Re: Comparing countries
Posted: Wed Jan 11, 2023 9:01 am
And also, the dumbest thread ever is clearly the coffee one, this is at worst second dumbest
As I've said, "You'll have to define your objective(s) much more precisely to arrive at any cromulent conclusion".El Pollo Diablo wrote: ↑Wed Jan 11, 2023 6:57 amI said "comparing", not "ranking".KAJ wrote: ↑Tue Jan 10, 2023 6:41 pmYou'll have to define your objective(s) much more precisely to arrive at any cromulent conclusion.El Pollo Diablo wrote: ↑Mon Jan 09, 2023 10:26 amIf you were to try to build up a picture of the relative state of a country compared to others, what measures would you use? What measures would you avoid? <snip> I'm thinking here across a whole range of aspects of life, such as economic, politics, health, quality of life, and so on.
Some ideas include the following:
- GDP per capita
- Human Development Index
- Gini coefficient
- Democracy index
- Health outcomes / healthcare system (life expectancy, % women dying in childbirth, etc)
- Quality of life
- Happiness
- Religiosity
Any others? And any of the above which are so problematic that they should be ignored (I reckon there should be a high bar for this)?
With "a whole range of aspects" you'll have to decide how to combine and weight them (and/or the underlying "measures") to get a single overall value for each country to allow ranking. That is non-trivial. With a number of "measures" comparable to the number of countries you can choose weightings to get any specified ranking.
As I've said, this is a non-trivial topic. This Wikipedia article gives a flavour.
But you haven't said what you do want to do. "Compare" isn't very precise You did say "the .. state of a country" (singular) and "what measures [to] use" (plural) suggesting you did want to combine numbers (measures) to arrive at a single value - maybe non-numeric, maybe multi-dimensional, but you didn't specify.El Pollo Diablo wrote: Well not really. I'm fully aware of how to combine numbers using weighting, it's just not what I said I wanted to do.
Isn't a thread arguing about which threads are dumbest the dumbest thread? Is there an infinite series of increasingly dumb threads where the next dumbest thread refers to the previous dumbest threads? I'm sure Godel had something to say about, or possibly Cantor.El Pollo Diablo wrote: ↑Wed Jan 11, 2023 9:01 amAnd also, the dumbest thread ever is clearly the coffee one, this is at worst second dumbest
Yes, I know. I've been involved in international benchmarking of railways, I'm fully aware of the complications involved in pitting one complex multifactorial system with metrics measured in slightly different ways against another complex multifactorial system with metrics measured in slightly different ways.KAJ wrote: ↑Wed Jan 11, 2023 11:58 amAs I've said, "You'll have to define your objective(s) much more precisely to arrive at any cromulent conclusion".El Pollo Diablo wrote: ↑Wed Jan 11, 2023 6:57 amI said "comparing", not "ranking".KAJ wrote: ↑Tue Jan 10, 2023 6:41 pm
You'll have to define your objective(s) much more precisely to arrive at any cromulent conclusion.
With "a whole range of aspects" you'll have to decide how to combine and weight them (and/or the underlying "measures") to get a single overall value for each country to allow ranking. That is non-trivial. With a number of "measures" comparable to the number of countries you can choose weightings to get any specified ranking.
As I've said, this is a non-trivial topic. This Wikipedia article gives a flavour.
Are you saying that the comparison is not desired to allow a conclusion that one country is "better/worse" than another? You did say (emphasis added) "the relative state of a country compared to others".But you haven't said what you do want to do. "Compare" isn't very precise You did say "the .. state of a country" (singular) and "what measures [to] use" (plural) suggesting you did want to combine numbers (measures) to arrive at a single value - maybe non-numeric, maybe multi-dimensional, but you didn't specify.El Pollo Diablo wrote: Well not really. I'm fully aware of how to combine numbers using weighting, it's just not what I said I wanted to do.
And I think "how to combine numbers using weighting" might be more complicated than you think. Creating a weighted sum is trivial, choosing appropriate weightings less so.