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Hasse diagram of the 2008 Olympic medal table

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Re: Hasse diagram of the 2008 Olympic medal table

#2
After unambiguously specifying the partial ordering for the triple, its very gratifying to note how each node gets an ordinal rank in the Hasse. So you can talk about USA > Russia ( rank 0 vs rank 1) but can't say anything about USA vs China ( both rank 0) - you can do this simply in terms of the ordinal rank and forget all about the medal tally.

A few years back, there was a data science problem to predict which startup had the best chances of exit, based on similar set of presumably unquantifiable predictors. There were some 10000 startups, and for each startup you knew who the VC's were, number of rounds of funding, valuation etc. Though it seemed quite an amorphous problem, we hit upon a very similar partial order, that made all the startup nodes fall into a Hasse and you could practically read off from top to bottom which startup would succeed and which ones would fail.

At that time, I remember thinking how you could do the same exact thing for humans too. Quantitative reductionism at its finest, sure, but when it works it's pretty amazing.

Re: Hasse diagram of the 2008 Olympic medal table

#4
> Different people have different conventions for how to rank the Olympic medal results.

The newspaper in my country sometimes used another method, where they divide the medal count by the population of the country. In 2008 that put Jamaica at the top, followed by New Zealand. Both China and the U.S. were well down in the chart.

Re: Hasse diagram of the 2008 Olympic medal table

#6
post #4

> Different people have different conventions for how to rank the Olympic medal results. The newspaper in my country sometimes used another method, where they divide the medal count by the population of the country. In 2008 that put Jamaica at the top, followed by New Zealand. Both China and the U.S. were well down in the chart.

Do you live in Jamaica or New Zealand?

Re: Hasse diagram of the 2008 Olympic medal table

#7
post #4

> Different people have different conventions for how to rank the Olympic medal results. The newspaper in my country sometimes used another method, where they divide the medal count by the population of the country. In 2008 that put Jamaica at the top, followed by New Zealand. Both China and the U.S. were well down in the chart.

A more helpful metric would be medals divided by delegation size.

Re: Hasse diagram of the 2008 Olympic medal table

#9
post #4

> Different people have different conventions for how to rank the Olympic medal results. The newspaper in my country sometimes used another method, where they divide the medal count by the population of the country. In 2008 that put Jamaica at the top, followed by New Zealand. Both China and the U.S. were well down in the chart.

Do you live in Jamaica or New Zealand?

How did you guess?
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