How to Think About the Difference Between Choice and Score in Jev

One thing that has been tripping me up with Jev is the difference between choice and score. I keep mixing them up.

I finally took the time to debate it with my digital assistant, and I came up with a better way of describing it to myself, which I will share here.

They're both actually returning probabilities. So I was like, well, if they're both choices that are scored by probability, why not call them both choice? Or more importantly, why have a score one that's separate from choice, if score is just giving you back probabilities on the options that you gave, just like with choice?

Okay, so score is very similar to choice in many ways, but the main difference is you provide it in order, as a ladder.

So it's like cold, warm, hot. Or for security: critical, high, medium, low. Or for customer service: about to cancel, super agitated, and so on.

So between the structure that is being used, the way you phrase the inputs, and the state that you provide, which is the context, the system itself understands all of that and does a better job of ranking them because it understands that it's a scale.

In the case of choice, you just get probabilities for whatever list you provide, and it could be in any order because it's not on a scale.

Nominal Scale: Only the selection name matters, not any particular order. Ordinal Scale: Only the order matters, but you can't tell the relative difference between the items.Chart Scale Types, 2021

So in my mind, I'm going to think of these as choice and scale instead of choice and score, because both of them provide scores.

I'm 85% confident that I have this right. If anyone has a better way of explaining it, please let me know. But hopefully this helps someone.