sort by variance, average rating, or Wilson score?"
(I'm pretty sure that's what Amazon is busy doing every day. They're positively brilliant at turning data into money.)
This only applies if you are using a sub-par database. While caching computationally heavy operations is not always a good choice (since they will need to get updated when more entries are added to the dataset), chances are you will have orders of magnitudes more lookups than writes and hence it makes sense to create a computed column and index the results (and hence cache them).
That said, asking honestly, are you entirely convinced of the mass appeal of user-defined (or user-selected) sorting algorithms? I find that the current algorithm usually gives fairly sane results.
(Edit: rewrote last sentence for clarity)