Statistical Data Additions

Why is rarity important?

 

Huh?

Just because certain users rate certain styles in certain ways, based on personal preference, does not diminish the quality of any other style.

Rarity, or perceived value, should not be a part of a beers score.

 

Don't want to speak for the OP, but I think it would be useful to see average rating for styles because of grade inflation. There are 50 NE IPAs with a score above 4.5, but no Altbiers with a score above 4.25. Having these stats readily available (maybe along with median score), in addition to total entries for a given style, can help put a beer with a rating of 4.1 into better context.

Similarly, knowing a beer is the 150th ranked beer for a style might be helpful (I don't believe that is displayed currently), and further, knowing a beer is 150th ranked out of 150 beers of a style versus 150th out of 1,500 beers. There are lots of good reasons for not keeping rank beyond top 100 for a given style, as well, but I could see that information being useful or desirable to some.

 

Is that on the beer, or on us?

Who was a better football player, Wayne Gretzky or Babe Ruth?

 

Yet, you made a point of highlighting it in your OP:

"Total ratings would demonstrate rarity."

 

I think they were talking about rarity of a given style, I guess so that you could see how common/uncommon styles really were. They mentioned using it as a tool to target " endangered" styles, and possibly using it to inform your interpretation of the ratings (maybe a rarer style is more likely to have poor ratings from people who don't know what to expect?).

 

Or, being the cynical bastard I am, OP is trying to narrow shit down to his view.

I've been wrong before though.

 

I'm not sure what you're suspecting? How would the relative rarity of a style being numerically represented cause a problem? Or be misused?

 

He seems to imply that rarity should carry extra weight is the scores.

 

Hmm I didn't get that. I thought they were saying that many of the beer styles that have a low rated "top rated" beer are often very rarely brewed. My interpretation was that knowing how uncommon a style is would help you frame the ratings appropriately. Super common styles are likely well understood and thus ratings are probably accurate. Rarely brewed styles are likely to be little understood, and so low ratings might be a result of misunderstanding vs actually being poor examples. That's my interpretation, hopefully they'll clarify I guess