Over the years I see plenty of top 10 lists, top 100 lists, and lists even longer than this… This is a sort of backstop topic for lots of blogs out there, and as with the magazines which were using this method to gain market share…it actually works…to a degree.
Of course, the mere label of something like…the top 10 file compression utilities, or the top 7 reasons to vacation in the Bahamas, and so on…bring in readers. This is an action which I find fascinating…I see a strange sort of hope in these readers, where they are expecting to get some information about something which they have been given a peek at… This sounds like Christmas morning when I was five years old…It goes without saying that the vast majority of these lists are close to worthless, and even at best are quite arguable.
In some cases they are lists of what are more appropriately names ‘popularity contests’. A great example came to me a couple weeks ago. I was in the midst of a conversation with my brother; in this case, we were talking about great movies. He suggested looking at the IMDB site… Things started to get very weird soon after that… The IMDB site has a top 100 movies of all time list…this is actually a compilation of the ratings which readers have given to movies that they have seen. Already you can see several obvious biases here.
This top 100 list was overly focused with movies which have been out for less than 10 years, and since there were no real criteria for how they rate or select these movies some of the results were plainly unbelievable, such as: the movie Toy Story 3 came in at number 30 of the all time best movies…
I think that this is a great example of the shortcomings of this sort of presentation…
Another aspect of this idea is the continually recurring notion that you can compare apples to oranges, in this case creating hypothetical matches between…let’s say the 1928 NY Yankees with some comparable team in the 2000’s… Or comparing Muhammad Ali with Joe Lewis, and so on…
The fact is that on a very superficial level you could chat about the comparative merits of these comparisons, but as you delve deeper you will run aground… For instance there are so many changes to the game of big league baseball that these comparisons are far more than artificial.
On a related note, I often wonder whether baseball was a more important game when it didn’t have so much real-time coverage. In the 30’s you either went to the game or read the box scores. This gave almost every game a mythic sort of cast… Now you can see the speeds of pitches and close ups of lots of spitting. Maybe you can see my point…
