How does Semantic Inequality work?

We assume the following:

  1. That the internet is (approximately) infinitely huge, and contains (approximately) all the information there is.
  2. That everything can be placed into one single, very large, ordered List of Greatness.

With these assumptions, we attempt to figure out where in the List of Greatness each item belongs.

To evaluate "bacon", for example, we calculate two numbers: the number of items greater than bacon, and the number of items less than bacon. This is accomplished by counting the number of results from internet searches such as "bacon is greater than *" and "bacon is less than *".

Dividing these two numbers (well, actually, taking the "lower bound of the Wilson score interval") will give us the relative position of bacon in the List of Greatness.

Doing the same for ham and comparing the results, you can easily see that bacon is significantly greater than ham. Which is obviously and axiomatically true.

But it is telling me that Scott Baio is greater than Gandhi. That can't be right, can it?

I don't know, man. Scott Baio is pretty cool.