141–147 of 147 posts
Curious how much longer/shorter the code would have been had Python been used instead of R.
> I gathered the average rating across all episodes by writers contributing more than ten episodes. why 10? why not 12 or 8 or 5 ... ?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair/accurate, the South Park generation (myself included) is no longer "young". South Park is great if everyone is in on the joke. They tend to make fun of BOTH sides of every issue, showing the insanity and hypocrisy along the way. A smart person realizes what is right and wrong. The danger of this are those who "don't get it" and think being a giant asshole is funny/cool. The same thing applies to Howard Ste…
I agree, although you could interpret that approach as a cynical attempt to capture a wider audience. It's similar to when a show throws both liberals and conservatives a bone using various characters or dialogue.
> I gathered the average rating across all episodes by writers contributing more than ten episodes. why 10? why not 12 or 8 or 5 ... ?
Our number system is base 10. The choice was arbitrary, I just wanted enough episodes to reduce the noise in the average ratings.
It's a bit confusing. The author starts with the assumption the show got worse, and assumed a causal relation with an random piece of data. This is not proper Bayesian statistics. The author claims there is no principled way, but there is. Confidence bounds are the way to measure what affect a variable had on an outcome.
I didn't assume a causal relationship. In the last line I state that a change in writers may not have caused a decline in quality, but the change in the make-up of the writing team around the team most people agree the show went downhill would lend some credibility to the idea. What about that article suggested I was attempting to do proper Bayesian statistics? It's an exploratory analysis, I'm just looking at the da…
That said, you started with the following prior: Simpson ratings went down over time. Then you looked at 1 variable: The writing staff. You noticed: Aha, if we assign each writer a rating, then we see that later writers have lower ratings than writers that only worked on early episodes!
However that's a tautology. Of course the writers that worked on later episodes have lower scores than those that worked on earlier episodes. The fact the ratings went down over time was the prior we started with! This is the natural result of taking averages. The experimental setup was wrong from the beginning.
As for why I think you would want to do proper statistics, the reason is simple: I assume that people who publish these things are well intentioned, and they want to show off actual statistical correlations.
Later episodes are rated lower, thus writers who mainly wrote later episodes have contributed to episodes with lower rating. This seems like circular reasoning, and doesn't say anything about an individual writers' contribution to the quality of the show.
While I admit the logic is somewhat tautologous, that's not quite the conclusion I'm drawing. I, first of all, look at the average rating of the writers involved in the show, and then look at how the make-up of the show's writers is substantially different in the early years vs the later years.
Everything in the article is just properties of arithmatic averages in sorted sequences.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Classic Simpsons would occasionally get a bit satirical or referential (like when Bush Sr made a guest appearance), but modern Simpsons seems more satirical than not. Episodes like the one featuring the "MyPod" with "Steve Mobs" basically had my eyes rolling into the back of my head. That's such low-hanging fruit that they're picking it up off the ground. It's not even good enough to be considered sophomoric. And t…
I think it's because South Park has always been a vehicle to comment, usually specifically, on current events and popular culture. The world of South Park is really a sandbox for Trey and Matt to caricature whatever they're choosing to ream on that particular week. The Simpsons, Futurama, when they address these kinds of issues, they feel like they're 'reaching' for it. Or, worse, just 'not trying'. Someone else here…