cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/16337814
The issue is that “left / right / center” are entirely subjective. You’re always going to have somebody bitching about “how can they say that’s left-leaning!” no matter what standard you set. What’s important is to make the standard you’re following transparent and to justify how you came to a result. Then people can adjust for what their personal offset may be.
Or mostly likely people will just continue to bitch and call it an arbitrary ranking.
Having a methodology or a standard and writing about how you came to your conclusion doesn’t absolve you of being completely subjective. It also doesn’t mean that it’s not arbitrary. My methodology could be that I roll a dice, a one is left leaning and a six is right leaning. I can be totally transparent and have a clear methodology, but it’s arbitrary.
MBFC’s methodology is totally subjective and arbitrary. It’d be almost a miracle if two people independently followed their methodology and came to the same conclusion. I think I showed how flawed it is with my previous comment, but if you think otherwise I’d be really interested to understand your reasoning.
Having a methodology or a standard and writing about how you came to your conclusion doesn’t absolve you of being completely subjective.
No shit. That’s what I said - it is subjective. But this is a way to quantify that subjectivity in a way that is methodological.
Like - “a lot of rain” is completely subjective. But if I say “I consider 2cm/hr to be ‘a lot’” then that at least lets you understand what I mean when I say “a lot”.
2cm per hour is an objective measure though. So now we have an objective standard so we can all understand what ‘a lot’ means, which is great but not at all like the bias methodology from MBFC.
Rate the amount of rain from 0 to 10 is still entirely subjective and is closer to the actual methodology used by MBFC.
