🧵 The Shirley Temple Paradox
Anonymous at Wed, 19 Feb 2025 20:41:11 UTC No. 16591783
A week or so after that something started troubling me - I'm a bit of a cinephile and have my own personal movie review system - and yet, for the life of me, I found it nearly impossible to figure out which Shirley Temple movies stood above the others. The consistent quality of the movies was "good to pretty good" and making a ranked order of my favorites was very difficult.
This stood in sharp contrast to my list of all-time favorite movies, drawn from a much larger/diverse field with incredible competition for the top spots. Yet, ranking my top 5 favorite movies of all time seemed, somehow, easier than ranking this much smaller set of movies. To make sure I wasn't crazy, I messaged my old English/Film Literature teacher to get his opinion on the matter. Now, he admitted that it had been some 60 years since he has seen a Shirley Temple movie, so I changed the prompt to this - "Which is harder - Ranking your top 5 favorite Martin Scorsese movies, or your top 5 favorite movies of all-time?" After deliberation, he replied stating that it was harder for him to pick his Top 5 favorite Martin Scorsese movies "by a hair".
So, I come to you lot. Is there some sort of mathematical principle to this paradox that I don't know the name for? Why is it harder to a ranked sorting of a smaller set than it is for a larger set?
My initial hypothesis is that it is akin to a field of wheat, wherein spotting the tallest stalks is easier when looking at the entire field as opposed to looking at a smaller section of the field where all the stalks are of height so similar that it becomes harder to differentiate them.
But is there a name for this principle already? I guess that's my question.
Anonymous at Wed, 19 Feb 2025 20:45:16 UTC No. 16591788
Yeah basically its been 100 year plot from Zionists in Israel and the UEA to collapse the west.
By using "intel" clipping and movies and polyamory to destroy us from inside. With a dab of china.
Also the iron dome meat grinder in israel palestine is an expression of, circumcision. Theyre insane.
Anonymous at Wed, 19 Feb 2025 20:45:45 UTC No. 16591791
Ugh, tried making this post a few times and screwed up the character limit and when I copy-pasted the post to edit it I missed the preface. I'm really bad at this.
Preface is that I rewatched a bunch of Shirley Temple movies in January, starting appropriately with Captain January.
Anonymous at Thu, 20 Feb 2025 03:47:11 UTC No. 16592130
>>16591783
interesting. Dont know if theres a name for it.
But to formalize alittle more imagine a universe U of 100 elements that are ordered. They are not simple numbers, but structured elements that are to be ordered in accordance with some principle. It will be natural that elements of the same or similar structure would be near each other in rank.
So whats really happening here is the structure of the shirley temple movies are so similar, that they are hard to order correctly. It is irrelevant how small the set of them are, just how similar they are.
To illustrate the a point, imagine a maximally small list of 2 movies to be ordered: Shaw shank redemption and Jaws: Revenge. In this case the movies cannot be further apart, and can therefore be ordered easily even though the set is small.