Thanks, means a lot, it was definitely an opportunity I didn't want to waste

Edit: 4 stars

I don't actually give lots of books a 0. I was bored one day and messed with my ratings on excel to make the average score a 5/10, to see what scores I would have to give for a 5/10 to truly be the average book I read, and the results were silly, and had tons of 0/10s Normally i'm not going to give anything a 0/10, because I feel like even pretty bad books have a couple things they do kinda well

I won't argue with you too much, It might be my favorite opening, amazing supporting cast, incredible final page. I don't quite like the protagonist as much as I do in Brightness, or the overall story as much as Lord of Emperor's

People giving ratings you books that don't exist yet is indeed wild I feel like saying you DNFed it already gets the point across.

2. I think I struggle to differentiate my decimal point ratings more and more as I like the books less, you can actually see if you look at my spreadsheets that I am a lot more likely to give a book a 6/10 exactly, while I am roughly equally likely to give a book a 9, or a 9.1, because when I think a book is kinda mid, the small difference doesn't matter that much. Once we get to the high ratings though, for me the scores are reasonably differentiated, like I am fairly confident I definitely like the books I gave a 9.5 more than the ones I gave a 9.2. Also a good point about quantity, that generally as people read faster they might care less, although I would also note that the opportunity costs are the same for really fast readers who read a bad book in a day, because they could have read an entire good book in that day. Compared to a slower reader who might read 15 bad pages, and is only missing out on reading 15 good pages. That's an interesting scale, because for me while there is a generally positive relationship between how often I recommend a book, with how good it is/how much I like it, it is far from perfect correlation since I can often love a book and think it is genius, but know that it has lots of stylistic elements that make it niche. I actually think the really weird ratings where it sounds like it is all complaining, followed by 5 stars, or vice versa are some of the ones were the ratings show their value, because they clearly communicate that this person doesn't care much about the specific things they are praising, or complaining about. Which is pretty useful information when looking at their reviews of other books

@jacobhubbard9266 That's OK. Disagreeing is fun. Interesting points, allow me to try and be convincing again. I somewhat agree they have limited use in isolation, if I can only see someone's rating for 1 thing, but I think they gain usefulness over time as you compare it to other ratings they give. Because you can gain knowledge of other people's criteria. I know Mike giving a book 5 stars, and Kyle giving a book 5 stars doesn't mean the same thing, and can adjust my reaction based on that. I do find the comparison to grades a little flawed because you are giving grades as feedback to the student to try and be useful to the student, who is the writer in this case. While the point of ratings is not for an author to see I gave then a 8.1 and wonder how they can get an 8.5, but for readers. They could have either already read the book and can now get a snapshot of whether we have similar tastes for future reference, or if they haven't read the book and are familiar with my taste in books already, they get a quick data point for whether it is more likely they will enjoy this one. I also don't find the case that since our criteria for ratings are slightly different, that referencing them, or gaining context from them is impossible. I probably have different criteria than you for how spicy food is, but I can gain useful context based on how spicy you think something is. Especially if I know you well. We all have different criteria for how painful something is, but still, if you go to the emergency room and tell them something hurts, they will ask you how painful it is on a scale of 1-10. They generally don't even give context on what a 10 means relatively speaking. And they have even less context than I would seeing someone's star rating, because I often can know roughly how that other persons criteria for a book being 5 stars differs from mine, that ER Doctor knows nothing about me at all. Is that even a little convincing? Could you maybe tell me how convincing it is on a scale of 1-10? If it's like a 2, I will probably give up given that useful context.

​@@jakebishop7822 "I do find the comparison to grades a little flawed because you are giving grades as feedback to the student to try and be useful to the student, who is the writer in this case. While the point of ratings is not for an author to see I gave then a 8.1 and wonder how they can get an 8.5, but for readers. They could have either already read the book and can now get a snapshot of whether we have similar tastes for future reference, or if they haven't read the book and are familiar with my taste in books already, they get a quick data point for whether it is more likely they will enjoy this one." This point doesn't make sense at all because you even imply it yourself that there isn't much meaningful difference between an 8.1 and 8.5. The difference is in degree, but that doesn't solve the problem I've pointed out earlier because, by the end of the day, we still have completely different criteria as to what constitutes an 8.1 and an 8.5. There is literally no difference between an 8.1 and an 8.5. If I had you evaluate a letter and you said it was a B-, what does that B- grade mean? Okay, you give it an B-, but what if I told you Albert Einstein wrote that letter? Does that change your grade? If it does, you've run into another problem, and that's an introduction of bias into you grades, which makes both your original grade and your new grade useless. This is why grades = feedback is problematic. A grade alone is not going to tell me (nor tell you) with any reliable ounce of accuracy why you got the grade that you got because it's so subjective and truly difficult to get everyone in the room to agree what constitutes an "A" or a "B." It's the same issue with ratings. It doesn't matter if ratings are "for readers" because because both grades and ratings suffer from the same problem. If you see someone give a book you like 3 stars, what exactly does that 3 star rating mean? For all you know, they may think a 3 star rating is "decent" but you may think a 3 star rating is solid. Again, there no consistency here. Your 3 star rating means something different from my 3 star rating, and if we can't agree, there is nothing being communicated here. "We all have different criteria for how painful something is, but still, if you go to the emergency room and tell them something hurts, they will ask you how painful it is on a scale of 1-10. They generally don't even give context on what a 10 means relatively speaking. And they have even less context than I would seeing someone's star rating, because I often can know roughly how that other persons criteria for a book being 5 stars differs from mine, that ER Doctor knows nothing about me at all." This is a really flawed (and borderline false) analogy. Something as subjective as the creative arts is not in the same league as determining someone's pain level, but even if used this really flawed example (I don't buy it), all you're doing is is comparing someone's pain level to someone's subjective taste in literature. Most doctors understand that a scale of 1-10 is rating something objective; a rating for something as subjective as one's taste in books is not a useful metric here. "Would you maybe tell me how convincing it is on a scale of 1-10? If it's like a 2, I will probably give up given that useful context." No, I'm not going to give you a rating because a 2 out of 10 scale could mean something different to me than it would be for you. Here's the problem I'm noticing: You're relying way too much on numbers and scores as some sort of odd metric for a quick glance at something that's not going to tell you the full story anyway. You're treating it like it's some sort of scientific data like a poll number or a statistical analysis of a problem, rather than someone's subjective taste. Having a quick glance at someone's taste in literature by relying on something as subjective as scores and numbers is not going to give you a fully accurate picture as to why they liked or didn't like something. The only real way I'm going to know how someone feels about a book is if I read their written review.

​@@jacobhubbard9266 ​ I'd like to apologize before hand for this long comment, but hey I had fun writing it, I fully understand if you chose to ignore it. But multipara graph responses yield multi paragraph responses. Couple interesting points here, one part where I reckon you talked past what I said so I will try and restate it better for clarity. " This point doesn't make sense at all because you even imply it yourself that there isn't much meaningful difference between an 8.1 and 8.5. The difference is in degree, but that doesn't solve the problem I've pointed out earlier because, by the end of the day, we still have completely different criteria as to what constitutes an 8.1 and an 8.5. There is literally no difference between an 8.1 and an 8.5. If I had you evaluate a letter and you said it was a B-, what does that B- grade mean? Okay, you give it an B-, but what if I told you Albert Einstein wrote that letter? Does that change your grade? If it does, you've run into another problem, and that's an introduction of bias into you grades, which makes both your original grade and your new grade useless. This is why grades = feedback is problematic. A grade alone is not going to tell me (nor tell you) with any reliable ounce of accuracy why you got the grade that you got because it's so subjective and truly difficult to get everyone in the room to agree what constitutes an "A" or a "B." That entire section you wrote just kinda has nothing to do with what I said, you seemed to focus on the numbers I used which were just random stand-in examples, and threw in a random hypothetical Albert Enstein example, while ignoring that the reason I believe the analogy between letter grades for students and ratings for books is really flawed(and borderline false). Which is that letter grades in school and ratings for books on goodreads serve completely different purposes. If a teacher gives me a grade on an essay the point of that grade is to communicate to me how good the essay was for my own benefit. Thinking letter grades are not useful feedback for pieces of creative writing makes sense if you think that because any grading criteria for creative writing would be too nebulous, and therefore letter grades wouldn't provide useful feedback to the student. Which is a position I have no problems with. If the point of book ratings was to provide feedback to the author, I would buy this comparison, but that isn't the point of them at all. I agree that ratings don't give useful feedback to the author, that is not in dispute. The point of reviewers giving things ratings(for anything; restaurants, movies, books, tv shows, plays, resorts, etc) is communication to the consumer/reader/watcher/customer. So the entire letter grade comparison just falls apart for me. Because they aren't even trying to accomplish the same thing, so I don't think one being useless does anything to entail or suggest the other is useless. Also the bit about what if Albert Einstein wrote that letter is just a complete non sequitur and has nothing to do with anything I said, but I find the logic behind it as a counter example interesting. This isn't important to the rest of my point and I almost don't want to write this because I don't want you to randomly focus on this part and ignore what I said above, but I have to say. Wouldn't be kind of weird to think that example is a counter example to to grades being useful, but not a counterexample for written feedback(I don't think it's useful as a counter example to either to be clear). If you learned Einstein wrote something you had graded and giving written feedback for, would you (this is a hypothetical, please ignore that you don't give letter grades, Albert Einstein is also dead, You started the wild hypothetical chain with bringing in Einstein and letter grades)change your grade but not change the written feedback? If the answer is yes that's favoritism, if the answer is no, and you would also change the written feedback then the criticism you gave applies equally to written feedback so is just kinda weird. If knowing it was Einstein would not result in you changing the grade or the written feedback, then what was the point of this example at all? This response was so long it broke youtube comments, so is part 1 of 2. Sorry

Part 2 of 2 " It's the same issue with ratings. If see someone give a book you like 3 stars, what exactly does that 3 star rating mean? For all you know, they may think a 3 star rating is "decent" but you may think a 3 star rating is solid. Again, there no consistency here. Your 3 star rating means something different from my 3 star rating, and if we can't agree, there is nothing being communicated here. " This is just not a logically sound argument because it is very easy to come up with a lot of counter examples. "If our 3 star ratings mean something different, then our 3 star ratings communicate nothing. " is a classic if P then Q P therefore Q so let's bring up examples where P and not Q. I, of course, can see that someone has a different criteria from me, and understand that they are communicating something slightly different from me when they give that rating. If I think 3 stars should mean solid, and you think 3 stars should mean decent, I can just ask you(or notice from also reading your written reviews), hey what do you mean when you say 3 stars, and then in the future you can give a book 3 stars and I can think to myself: Oh cool, Jacob Hubbard thinks that book is decent. He has effectively communicated this to me. And I can look at all the books you have reviewed, and know that the 3 star ones are in your opinion, on average, decent. So to directly answer you question of "If you see someone give a book you like 3 stars, what exactly does that 3 star rating mean?" I would just ask them(or figure it out with context clues), and then I would know from then on. I have a pretty obvious real example of this. Read By Kyle is a human who also has a book channel and goodreads, and like me gives books ratings on a scale of 1-10. I have given 2 books a 10/10 ever, he probably gives roughly 10 books a 10/10 a year(in fairness he reads way more than me). When I give a book 10/10 I am clearly saying something different from when Kyle gives a book 10/10. And we both think our way is better. So according to your logical structure there can't be any communication between us when either of us gives a score to books. And yet like....we very obviously know what the other person thinks of a book by seeing their score to some degree. We obviously don't have perfect information based on the score, but clearly some communication is happening, and something doesn't have to be perfect to be of use. Kyle's ratings do all the things that make me think ratings are useful. If I then read his 4 paragraph review of a book and I see he is complaining about something for 1 of those paragraphs, but then I get to the bottom and see he gave it a 9.5/10, I will know that those complains were probably pretty minor, and just happened to take a disproportionate amount of words to communicate. I will also know specifically that that complain is probably something he doesn't really care about that much, and can use that information while reading his other written reviews. P (we have different standards and disagree on what the better standard is) And Not Q(We are able to communicate with ratings anyway) Then I think you make a good point that there is an underlying objective truth to how painful something is, and while some people think there is an underlying objective truth to how good a novel is, I am probably not one of those people. Which does stop the two scales from being a one to one comparison. So it is not a perfect analogy. However, I actually still think the analogy does mostly work at illustrating my point despite that difference. Because I don't think whether the underlying quality of a novel having an objective ground truth is really the crux of your objection to ratings. Your objection seems to be that everyone's scale is different, that a 6 for one person is not a 6 for another person. And if I understand you right and that is your main problem, you should have the same problem with the scale being used for pain. Because it would be insane to argue that everyone means the same thing when they say they are a 6/10 on the pain scale. And I guess I would want a reason for why the underlying truth being objective makes it so that everyone having a different reference point for each spot on the 10 point scale is not a problem for the 1-10 pain scale as a tool for very quick and broad communication. Unless you think the pain scale isn't useful, and doctors, or nurses shouldn't ask that which is a position you can have I guess, but I think it likely just based on how common of a practice that it is likely it does give them some useful info. As a random thought experiment: Imagine God descended and said. " I exist, i'm all knowing, by the way there is an objective truth to how good books are, there is an objective best book ever, there is an objective 457th best book ever, I God can rank all books from best to worst objectively(again I know this is a crazy hypothetical, whatever, you brought Albert Einstein back to life, not saying this is true that books can be ranked objectively, if you respond to this as if I am saying there is an objective truth to books I am going to be disappointed in the results of your love of rhetoric)." If that crazy situation happened, would that change your perspective on whether ratings for books are useful(if yes, why)? My read is that it wouldn't, you would still say that even if the ground truth is objective, the ratings people give vary a lot from those ground truths, and where each level of quality exists on a 10 point scale varies from person to person. God said something is the 500th best book, and someone might say oh wow, there are 499 books better than that, I guess it's like a 7/10, and someone else could think that wow, in all of history, and the millions of books that have been written, only 499 are better, that's gotta be a 10. This is obviously me highlighting a problem with ratings, but my point is if you agree that is a problem(which I think you probably do?), that should also be a problem for the use of the 10 point pain scale, which is why I think my analogy works despite your criticisms of it. " Here's the problem I'm noticing: You're relying way too much on numbers and scores as some sort of odd metric for a quick glance at something that's not going to tell you the full story anyway. You're treating it like it's some sort of scientific data like a poll number or a statistical analysis of a problem, rather than someone's subjective taste. Having a quick glance at someone's taste in literature by relying on something as subjective as scores and numbers is not going to give you a fully accurate picture as to why they liked or didn't like something. The only real way I'm going to know how someone feels about a book is if I read their written review." Lastly this, I think this is you guessing what is going on in my head, and extrapolating what I think about reviewing, or understanding books generally from seeing me talk about 1 topic , and is just not at all how I think. I have said I think ratings are a tool for communicating to readers that is useful in aggregate to help people find reviewers they trust more, and books they are more likely to enjoy. It's not the only tool I use, or the best tool. I don't believe that ratings gives me complete knowledge of someone's feelings about a book, or even close to that. It is obviously a flawed tool for getting information for how someone feels about a book, that doesn't tell the full story, that is not in dispute. But, if you are then going to say that because it is a flawed tool it, that therefore it shouldn't be used at all, and is useless. Then you are going to run into a problem. The problem is that a written review also absolutely does not tell you the full story of what someone feels about a book. I could write 20 pages about books and not include everything I feel about it. Really it is just not possible for me to perfectly communicate everything I feel about a book. Some things I feel about some books are simply beyond my ability to describe(and I believe they are beyond anyone's ability to describe). I have done a 44 minute review for a 2 book series and still feel like I left so much out. I have been a part of hour long spoiler discussions about a set of 2 short chapters, and the people who watched it have a pretty damn good idea for how I feel about those chapters, but they also don't know the full story. That doesn't mean they didn't gain information about what I felt about those chapters though, obviously. Now if you want to argue that written reviews give you a good enough idea of how someone feels about a book, and the gap in how flawed written reviews are, and how flawed ratings are, is large enough that you are going to ignore ratings, that's fine. Live your life how you see fit. That's a subjective call that I disagree with, but it is just a matter of opinion. I do think that if you are going to try arguing that ratings serve no purpose, don't work at all as a tool for communication, and that they are completely useless, well then we end up with this multi paragraph long discussion that has actually been pretty fun to write out. And I think you run into a bunch contradictions where it is hard to make an argument for why ratings for books are useless, that doesn't also accidentally argue why a bunch of clearly useful things are also useless.

“If you learned Einstein wrote something you had graded and giving written feedback for, would you . . . change your grade but not change the written feedback? If the answer is yes that's favoritism, if the answer is no, and you would also change the written feedback then the criticism you gave applies equally to written feedback so is just kinda weird. If knowing it was Einstein would not result in you changing the grade or the written feedback, then what was the point of this example at all.” I’ve addressed this already but I’ll address it again: If you knew something was written by Albert Einstein, that already introduces context for your evaluation, but if you evaluated something without that context, but then change your grade/evaluation after finding out it was written by Albert Einstein, that a bias being introduced into your evaluation. The point is that if you changed your grade because you learned this context, what bias does that introduce? If you didn’t change the grade, then how does that factor in the context of the letter (the letter in question was a letter directed at FDR to urge the US to build atomic bombs)? That still becomes subjective (and useless) at this point. Even if you didn’t change your evaluation or rating, how useful is that rating considering the context of the letter? It still contributed to the start of the Manhattan Project and led to making the bombs that dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Knowing that context, I’m not going to give a shit if you gave that letter 3 stars out of 5. It still did what it set out to do. The 3 star evaluation of the letter is white noise at this point. “I, of course, can see that someone has a different criteria from me, and understand that they are communicating something slightly different from me when they give that rating.” If I think 3 stars should mean solid, and you think 3 stars should mean decent, I can just ask you(or notice from also reading your written reviews), hey what do you mean when you say 3 stars, and then in the future you can give a book 3 stars and I can think to myself: Oh cool, Jacob Hubbard thinks that book is decent. He has effectively communicated this to me. And I can look at all the books you have reviewed, and know that the 3 star ones are in your opinion, on average, decent. So to directly answer you question of "If you see someone give a book you like 3 stars, what exactly does that 3 star rating mean?" I would just ask them(or figure it out with context clues), and then I would know from then on. That doesn’t address a fundamental issue I’ve raised here. Your point about familiarity doesn’t change the fact that there is still a bias in the way star ratings are interpreted. In order for that same level of understanding to take place, you have to assume that conversation is going to take place, which frankly most readers are not going to have time to do. People come in with their assumptions and biases and are not going take the time to communicate with the person and come to a similar understanding. “Solid” and “decent” mean two different things (unless in your world, they mean the same thing, but then that becomes a difference in terminology). “I have a pretty obvious real example of this. Read By Kyle is a human who also has a book channel and goodreads, and like me gives books ratings on a scale of 1-10. I have given 2 books a 10/10 ever, he probably gives roughly 10 books a 10/10 a year(in fairness he reads way more than me). When I give a book 10/10 I am clearly saying something different from when Kyle gives a book 10/10. And we both think our way is better. So according to your logical structure there can't be any communication between us when either of us gives a score to books. And yet like....we very obviously know what the other person thinks of a book by seeing their score to some degree. We obviously don't have perfect information based on the score, but clearly some communication is happening, and something doesn't have to be perfect to be of use. Kyle's ratings do all the things that make me think ratings are useful. If I then read his 4 paragraph review of a book and I see he is complaining about something for 1 of those paragraphs, but then I get to the bottom and see he gave it a 9.5/10, I will know that those complains were probably pretty minor, and just happened to take a disproportionate amount of words to communicate. I will also know specifically that that complain is probably something he doesn't really care about that much, and can use that information while reading his other written reviews.” This paragraph is super long and hard to follow (I would encourage you to break up your paragraph more, lol), so if I misunderstand your point here, I apologize in advance. If I’m understanding you correctly, the biggest issue I’m seeing here with this point is that there is assumption of familiarity with Kyle here that most readers are privy to, which makes your point here problematic. Most people are not going to take the time to familiarize themselves with someone’s review style, scoring metric, etc. unless you have a close relationship with that person, which again, most people are not going to do (I know I wouldn’t). Also, why in the world would you and Kyle have 10/10 scores that mean different things? That just reeks of inconsistency. Just do written reviews or spoken reviews and let people decide for themselves based on what you say if they may enjoy the book based on what you say about the book lol. Part 2 of 3

@@ericF-17 that's good, because I almost scrapped this video

Phillip is just here throwing shade at Phillip

@@jakebishop7822 Dr Philip should grade instead of rate. Imagine the views on "English Professor Grades Fourth Wing"

Probably, there are a lot of good kinds of nonsense

🤣🤣 But i'm impatient!

I think having them on goodreads is probably more important than having them on reviews, since on a video review you give so much more context

@@jakebishop7822 agreed - that was my reasoning.

It reframes it with chaos

I love the way the reframed stats were just so polarising haha I also agree i prefer the decimal 10/100 system for reviewing, like in my head most of my 5 stars are 9 and above because i dont think Ive read a 10/10

Thanks, definitely in the best shape i've been in right now in terms of strength, weight, and conditioning

No, evil Jake is evil.

This is fair, it often depends for me. But usually I have a pretty good idea of how much I will like a book pretty early on

Glad to hear it

I think it would take less time than you would think. Usually when I go in bookstores and browse the fantasy section, I still know very little about most of the books Maybe I will do it at some point and we will see

I'm very happy with how they look next to Sarantine. I think the midnight editions look better than the original editions, and for my preference it isn't that close.

@@Greenslime300 I love this

One of the main reasons I use Storygraph for stats instead of goodreads. The gap between a 7 and an 8.9 is really really large, but both are just 4 stars on goodreads.

@@mitch8948 couldn't have said it better myself

That's why it is evil Jake, and not alternate Jake

Gracias

I am just happy for someone to comment that 2 decimal places are better, because people mock me for my 1 decimal place

I don't get this whole narrative that you rate books compering them to previous reads. Every book is individual so rate your enjoyment base on current read, compering to previous reads especially if you read different genre makes no sense. Unless you binge read Emily Henry for ex. And you compere level of enjoyment reading all of her books.

@@Iza56Ranking is based on comparisons. Im sure everyone will rate in their own way. Some will even just say they liked or didnt like a book and thats fine. To rate books for one’s own reasons, you must compare against something. If not, then im not sure what youre basing your ratings on other than feelings. Im very happy with my rating system and im sure you are happy with yours. 😊

I give this comment 5 stars, but the psycho bell curving version of me only gives it 4.1 stars

@@jakebishop7822 hey I’ll take that…

Ratings are useful if they help people find things they'll enjoy. With the review pairing of Siskel and Ebert, I found myself agreeing with Siskel more, but Ebert's reviews were extremely useful to me -- not because we thought alike, but because we didn't. If you find a reviewer that you consistently disagree with, you can use them to identify works you're likely to enjoy: the ones they didn't like.

I mean at some point I have to try it just to reward the persistence of recommending it. I just checked cause I was curious and you first recommended it on my 2021 November wrap up. Which in fairness is after Jimmy told me to read Darkness That Comes Before which I just got to. I do tend to get there eventually, just takes me a while

@@jakebishop7822 ahhhhhhhh the Greatness that is Second Apocalypse…. Your taste in good literature never ceases to amaze me. The reason I am so persistent with my recommendations with respect to HxH is because I believe that the Van Diagram of our taste is literature(for the books we both have read)is “Literally a circle”. And I know for a fact that you have not experienced HxH. PS: The author of HxH is returning in october with new chapters, he takes breaks due to a back problem “Lumbago” where he finds it hard to draw. But his support from his fans has not wavered even a cent. I just have this itchy feeling for you to react to the Greatness that is HxH.

Last time someone was this persistent was Fith Fath with Charles De Lint so this does put it on my radar for sure.

@@jakebishop7822 well gotta read this now. Thanks for the recommendation. i am gonna read Charla De Lint in the foreseeable future

gooooooooooood. Love to hear it, 400 pages of slice of life glory

@Matt42MSG ya, I've heard experiencing dick can really change how people see the world. I've had a lot of people recommend dick, and It kinda sounds unlike anything I have experience with, but I'm expecting to like it. Sorry, I can't help myself

@@jakebishop7822 Do you shake your mother's hand with the same fingers you used to type that?

@@Isyfur thanks for the comment. I'm somewhat pacing myself on reading the rest of Vorkosigan and Penric because I don't want to run out of novels

@esmayrosalyne I have read Blood Over Bright Haven now and it is amazing

@@jakebishop7822 love to hear that

@@darmokandjalad7786 thanks

@@darmokandjalad7786 the question is whether they are Merchant and the Alchemist Gate good, or Truth of Fact, Truth of fiction good. And the answer, is no

Should be a good time

Oh 100%

Thanks, i'm about halfways done Boys Life now and enjoying it quite a bit

Might make it a yearly tradition to read a bunch of really short stuff in December