> >Sometime in 1930's Mozafer Sherif conducted following experiment. First he
> >asked the subjects to rank ten different authors. Than he gave them what he
> >told were excerpts from those authors and asked to rank those excerpts. In
> >reality all of the excerpts were from one author, Stevenson. You know the
> >rest.
>
> This all seems like an idiotic exercise.
This is an ingenious experiment, which is now considered classic.
>What's the point of
> "ranking" authors in the first place?
To investigate the correlation between the rank of an author and the rank of an excerpt "authored" by him.
>But the sort of stuff you
> doesn't prove much of anything: you select snippets of things, prose
> or visual art,
I got such complains too:
"I know the book, I did my thesis on it. I wouldn't have made any mistakes if some of the slots hadn't been filled automatically. I suppose this is what happened. "
Regarding visual art. If you refer to my "True art or a fake quiz"( http://www.ee.ucla.edu/~simkin/true_art_or_fake_art.html ) - all images are of the whole paintings.
> I'm sure you could
> play similar games with Shelley, Dickinson, Joyce, or Sidney Sheldon.
I haven't read any of those authors except for Joyce. It does not seem to me that his prose sounds like a machine translation. Can you give an example?
> What's the point?
Fun
Mikhail Simkin --- http://www.ee.ucla.edu/~simkin/
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