The portion I found most interesting, and best illustrates their point: "Here are a few stats I collected early Thursday for the new “Ghostbusters” movie:

The portion I found most interesting, and best illustrates their point: "Here are a few stats I collected early Thursday for the new “Ghostbusters” movie: IMDb average user rating: 4.1 out of 10, of 12,921 reviewers IMDb average user rating among men: 3.6 out of 10, of 7,547 reviewers IMDb average user rating among women: 7.7 out of 10, of 1,564 reviewers The movie isn’t even out in theaters as I’m writing this, but over 12,000 people have made their judgment. Male reviewers outnumber female reviewers nearly 5 to 1 and rate “Ghostbusters” 4 points lower, on average." And from its related article: "“Sex and the City” has seven Emmys and a suite of Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild awards... Any reasonable person should concede that “Sex and the City” was an above-average television program ... “Sex and the City” has an overall rating of 7.0 ... the average score ... is 7.3. So why did a show roundly considered seminal in the now ubiquitous genre of driven-New York-women-make-a-go-of-it programming score so low? Yeah, it’s men. Nearly 60 percent of the people who rated “Sex and the City” ... are women, and looking only at those scores, the show has an 8.1 ... Male users, though, who made up just over 40 percent of “Sex and the City” raters, assigned it, on average, a 5.8 rating." We like to think of these aggregated ratings, as some objective measure of crowd-sourced wisdom. But in reality, it's just an aggregation of thousands of people's personal preferences and biases. If you're someone whose tastes line up with the average critic/online-commenter, the aggregated ratings will sound pretty accurate to you. If you're someone who differs from the average critic/online-commenter, you'll be left wondering why all your favorite shows are rated so poorly. There's probably a moral in here somewhere regarding top-rated posts/comments on HN.