28 Comments
Mar 7Liked by Emil O. W. Kirkegaard

I have a question that's a bit off topic. I came across your paper titled "Evolutionary Trends of Polygenic Scores in European Populations From the Paleolithic to Modern Times." It appears you've utilized the GWAS study on intelligence by Sniekers et al. from 2017. However, I noticed it's missing from both your references and the methods section.

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author

It was Savage. Yes, it's missing. Journal doesn't seem to accept minor corrections, so I guess it will have to stay like it is.

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founding

Curious what other movies you gave a 10 to.

Personally, I've found that movies with ratios on Rotten Tomatos (high audience, low critic scores) have tended to be good.

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For the curious. These ratings have been made over the last 10 years, so may not reflect current opinion.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13y3enP_GhrAu1ai-1ob3Uvh-ELKX2pQMkCDNGrCD3YE/edit#gid=1733559149

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No movies with main casting brownies thx.

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That Rings of Power IMDB rating is a joke. I can’t believe anything over a 3 for that is sincere

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This would be some beautiful data if you could see the individuals as well.

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Horror is under-rated on any media-tracking site, even though it's the most consistently enjoyable genre.

There's also the continuing-sequel bias, that increases the score of sequel entries if they require watching previous movies first. It's more pronounced in certain video games or split-up-between-seasons tv-shows, that it'll mostly be only fans of the previous entries rating it.

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“Besson has been churning various ingénue forced to become assassin movies”

Haha, yes, one of my favorite genres, after spending the last two months watching all two dozen or so female assassin movies in a row. Anna is really quite an achievement in that Besson combined all his previous original tropes with all the tropes created by those who copied them earlier Besson movies, such as T

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Mar 7·edited Mar 7

Hi Emil, offtopic question.

Do GWAS polygenic scores predict regression to mean in children and siblings?

Can polygenic scores predict, given two parents, whose children regress where to?

Thanks for your work!

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Dude, I just clicked on this article for you to tell me whether or not Dune 2 was good. GTFO with all this statistics bs. Dune 2 go see or not?

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Mar 8Liked by Emil O. W. Kirkegaard

Small brain take. He used a current discussion topic to start a wider discussion about how movies are rated

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I would think that there are two effects going on: recency bias where new movies are inflated due to being overrated by fans and nostalgia bias where old movies as a category get overrated because old movies that are bad get forgotten about.

It would be tedious to test for nostalgia bias, but I worry that, by conditioning on a specific number of ratings to be considered in the data set, a kind of selection effect can sneak in where bad old movies are selected out.

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author

How do you propose dealing with this problem? Find a catalogue of movies released in each year, sample at random to find a representative sample on IMDB? Many will presumably be missing, but who knows without looking.

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I'm honestly not sure. If you have can track the trajectory of the rating of individual movies over time that would be helpful, but it doesn't sound like that type of data is readily available.

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author

We could set up a script to download their files every day, so we can track longitudinal ratings.

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I'm a bit unsure whether the "we" is meant to refer to you and your team (I know you like to collaborate with people) or to the two of us. But in case you meant the latter, I would be interested in setting up a script (though be warned my programming experience is recreational at best). I've sent a DM containing an email address that works for me.

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I meant we as in you and me (and anyone else interested). Seems like an easy cron job to have running on some random webserver, and one can download the data in a few months time.

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Luc Besson’s “Anna,” which I really liked, has a 48 point gap between critics and audience. I read some of the critics’ reviews, and they don’t really come off as that negative, mostly “we’ve seen it before.”

Why the critical reluctance to give a high rating? I developed a theory after reading the film’s Wikipedia page: its release was delayed a year because of some chickenshit #metoo claim by a nobody actress. When that would-be scandal fizzled, the film finally came out. But I think Besson had became damaged goods like Woody Allen, and reviewers feared reputational repercussions if they were seen by their woke feminist colleagues as upranking a film by “that monster!”

At this point, depending on the genre, I tend to go out of my way to watch “gap” films.

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Never heard of this movie, but there's quite a wide spread across these ratings. 3.3 critic, 8.1 audience, vs. 6.6 IMDB. The latter looks more correct for this genre movie. Perhaps the audience on RT are voting against the critics to offset their poor rating, whereas on IMDB no one is doing this, so rating just follows the expected quality (mediocre).

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/anna_2019

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7456310/

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Maybe the critics are more aware than the audience that Besson has been churning various ingénue forced to become assassin movies since the 80's

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Yeah, but if I watched it I'd have to look at the ugly, stupid face of Zendaya for almost three hours. To say nothing of the desiccated twink face of Lil Timmy Chalamet. That's just too much to ask of anyone.

Remember when movie stars were attractive? These two are more repulsive than a sand worm.

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Mar 4·edited Mar 4Author

She looks OK, often they cast her to look less than she could.

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Zendaya looks OK but she spent 90% of her scenes frowning.

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Is it fair to characterize Indian ratings as cheating? Those movies are definitely not my cup of tea, but the Indians really do seem to like their flicks. Ditto Turkish movie scores. Seems like a matter of alien tastes.

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Since Indians cheat at high rates with all manners of other things, it seems a fair assumption they are running botnets to inflate ratings of their movies too. But sure, you could hypothesize that they are operating with a different rating distribution than Westerners, in the same way the fans of documentaries rate them really highly, presumably due to ideological/pet hobby influence.

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Tyler Cowen disliked it: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/03/dune-2.html

"The crowd mostly seemed bored, and I saw a lot of people looking at the time on their phones. Was there any line from the movie that anyone is going to repeat?" Having seen Dune I - mildly bored - I will watch Dune II at home for free sometime next year.

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He must not read SF. Reads like someone with different tastes.

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