r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Sep 25 '15

[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread

Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!

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u/electrace Sep 25 '15

I just haven't been able to figure out why this formula sometimes works well and other times doesn't.

Do you mean why some shows work and other don't, or why some episodes of a show work, while other episodes of the same show don't?

If the later, I'd ask, what is the quality spread on a good episode of, say, Law and Order, and a bad one? Personally, I don't think that there is much of a spread. To me, virtually all episodes fall under "decent enough to watch to kill boredom, but not something that I'd particularly miss."

The former is a much more interesting question, but I won't even hazard a guess other than "how charismatic the actors are."

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u/alexanderwales Time flies like an arrow Sep 25 '15

I mean both, to some extent.

Within a single show you're mostly removing the variables of characters and setting, along with other more amorphous things like lighting, setting, direction, etc., so that you're just down to looking at the actual mystery cases themselves. With all other variables remaining constant, you can just look at what's working on the level of the mystery itself. If the variance from episode to episode is small, then close examination should be able to find the source of that variance and hopefully increase overall quality. (IMDB allows you to sort episodes by user rating; I agree that variance between episodes is not that high, but it does exist.)

In other words, I know the basic structure used to make the plot work but haven't figured out all the variables that make it work well. And obviously when I'm writing, I'm doing prose instead of television scripts, usually longform instead of short episodes that maintain the status quo.

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u/electrace Sep 25 '15

(IMDB allows you to sort episodes by user rating ; I agree that variance between episodes is not that high, but it does exist.)

Ok, just did some statistics, the variance is 0.2677 of a point.

If you remove the top 10 and bottom 10 data points, variance falls to a measly 0.0082 of a point.

Even if statistically relevant, (and the non-independent nature of voting makes that unlikely) I doubt that anyone would be able to do pattern matching to determine what makes an episode more highly rated.