- Joined
- Oct 19, 2009
I'm not sure where to put this...so I'll just put it here.
Mathman, in some other discussions, raised the point that randomly selecting 7 judges' scores from a panel of 9 does not really "add more randomness" to the judging, because whether you selected 7 judges randomly from the whole population of available judges; or you select 9 judges randomly, and then from those 9, you further shrink it to 7 randomly, makes no difference.
I don't know why this thought came to me so late, but this is not really true, because it is assuming that the initially selected 9 judges (from which the final scoring panel is shrunk down to 7) are randomly chosen, and they are not. Most significantly, the initial panel of 9 judges is chosen to at least be somewhat fair in representing certain nations. When you randomly toss out 2 judges' scores, you have the possibility of skewing the final result in favour of certain nations' bias "just because".
So it would be very important to keep the scores of all the original judges on the panel in considering the final score, not only so that you have a larger sampling of scores from different judges...but also in order to not introduce a random element of bias in terms of which scores are accounted for and which are randomly tossed out.
Mathman, in some other discussions, raised the point that randomly selecting 7 judges' scores from a panel of 9 does not really "add more randomness" to the judging, because whether you selected 7 judges randomly from the whole population of available judges; or you select 9 judges randomly, and then from those 9, you further shrink it to 7 randomly, makes no difference.
I don't know why this thought came to me so late, but this is not really true, because it is assuming that the initially selected 9 judges (from which the final scoring panel is shrunk down to 7) are randomly chosen, and they are not. Most significantly, the initial panel of 9 judges is chosen to at least be somewhat fair in representing certain nations. When you randomly toss out 2 judges' scores, you have the possibility of skewing the final result in favour of certain nations' bias "just because".
So it would be very important to keep the scores of all the original judges on the panel in considering the final score, not only so that you have a larger sampling of scores from different judges...but also in order to not introduce a random element of bias in terms of which scores are accounted for and which are randomly tossed out.