Preference synthesis illustrated: Star Wars

EDIT: this post is intended to be mainly about preference ordering synthesis, not Star Wars.

This is my ordering of the core Star Wars movies:

The Empire Strikes Back > Return of the Jedi >= The Last Jedi > Rogue One > A New Hope = The Rise of Skywalker > The Force Awakens > Revenge of the Sith >> Attack of the Clones >>>>> The Phantom Menace

I’m sure that nobody will disagree with me or find these rankings in any way controversial ^_^

But I’m really posting these here to illustrate how preferences can be synthesised from partial preferences.

Because that order didn’t exist in my head, I had to synthesise it, fitting various arguments and orderings together. Had I done it at a different time, or in a different mood, I would have had a substantially different ordering.

A few things were probably invariant, though. The quality of “The Empire Strikes Back” was clear in my head, as was the terribleness of “The Phantom Menace”. “A New Hope” and “The Force Awakens” were easy to compare, being essentially the same movie.

But how did I compare “The Last Jedi”, which I found to be an inconsistent sprawling mess with some of the most beautiful scenes in all of Star Wars (and the “old hero retired” trope, which I really enjoy), with “A New Hope”, a tightly scripted elegant adventure story with little depth? And what about “Return of the Jedi”, which has a great ending, a decent beginning, but a muddelish middle?

Well, Scott has defined ambijectivity, which allows one to say that comparisons like “Mozart’s music is better than Beethoven’s” is subjective, while “Mozart’s music is better than the music of the three-year old girl who lives upstairs from me and bangs on her toy piano sometimes” is more objective.

The idea is that there are hundreds of different ways in which we can compare things, and some of these are simple enough that they have an easy objective or subjective answer. And Mozart and Beethoven are tend to beat each other roughly equally on the more objective criteria, and can go either way on the subjective ones.

But they both tend to beat the three-year old on almost all criteria.

How I ordered the movies

So, in comparing the Star Wars movies, I stated with a few clear orderings, and then compared movies based on criteria I felt were relevant. For example, “Return of the Jedi” and “The Rise of Skywalker” are reasonably similar, and though I found Kylo Ren an interesting character, Vader is… Vader. Iconic characters and emotional arcs were used here.

“Rogue one” is tricky, as it’s great on many criteria, but isn’t maybe as enjoyable to watch as some of the other moves (in most ways more realistic, more tragic). I could have put it in many different locations, depending on what I emphasised (emotional arcs would have put it lower; exciting story would have put it higher; showing the cost of war would have put it higher, and so on).

I was aware that I would be presenting the ordering to the public, and this made me more likely to use arguments that I could defend. For example, I personally really liked “The Rise of Skywalker”, but felt I couldn’t justify (to myself or others) putting above “A New Hope”. And do the original movies get a bonus for their originality? Maybe. In different moods, I could prefer different movies, quite easily.

After filling out a few orders, I then tried to make everything transitive, comparing a few of the movies one with another, and trying to collapse my circular preferences. There are two places where equal signs snuck in; note that these are pairs that are particularly hard to compare, and they gained the equal (or >=) sign mainly because I sorted out their relative ranking with the other movies and then really couldn’t compare them well with each other.

I was also expecting to put “Revenge of the Sith” higher than it ultimately was. Unlike the other two prequels, I feel it was actually a decent movie, and wanted to reflect that by putting it higher; but, in any one-to-one comparisons with the other non-prequels, it ended up the loser. So it was a sort of Condorcet loser.

Analysis of my synthesis

So, how would I compare my own synthesis efforts with what I described in my research agenda?

There are some similarities, to be sure. Partial preferences, and some things that might be defined as meta preferences (not wanting circular preferences, preferring defensible criteria, my ultimately frustrated desire to show that “Revenge of the Sith” was not a bad movie).

Maybe the most important point is that my preference ordering of Star Wars movies did not exist until I synthesised it, and that the synthesis process could have ended up being different. So this is evidence for the core theses of the research agenda: that making preference orderings is a constructive, synthesis process, and that it doesn’t have a single clear outcome.

All in all, my efforts were pretty sloppy. Many movies were compared on subjective feelings, the criteria I used were generally the first or second that sprung to mind, I made no effort to be systematic, or to consider at different times and with different moods or aims. If you feel I didn’t put many details in the description above—well, there weren’t that many details to put.

In these areas, I expect that an AI could do better, could correctly compute my “one-step hypothetical preferences”, and get a more invariant representation of my preferences. So, in that way, a preference learning AI would be like me, just better.

But the “meta-preferences” are a bit more worrying. Are they genuine meta-preferences? Especially since the second one is one that was more subconscious, and the third one looks more like a standard preference than a meta-preference. If the category of meta-preference is not clear, then that part of the research agenda needs to be improved.

Anyway, this is my tour through Star Wars and synthesising preferences, two burning issues of different importance.