Next Countdown Poll: Genre/Type

Definitely, but I'm still willing (would like to, even) address the conceptual questions, since this may very well come up again.

And you have won the job as host, congratulations!!

In my case I was for a foreign countdown, but choose not to vote for it because of the possibility of doing a regional foreign countdown.

I'm proof of what you said. And yes you're correct we did also talk about neo-noir vs noir and I even posted about breaking a war countdown into various sub categories.....I think the poll is fair and thanks for doing all this for us!

True dat!

and that too!

So Foreign sure looks like the winner, can we move on now?
We Need a Host for it, Yoda said in an earlier post that he has made tweaks to MoFo so that the next Host/Curator will have it much easier....So who wants to Host? and have all the fun

In reference to splitting the categories, the difference is that I haven't heard anyone say that they have no interest in the other genres if certain sub-genres are, or are not, included. People have asked whether or not neo-noir is considered part of noir, but nobody has said something like they want a noir countdown, but only if neo-noir isn't eligible, or they want a comedy countdown, but they have no interest if dark comedies are excluded.

When we did the horror countdown, we didn't make it only slashers, or only psychological horrors, etc. When we did the (unofficial) sci-fi countdown, we didn't exclude sci-fi horror movies, or sci-fi fantasy movies. So why should foreign movies be broken down into sub-categories if nothing else has been done that way? Based on the comments in these poll threads, the results of this question could change the results of the poll.

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If I answer a game thread correctly, just skip my turn and continue with the game.
OPEN FLOOR.

So you're looking to make the most people happy, rather than finding out the legitimate most popular genre for the next countdown? That's a different goal than what I thought it was when this was discussed in the previous thread. I thought we were trying to find out which genre most people wanted the most, not which genre the most people wanted in general.

That explains the multiple votes, but I still don't agree with it.

And just for the record, my complaint isn't about that foreign is winning this poll. I would have been against the multiple votes regardless of which genre was winning, even if it was something like musicals. As I said earlier in the previous thread (when I voted for decades), I was already expecting foreign to win either way, so I'm not a bit surprised at the results.


You obviously haven't had to pick a restaurant with the same people that I go out to dinner with. I usually hear things like "Anywhere is okay with me", followed by "No, I don't want Italian food" after someone suggests Italian, or "I'm not in the mood for Chinese food" after someone else suggests Chinese. Then we start again with "Then where do you want go eat?", followed by "Anywhere you want is good."

So if multiple, equally-ranked votes is a fair system, why do we rank the movies when we submit our lists? Why not just have each person submit a list of their top 25 movies, and each movie is given only 1 point, regardless of its placement on the list? Wouldn't that give us a more "acceptable" top 100 list?

I'm having trouble following this argument, because it began by insinuating Foreign had some kind of unfair advantage, even though most of what you're saying now seems to suggest it has a disadvantage this way, as I noted earlier.

This reminds me of an old Yogi Berra quote: "You better cut the pizza in four slices because I'm not hungry enough to eat eight." The category of Foreign contains all Foreign Language films. We can talk all day about whether to drill down deeper into that or not, but we can't make that basic category bigger, which means it can't really garner any kind of artificial competitive advantage as a result of that talk. It seems clear on net it should be a disadvantage.

Yes, but change from what? The problem here, I think, is treating single-vote as the default, as if it's a neutral starting option. But it isn't. It's not a universal standard, it's just a method that's good for some things and not for others. Yes, choosing one voting method rather than another changes the results...in all directions. Single-voting could change what the result would have been from multiple-choice, which could change what the result would have been from ranked choice. But none of those has a claim to being the "real" result.

We are. The question is how to determine "most."

Imagine 30% of people put Comedy first, but the other 70% have it last. And imagine 29% have Foreign first and the other 71% have it second. In this scenario, Comedy would "win" in a single-vote system, but 70% of people would hate the choice, whereas if Foreign were the choice, everyone would like it. So which is more wanted?

Understood. And also for the record, I did not vote for Foreign.

If thinking a voting system worked best in one context obligated us to think it must in every other, wouldn't you have been obligated to object before now? The ballots are weighted and contain multiple votes, which is very different from the single-vote method; if isolating everyone's top choice were the only fair way to do things, ballots would be just a single film! But I'm guessing nobody thinks that, so obviously we've all already accepted that the methods at different stages can (and should) be different.

My statement, (in this case), was more about the concept of splitting the categories, rather than how it affects the vote. I don't think that foreign should be split into sub-genres for the countdown, just as none of the other genres were split into sub-genres.

However I still think it had the advantage in the poll by not being split, assuming that people on both sides of the split argument voted for it, hoping that their preference would be the eventual winner, (but that might be an incorrect assumption), as they could vote for foreign, while still voting for their other choice if their preference wasn't the eventual winner.


Until this poll, single vote was the default for all of these polls here. I can't remember any other polls here (that were actual votes for something, rather than just opinion polls), where we had the option to vote for more than one choice.

There may not be an actual "right" or "wrong" method to this poll, but based on past polls, the expectation here was to have a one vote per person poll, so it felt like being blind-sided by a method that just seemed to be "pushing the boundaries". (I'm sure there's a better phrase for this, but it's late, I'm tired, and I'm not thinking at full capacity right now.)


This discussion feels more like an Abbott and Costello routine than a Berraism to me.

Which is more wanted depends on your goal. If you're looking for an actual "winner", then the most first place votes would be the most wanted, but if you're looking to please the most people, then the most overall votes would be the most wanted.

I think we just have different goals.


I didn't vote for foreign either, (or anything yet), but that won't matter unless nobody volunteers to host the foreign countdown.

Yes, the methods are different because the goals are different.

A one-vote system for the countdown would only work if we were only looking for the one top film, not multiple films. For the countdown, we weren't looking for one clear winner. We were looking for the top 100 winners, so the ranked list works for that goal. But the whole point of these countdowns is to make the ranked list from other people's ranked lists. My point is that it wouldn't work if we were trying to find one top film, and everyone got multiple, equally-ranked votes. I don't know if it would work with multiple, equally-ranked votes even if we were looking for the top 100 films. The countdown results would definitely be different, but would it be better? Maybe, maybe not.

Plus, I've already said that if this had been a ranked poll with multiple votes, it would have been better than this method with multiple, equally-ranked votes.

Respectfully, yes, I believe that assumption is incorrect. You can subdivide any category (or not), and all categories already have divisions whether we talk about them or not, but you can't give the category more appeal than it "rightfully" has, since you cannot add to it by merely dividing it up.

This I'm sympathetic to. I admit that we've normally done single vote, and I can understand how it might feel strange (and maybe alarming, if we can find a word that means "alarming," but a little less than that word usually means). I'm pretty open to the idea that I should have discussed this more beforehand. You're all free to chastise me on that front.

My primary/immediate concern, though, is addressing the idea that there's anything unfair going on. That's the kind of "default" I mean. Default in terms of expectation, absolutely, just not in terms of legitimacy/fairness/accuracy.

Can't argue there. This is actually a sneakily complicated topic, as I think our exchange has shown. There's a ton of research and writing about voting systems out there, much of well beyond me. Unfortunately the moment you get beyond two options it gets very complex, and there's some argument that it might not be possible to design a system for those scenarios that can always avoid clearly suboptimal or counterintuitive results.

Hmm, maybe. But humor me just a bit longer, because I think we can shed a bit more light on this yet:

You say that you'd use first-place votes if your goal was to find the "actual winner." But isn't that circular? Our criteria for picking the winner should be trying to find the winner! The question is what we're trying to measure. What does "most first-place votes" measure, and why is it better than anything else? And in the hypothetical I mentioned, do you think Comedy winning would have been a good outcome?

Maybe I should give the Curator a second vote for the next one....

You might be right that it's an incorrect assumption, but if it isn't, then there is an advantage to not splitting the choices into "foreign general" and "foreign regional" because only one of those will be the eventual winner, but as simply "foreign", it's getting votes for both choices. None of the other genres has had any discussion about their countdowns being broken up into two or more sub-genres, so they're not getting any (potentially) undeserved votes.


"Unfair" might not be the best term for it, but it does skew the results.

I agree ranked choice would be even better, it's just a lot more work for (in my opinion) a very modest improvement.

Anyway, the point is not that there aren't differences (as you articulated quite well), it's that we all already agree that different situations call for different methods. You pointedly asked, if multiple votes were good, why not use them for ballots? But that same logic rebounds on the idea of using single voting, too. More, actually, since multiple votes is closer to how ballots work already.

Unfortunately I think we're probably going in circles now; I can only repeat my previous responses to this point:

1) You can't inflate a category by sub-dividing it. Comedy would not suddenly have an advantage if only we'd had a long discussion about whether to do Satires separately or not.

2) The prospect of sub-dividing a category is, as far as I can see, pretty clearly a disadvantage, since it has the potential to exclude large numbers of films. This isn't a hypothetical in this case, either, as a number of people expressed this very sentiment in the previous thread.

If by that you mean that it may simply change the result relative to another method, I agree.

Regardless, I'm calling it a night here. It's fine if not everyone likes this voting method, and I'm fine hearing the complaints. Hopefully my responses assuage them, but if not, I still need to reply in the interest of transparency.

Hopefully, also, people can also trust that I've put a lot of thought into this and consider giving me the benefit of the doubt on a few things. But if not, that's okay too.

You’re doing fine.

(Maybe I'm wrong), but in my mind, the "most first-place votes" measures the choice that the majority of people want the most, not the choice that the most people just want in general.

I'm not sure that one is "better" than the other. I'm just saying that the different methods will get different results.


I think this is the scenario that you're asking about:

I understand what you're saying here, and you might be right that in this scenario more people would be happy with Foreign over Comedy. But this is why I said that multiple choices should at least be ranked. In this same scenario, with a ranked multiple vote system, Foreign would have won. (I think, but it's late, and some of my brain cells have gone to sleep without me. )