2003-12-04 - 9:14 p.m.
I told you all a few days ago that I'd gone and put a picture of myself on hotornot.com, because I was eager to find out just how horrifically shaming such a thing could be... but really because I just thought it would be awfully funny to see what happens when you put yourself up on a website designed to excise personality, character and behaviour from the assess-people mix and distill everything to the most utterly fundamental, one's physical appearance in all its charmless snapshot glory. Here's a little update on what's happened since:My out-of-ten average score seems now more or less permanently fixed at 7.4. 99 people have rated me so far, which is close enough to 100 to allow me to use the individual values as convenient percentages.
10 - 0%
9 - 5%
8 - 7%
7 - 12%
6 - 8%
5 - 16%
4 - 12%
3 - 10%
2 - 13%
1 - 16%
That's how the voters have responded to me. How, you ask, is it possible that the above works out to an average of 7.4? Well, turns out the hotornot.com folks perform a little mathematical wizardry in the interest of normalizing scores. Statisticians use this sort of thing all the time, and it's just called "normalization," but I think at hotornot.com it might more properly be referred to as "mercy math." They diminish the mathematical weight of the extreme ends of the scale, and through some sort of big-brotherish watchfulness they eyeball the voting tendencies of visitors and appropriately weight responses from people who only vote from 1-5 or from 5-10, etc. They throw that stuff in a bag along with all your actual votes, give it a good hard shake, and dump out an average that's probably about as uninformative as you'd imagine.
I'm probably not a 7.4 -- my guess is I'm closer to a 5 judging by the responses. Now then, assuming that all the voters were women who were giving their honest opinion, this means I have roughly a 24% chance of being regarded as above-average by the women I meet. On the other hand, I have about a 39% chance of being regarded as something that is quite cleverly hiding its stiff joints and the bolts in its neck...
So here's my plan: I'm going to get out a saw, remove the third arm protruding from the bridge of my nose, and then try again with a new photo. I'm a shoo-in for a 6, I'll bet...
Fear not, those who may read my mirthful sarcasm above and fear that this project is performing disastrous revisions of my self-concept. It's the photo they're rating, not my appearance in any strict sense -- no one moving around a room looks precisely like they do in a still photo. It's got me thinking about other good projects... like how best to get myself an above-9 and below-2 rating on the site using specially crafted photos of myself. Suggestions welcome...
