Paul Graham, Jessica’s husband and partner in Y Combinator, has tackled this subject on his website. “The biggest reason founders stop working on their start-ups is that they get demoralized,” he writes. “Some people seem to have unlimited self-generated morale. These almost always succeed. At the other extreme, there are people who seem to have no ability to do this; they need a boss to motivate them. In the middle there is a large band of people who have some, but not unlimited, ability to motivate themselves. These can succeed through careful morale management (and some luck).”
Joel Spolsky’s Secret to Start-up Success? Careful Morale Management.

I wanted to try the netflix challenge but never seem to have the time. This seems something that needs to be addressed. I’m a little busy right now so don’t know if this has already been addressed by netflix but this seems a too gross oversight from them.
Stole this from the comments of the previous linked marginal revolutions post.

Interesting — I have the opposite complaint about the Netflix 5-star rating system: I think it is too course. Why? Because even there are 5 ratings, it’s really effectively only 3 ratings if you only bother to rent movies you are actually willing to watch; the movies that I would give one or two star ratings to mostly go completely unwatched and unrated by me. As a result, if I am going to reserve the 5-star rating for movies I think of as truly excellent, most of the movies I watch end up with 3 or 4 star ratings — and as a consequence, Netflix’s *predictions* of ratings of films that I haven’t seen seem all to end up in the 3.3 to 4.5 star range. I suspect that the predictions would end up a little more accurate if I had a 3.5 star and 4.5 star rating available.
Marginal Revolution: *Spin* magazine moves from a five star system to ten.

What I do personally when I rate something is to put it in a 100 star system and then convert it to a 7 star system, (I remember reading a report that a 7 star system is less ambigous than a 5 or ten star system).  This is logical to me because like a 5 star system there is a clear middle star and at least a choice in ranking somethign closer to average or closer to perfect/worst.

Yes they are putting their reputation on the line when they give ten stars, but this will happen so infrequently that it will be harder to judge their overall trustworthiness.
Evaluation systems with fewer and grosser distinctions are often more credible because they are easier to monitor.
Marginal Revolution: *Spin* magazine moves from a five star system to ten.

ty to pk for the pointer

Synchrony and Cooperation
Scott S. Wiltermuth and Chip Heath
ABSTRACT
Armies, churches, organizations, and communities often engage in activities—for example, marching, singing, and dancing—that lead group members to act in synchrony with each other. Anthropologists and sociologists have speculated that rituals involving synchronous activity may produce positive emotions that weaken the psychological boundaries between the self and the group. This article explores whether synchronous activity may serve as a partial solution to the free-rider problem facing groups that need to motivate their members to contribute toward the collective good. Across three experiments, people acting in synchrony with others cooperated more in subsequent group economic exercises, even in situations requiring personal sacrifice. Our results also showed that positive emotions need not be generated for synchrony to foster cooperation. In total, the results suggest that acting in synchrony with others can increase cooperation by strengthening social attachment among group members.
Paul Kedrosky: Never Sing on the Trading Floor.

The Catholic church has understood this in other contexts. Official Catholic doctrine, as outlined in the 2004 document Communion and Stewardship, accepts the reality of biological evolution, and that the theory of evolution is compatible with the Bible. It has had to recognise that it would be fruitless to claim that evolution is inconsistent with a belief in God, because evolution did occur and is the source of the diversity of life on Earth. A similar argument earlier led the Catholic church to accept the reality of a heliocentric solar system and the existence of other stars and galaxies.
Why the Catholic church can’t ignore science – science-in-society – 06 February 2009 – New Scientist.