I think it's a huge usability problem, if we're talking about something Amazon-like that's presenting ranked data to an unsophisticated audience. Why pretend? B

I think it's a huge usability problem, if we're talking about something Amazon-like that's presenting ranked data to an unsophisticated audience. Why pretend? Because it produces something the user might be able to understand, that's why. (Yes, it would be extremely cool to make an elegant, intuitive interface to a fuzzy ranking. One reason why it would be extremely cool is that it's totally not obvious how it can be done, or even that it can be done.) I wasn't suggesting that my estimator is better because it's simpler, nor that anyone should care; just pointing out that the author of the article made a huge leap from "here are two things that don't work" to "and here is the specific arbitrary math-heavy thing I think you should do instead".