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Comment by nkozyra | Hacker News Reader

I feel like there's an assumption that this data is erroneous for this reason - I think that any reason in which a person gives a negative rating toward a film is valid, be it politically motivated or otherwise.

FiveThirtyEight has had a rough start so far so I may be more inclined to seek more nuance than I normally would as they've tended to be extraordinarily simplistic (Silver himself notwithstanding) to date.

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The problem not that the opinion of the members of Gonojagoron Moncho are invalid, but that they are not representative of general opinion on the film. The online activism has skewed the films ratings to a point that, unless you are a member of Gonojagoron Moncho, it becomes a less that useful metric. This is a case of a motivated minority overwhelming an apathetic majority. Think of the many times Steven Colbert had his fans write in his name on online polls such as naming a bridge in an eastern european country or a NASA space mission.

But most of the people who has given the rating have not seen the movie. They are giving the lowest rating just to put their point forward. This is not a documentary to put the truth on the screen (I am not sure how much of the movie is fiction).

I think the author calls data erroneous as the rating does not represent the actual quality of the movie - a thing which IMDB wants to achieve. He doesn't call it erroneous for actual errors in the process of collecting ratings.

I think, as you said, you are just inclined to seek more nuances.

> But most of the people who has given the rating have not seen the movie.

In the (paraphrased) words of Andrew Gelman:

"I can't knock this guy for slamming my book without reading it. For example, I have never read the autobiography of Uri Geller, but I'm confident it's full of crap."

If you don't think Gonojagoron Moncho is lying to these people about the point they're taking offense over, how is it relevant that they haven't seen the movie?

> But most of the people who has given the rating have not seen the movie

I'm sure it's possible, but no rating represents the "actual quality of the movie." A rating is based on a subjective amalgam measurement that encompasses a myriad biases, even when watched and with total scrutiny.

While this is true, I would argue that there is a social expectation that an IMDB review is written by someone who has seen the movie. Especially, it is expected to be true on average with the usual "few bad apples" thrown in the mix. In this case, this expectation does not hold, and in this sense these reviews are truly anomalous (they are produced by a different process than the other ones). From the perspective of the expected usage of the reviews this anomaly is indeed possible to see as an error, rather than just slightly different behavior.

While true, the ratings can be useful if there is some form of understanding as to what people are rating the movie for. Most ratings cover the simplistic "I saw the movie and this is how I feel about it" kind of data. In that case, the ratings can be useful.

But if a group with an agenda comes in and rates the movie on a different set of criteria without letting the typical reader know renders the data useless.

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