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TheLurkerSpeaks wrote:

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The editors aren't choosing to make anyone INV either. That's our vague construct, not theirs.

ETA: It still invalidates the argument that since it never happened, the rule must be good.

What!? So the editors just roll dice and some players are randomly left out of episodes if their numbers come up? If a player receives nothing in an episode, that's an editing decision, even in the sense that they weren't important enough to be included and others were. They may not be deliberately saying "lets leave this person out of the episode" but at the end when they watch the final product, the goal is to tell a story of the winner. The winner's edit should therefore logically be among the most carefully crafted and tended to of all 16-20 players. Surely they intentionally do some "cooldown" episodes in which winners get less attention. However, if you are telling the story of the winner and you have 15ish episodes to do it in, why would the eventual champion ever be completely ignored for 1/15th of the story? That's nearly 7% of the season - no small chunk.

Your counterargument to the INV rule is entirely unscientific (and many, including myself, consider Edgic to be science + art). Take theories like gravity as what I hope to be an analogous example. Throughout history, we have constantly observed that objects are attracted to large bodies of mass. If you walk out your front door, you will be firmly affixed to the ground. However, should we put faith in this whole gravity thing JUST because it has been observed consistently without being disproven for eons? I mean, tomorrow I could wake up and find the laws of gravity to be wrong! Thus, the theory of gravity cannot be trusted and we should not assume that it will work when predicting what will happen tomorrow.

This is essentially what you are arguing, from what I am reading. If we cannot base future inferences on previous data, what the hell are we supposed to be going off of here? NO ONE could ever be eliminated for ANY reason if we do not take a somewhat scientific approach to applying our theories. What's stopping anyone from arguing that a player could go INV for the first 14 episodes and OTTNN5 in the finale and win? It's never happened before, BUT IT COULD. It's illogical but if past data cannot be trusted, who is anyone to tell me my theory is wrong?

Alternatively, if one argues that Edgic is not supposed to be scientific AT ALL, there's no point to doing ratings of any sort because the entire process is 100% subjective. The guidelines become irrelevant because the theories they represent are not falsifiable.

Finally, I agree that editors do not "know" the term INV. They don't know OTT or CP either. However, these are meant to be operational definitions for various types of editorial intent. They are meant to represent editing decisions in a somewhat organized way. While you argue that INV is arbitrary, it is not entirely. A player could not get 10 confessionals and be defined as INV. There are criteria. The issue is that different people use INV differently, sometimes for questionable reasons like helping a favorite stay viable. This IS a problem and I think a fully fleshed out visibility formula could theoretically provide a clear cutoff (but most seem resistant to changing it - I think giving "points" for SPV, story focus, and screentime would help resolve this, although quantifying screentime would be a bitch).

Nonetheless, a variable definition that could use improvement does not make the entire construct flawed. Everyone agrees that happiness exists, but no psychological measure assesses it perfectly. All in all, I see no scientific argument for dropping INV as an indicator of non-winners and think it should realistically mean death to a player's edit (I assume even INV players after Tina got story focus or SPV like the Vecepia example). It could always be improved if the community wanted to do it, but until that happens, we will just have to live with the operational definitions that exist, just like CP, OTT, UTR, etc. (which, by the way, I find to be applied more subjectively than INV is).