the.com/ranking
A way to pretend one number captures everything that actually matters.
means The act of arranging things or people in order according to some measure of importance, quality, or success, or the position something occupies in such an order.
from From 'rank,' which arrived in English from Old French 'ranc' (a line or row), itself likely borrowed from a Germanic source — a cousin of the word that gives us 'ring,' carrying the old sense of a circle or row of people. Originally a military term for a line of soldiers standing shoulder to shoulder, it grew into the idea of grades and positions, and the '-ing' form turned that into the busy modern habit of sorting everything into tidy lines.
- Origin
- From Old French 'renc,' meaning a row or line
- PageRank
- Google's founders named the algorithm after Larry Page
- Goodhart effect
- Any ranking gamed becomes a worse measure of quality
- Tournament math
- Chess Elo rankings predict win probability between players
- Arbitrary precision
- Tiny score gaps create dramatic rank differences
fifa world rankings — official monthly rankings of national soccer teams by fifa, updated since 1992
qs world university rankings — annual ranking of 1,400+ universities globally by qs since 2004
forbes billionaires list — annual ranking of world's richest people, published since 1987
pitchfork best albums — music publication's ranked list of top 500 albums of all time