# the third tier poll



## science (Oct 14, 2010)

We're picking works to move from the 3rd tier of the Talk Classical community's favorite and most highly recommended works.

The winner (or winners in the event of a 2-way tie) of this poll will be promoted to the 2nd tier, joining Wagner's Ring Cycle. The loser of this poll, however, will be demoted to the 4th tier. (But we won't move down any works if two or more works tie for last place. And in the event of a 4-way tie, well, we won't move anything and we'll just go on to voting on the 4th tier!)

Of course all works will have a chance to continue climbing the next time we do whatever tier they land on.

Usually we would do such a small tier with such familiar works in a short time, but in an effort to include more people than usual, we'll leave this open 7 days.

Have fun! Also, please be considerate! Someone, hopefully, will be influenced by our selections!


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## RogerWaters (Feb 13, 2017)

Just so we know what we're voting for and why (I'm a relative newbie), why are there only 4 works in the third tier? And why these 4? Ta


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## science (Oct 14, 2010)

RogerWaters said:


> Just so we know what we're voting for and why (I'm a relative newbie), why are there only 4 works in the third tier? And why these 4? Ta


First, why four?

Well, ideally, it'd be three.

My targets for each tier can be seen here in column G, highlighted in light blue and labeled "Target."

I'm really not too bothered that almost none of the tiers are actually at their target - I can't predict the results of our votes well enough to achieve that anyway. (Our votes usually lead to "too many" or "too few" works being promoted relative to what the target might call for.) It's just a rough guide for me so that I can decide how many works we should promote when we do a tier.

Most of the tier targets are 25 because for aesthetic reasons I think that's the just about the perfect tier size on the Google doc. It also rounds off nicely to 100s for "target totals" (I'll explain that below). And of course when we "do" a tier of that size we can promote about 15 works, which enables us to have a "one +5 vote, two +4 votes, etc." structure for our voting, which I find ideal.

I also prefer for the higher tiers (such as the first one) to have fewer works than the lower tiers (such as, say, the one hundredth one) because that seems intuitively to me to be how tiers work on anything like this. You can see the "works per tier" graphs -- ideally, there'd be a nice smooth curve....

Column H, titled "target totals," which is a sum of the targets up to that tier. For example, the target total for the fourth tier is ten. That means that if everything worked out, we'd have ten works on tiers one through four put together. I'd like that because it would give us an implicit "top ten." You can see that if our targets are close, we can have implicit "top 25" and "top 50" and "top 100" and so on.

Next, why these four works in particular?

Because previous rounds of voting have put these four works on this tier. I don't recall the whole history, but in terms of recent results, Tristan was on the third tier and fell to this one as a result of getting the least votes when we last did the third tier. I believe that our votes promoted Brahms 4 from what is now the fourth tier last time we did that tier. Bach's mass and Beethoven's fifth have been there longer, and I don't remember how they came to be there... but regardless of the specific history, they got there as a result of our votes.

Hope this clarifies everything!


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## mmsbls (Mar 6, 2011)

science's answer is quite detailed and useful, but I just want to point out that this project, including it's earlier versions, has been ongoing for roughly 10 years. In that time many people have voted in various ways (it's changed over time, but has been fairly constant for several years now) so the position of any work is really the result of a large number of people (estimates are near 100 I think) for many years. Lately, we have repeatedly voted on all tiers so all works have a chance to move up or down. In theory if we went on long enough, a work now in tier 90, for example, could move up to tier 10 or higher. 

I'm not sure what everyone thinks of the tiers, but I don't care strongly about which works on on tier 2 compared to tier 5 or exactly how many works are on a tier. I do think it makes sense to start at small number of works in very high tiers and expand the number as we progress down the list.


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## Ethereality (Apr 6, 2019)

I have no problem with the way it's been going, I love all the work Science and the participants have been doing. So thank you to that. 

I have wondered how nice it would be to organize another type of list where all participants are urged to listen to all the works before voting on the ones they like most:

1. Each tier has no more than 5 works, to all be listened to
2. No one has to participate in all the tier threads, but get around to doing what they're comfortable with
3. Each participant writes down when about the last time they listened to all the works were (as an unofficial note that won't be used or documented)
4. With for instance 5 works, they can safely listen to all of them and vote for 2 or 3

But I apologize. This is probably the wrong thread for this.


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## science (Oct 14, 2010)

Ethereality said:


> I have no problem with the way it's been going, I love all the work Science and the participants have been doing. So thank you to that.
> 
> I have wondered how nice it would be to organize another type of list where all participants are urged to listen to all the works before voting on the ones they like most:
> 
> ...


It's a cool idea. If you decide to it, let me know. I'll scale back this project a bit so that everyone has time for both projects.


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## science (Oct 14, 2010)

About four days remain for voting here.


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