Kanye Was Right (Logically Speaking)

Dammit

My wife suckered me into watching the MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs) after the Internet was abuzz over this whole Kanye West fiasco.

I’m not going to rehash how much of an ass Kanye West is (although I’m very pleased Obama put him in his place), but I did want to bring up something I’ve been noticing for a while now regarding award shows.

And unfortunately I think this means Kanye was right.

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The VMAs, like many awards, are chosen by some secret backroom panel of experts. The criteria for $election is unknown, but we’re made to assume that it has something to do with artistic value. But let’s look at the award show through a software designer’s eyes.

MusicVideo is an class. Let’s assume that it has some fitness or score that can be used to rank it against other MusicVideo objects. This score should be completely dependent on the merits and value of the video. Each MusicVideo also has a list of tags that can be associated with it, for example: “rap”, “rock”, “hip-hop”, “group”, “male”, “female”, “newArtist”.

With this design, finding the best video within any category is a simple process:

Gather all videos that contain certain tags.
From that filtered list, get the highest scored video.

GetHighestScoredMusicVideo( GetMusicVideosWithTags( allMusicVideos, “female”, “rock”) );

But watch what happens when we apply this model to the results of the 2009 VMAs.

bestVideo = GetHighestScoredMusicVideo( allMusicVideos); // Beyonce
bestFemaleVideo = GetHighestScoredMusicVideo( GetMusicVideosWithTags( allMusicVideos, “female”) ); // Taylor Swift

The best video of the year, the video with the highest score of all videos, belonged to Beyonce. The best female video of the year, the video with a highest score of all videos with a “female” tag, belonged to Taylor Swift.

But didn’t Beyonce’s video have a “female” tag? Something doesn’t make sense.

If Beyonce has the absolute best video – and she’s female – logically, how can she not have the best female video? Dammit. Kanye was on to something here.

There’s really only a single explanation: the award show is corrupt. I played with the concept of defining fitness some other way. For example, what if there is some extremely complex “relative” ranking system. That is, the score is a function of not only the individual video’s parameters, but that of the entire list of videos.

In fact, you could muster up whatever bizarre video ranking system you want. But this still means that at some point, Beyonce and Taylor’s videos need to be compared to each other in some way. And these results are not repeating.

Alert the media! MTV may be trying to make money!