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Why is he being downvoted??? He’s right. Do you care more about China or Barbados? Clearly some countries are much more important than others, and it is fairly

Why is he being downvoted??? He’s right. Do you care more about China or Barbados? Clearly some countries are much more important than others, and it is fairly easy to make a decent ranking of importance (even if the exact ranking will vary from person to person)

CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
> Clearly some countries are much more important than others, and it is fairly easy to make a decent ranking of importance "Important" in this way? At least by the current methodology, it's fairly bias-free, which if you add "Countries that are more important than others weight more" to the mix you cannot call it bias-free anymore.
- pinkmuffinere 1y ago
  Counting each country equally is itself a bias -- it slides the weighting 100% towards international recognition of a country. As a result, Somalia and Morocco are weighted equally, which is obviously incorrect; nobody is upset if they can't go to Somalia. A common-sense weighting would be imperfect, but almost certainly better than an equal weighting on each county. "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good". edit: it _SHOULD NOT MATTER_, but I grew up in Turkey, am half Persian, and am very liberal. If that matters to you, please think good and hard about what kind of person you have become.
- oceansky 1y ago
  It's close, but the existence or not of some countries is sometimes disputed.
gtirloni 1y ago
> Do you care more about China or Barbados? What if I do? Is this index only for US citizens to make use of?
cyberax 1y ago
China absolutely is interesting to a lot of people. Both from a business perspective and for tourism. It's a country with several thousand years of history, after all.
- gs17 1y ago
  It's funny you took it that way, I took it as dismissive at Barbados for being smaller, and it's not clear which one was actually intended.
  - pinkmuffinere 1y ago
    Lol ya, I meant that easy access to China is much more important than easy access to Barbados. No shade at Barbados, I just think there are 100x more people that would go to China than Barbados edit: here's the number of US visitors to each country in 2018 (the easiest year for me to find data on). This isn't a perfect comparison, because the amount of visitors will of course depend on the visa situation for each country, but it does give some feeling for how useful increased access would be Barbados in 2018 had 204,830 US visitors -- https://www.caribjournal.com/2019/03/11/american-travelers-are-flocking-to-barbados/ https://www.caribjournal.com/2019/03/11/american-travelers-a... China in 2018 had 2,485,000 US visitors (but this may be padded by the state media) -- https://gowithguide.com/blog/exploring-china-s-tourism-landscape-2025-outlook-and-insights-5802 https://gowithguide.com/blog/exploring-china-s-tourism-lands... So China attracted approx 10x more US visitors, even though in 2018 it was much easier for Americans to go to Barbados than China. And I bet that gap has only grown in the last 7 years.

CaptainOfCoit 1y ago

> Clearly some countries are much more important than others, and it is fairly easy to make a decent ranking of importance "Important" in this way? At least by the current methodology, it's fairly bias-free, which if you add "Countries that are more important than others weight more" to the mix you cannot call it bias-free anymore.

pinkmuffinere 1y ago
Counting each country equally is itself a bias -- it slides the weighting 100% towards international recognition of a country. As a result, Somalia and Morocco are weighted equally, which is obviously incorrect; nobody is upset if they can't go to Somalia. A common-sense weighting would be imperfect, but almost certainly better than an equal weighting on each county. "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good". edit: it _SHOULD NOT MATTER_, but I grew up in Turkey, am half Persian, and am very liberal. If that matters to you, please think good and hard about what kind of person you have become.
oceansky 1y ago
It's close, but the existence or not of some countries is sometimes disputed.

gtirloni 1y ago

> Do you care more about China or Barbados? What if I do? Is this index only for US citizens to make use of?

cyberax 1y ago

China absolutely is interesting to a lot of people. Both from a business perspective and for tourism. It's a country with several thousand years of history, after all.

gs17 1y ago
It's funny you took it that way, I took it as dismissive at Barbados for being smaller, and it's not clear which one was actually intended.
- pinkmuffinere 1y ago
  Lol ya, I meant that easy access to China is much more important than easy access to Barbados. No shade at Barbados, I just think there are 100x more people that would go to China than Barbados edit: here's the number of US visitors to each country in 2018 (the easiest year for me to find data on). This isn't a perfect comparison, because the amount of visitors will of course depend on the visa situation for each country, but it does give some feeling for how useful increased access would be Barbados in 2018 had 204,830 US visitors -- https://www.caribjournal.com/2019/03/11/american-travelers-are-flocking-to-barbados/ https://www.caribjournal.com/2019/03/11/american-travelers-a... China in 2018 had 2,485,000 US visitors (but this may be padded by the state media) -- https://gowithguide.com/blog/exploring-china-s-tourism-landscape-2025-outlook-and-insights-5802 https://gowithguide.com/blog/exploring-china-s-tourism-lands... So China attracted approx 10x more US visitors, even though in 2018 it was much easier for Americans to go to Barbados than China. And I bet that gap has only grown in the last 7 years.