Dumbing down of America, sartorial edition

While searching for wedding attire, originally deciding on morning dress (before the ceremony was moved to later in the day) I discovered that not a few companies call the morning coat/cutaway coat "Tuxedo Tails", and that they also call the "white tie" tailcoat "Tuxedo Tails".

Moreover, on a somewhat related note, the Homburg hat is sold on the Internet as the "Gangster" or "Godfather" hat. Given how the fedora was named, that almost makes sense.

Jacques Barzun considered the turning away from more prescribed forms of dress a symptom of a broader culture of "emancipation". What does one call "Tuxedo Tails" and "Godfather hat"? That doesn't seem to be the word for it.

A series of tubes, leading to Lake Wobegon

According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, on a five-star scale, the average rating given by a reviewer on the World Wide Web is 4.3. Despite the Web's reputation for rudeness and hostility, the average rating given to goods and services is above average.

Thinking to my experiences as an Epinions.com contributor and ChefMoz editor, 4.3 sounds about right. If people like something, they tend to give it maximum or near maximum rating.

That there's a filtering step keeping most truly lousy products out of the hands of Web reviewers would seem at first to explain this, but it isn't compelling. Yes, consumers--unlike newspaper and magazine writers--tend only to review products they buy, and that they have thus already researched, but this should drive expectations down, certainly not up. Consider that the filtering-by-research means that the average product a savvy customer sees is better than the average product being sold. If we knock all of the one-star products out, the scale we're left with centers on 3.5 stars. If we expect product ratings to follow a Gaussian ("normal") distribution up to the limits posed by the discretization and boundaries, this will bias slightly to the left of 3.5, but the point still stands. Filtering can't explain pervasive overrating.

The U.S. school grading custom, in which scores between 70 and 80 points out of 100 are supposed to be the average, may have something to do with it. Products may start out in people's minds with 5-star ratings, with stars being knocked off for lousiness. That's quite a different thought process than considering 3 stars as average, 2 stars as below average, one star as lousy, etc. Perhaps, as is speculated at the end of the WSJ, the ability to be meaningfully negative--or just to shed Lake Wobegon Syndrome--may come with experience; willingness to give five-star ratings to mediocre goods and services could be simple naivety.

Before adjusting a few Epinions ratings (downward, very slightly), I computed my average rating: 3.18 on a scale from 1-5. That's above 3, probably statistically significantly so, but not by much, and I've been reviewing "great stuff" lately. That the number is close to 3 is reassuring. Then again, when clicking the Haloscan stars on 'blogs, I'm so consistently a downrater that I didn't need much reassurance at all.

If you don't mean to say that something is great--not good, not "great!" like "pizza tonight?--Great!, I want anchovies...", but better than good, one of the best in its area, a real standout, please don't give it five stars.



HT: Mark Stevens

Thanks for the idea!

The quasi-anonymous "CLS", 'blogging on Classically Liberal, reports on a complaint brought to a Neptune, NJ residents' association meeting about "flags being displayed...declaring the occupants' sexual orientation or proclivity — not just the multicolored "gay' striped flags, but also banners indicating fetishes and or other "lifestyle' choices."

No such thing, but I'm reasonably certain that a good marketer could sell them. "Hmm...the frotteurism people don't have a banner yet...and what about the guys who like old-fashioned stockings? And a box of the special lolicon pennants are ready for shipment to Japan!"

Not my line of work, but I wouldn't be surprised to see these appear, thanks to a suggestion from a New Jersey busybody. Ahh, the beauty of the Internet Age!

The difference between Democrats and the rest of us.

Democrats, like presumed President-Elect Barack Obama speak of "creating jobs". The rest of us: classical-liberals, conservatives, Libertarians, Republicans, moderates, speak of prosperity and wealth.

If increasing the quantity of "jobs", whatever that even means, is the proper object of economic policy and the route to prosperity, then I recommend that the Federal government fund a major public works program. Create a five hundred foot tall memorial to Franklin Roosevelt, out of Lego (green lego, if you like), atop Mt McKinley. Then coat it with silver and put it into orbit at L2.

Bad Netizenship

Rule number aleph-null: If you would like to unsubscribe from an e-mail list to which you have opted in, follow the instructions you were sent when you subscribed and which are mailed to you periodically, often at the bottom of each message. Do not click "This is spam" in a webmail client, especially if your e-mail service provider is Yahoo, Gmail, or some similar broadly-subscribed national service.

One too many boorish dummkopfs (yahoos?) using Yahoo mail told their client that Randy Cassingham's This Is True was spam instead of unsubscribing properly. As a result, tens of thousands of subscribers--many of them subscribers to the paid "premium" version--did not receive their newsletter for several weeks.

In the last newsletter, Cassingham reported that after a lot of back-and-forth with Yahoo support, his e-mails are now reaching subscribers and customers. However, there's no doubt that losing 15% of his subscribers for several weeks hurt Cassingham's business.

The lessons: Internet users should take spam reporting seriously, and service providers should ask "are you sure this isn't an opt-in list?" before accepting the user's click. This sort of thing has happened before. I was webmaster for an aquarium club, using the free Crosswinds service as host, when the site was blackholed because a spammer faked a Crosswinds origin for the e-mail, meaning members couldn't access the site for weeks. If the reporters had checked the headers, as is good practice, they'd have found that it was sent from an open relay elsewhere.

College does not imply middle-class values

While I was tutoring a local community college student in the basement of the University's main library, the boys--and I can't call them anything else--in the next glass-enclosed study room over were playing techno music, occasionally shouting/braying to each other (in between mumbles), and belching loudly and deliberately after guzzling their Cokes.

Chewing-tobacco containers and Burger King bags littered the floor. Barzun would call it "emancipation", and it not only debases the academic enterprise, but also devalues the degree of the more serious students. A college degree, especially from a "we have to take just about everyone" state university, no longer almost necessarily implies middle-class values.

Kids, that's why, right or wrong, college degrees are almost always required to get the "good jobs".