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Do the math yourself

The point of publishing the arithmetic is that you do not have to trust us. Every award has a page that lists each act, its category, its score, and its weight — and the whole equation is one line.

The equation​

Monkey Award  =  ( SUM over all acts of  score(category) x weight(category) )
                 -------------------------------------------------------
                 (        SUM over all acts of  weight(category)        )

A weighted average. That is all of it.

What is deliberately not in it​

Several plausible-sounding adjustments were tried and retired, and it is worth knowing why, because each one sounds reasonable until you use it:

  • A headwind multiplier — credit for voting the hard way against your own party. Retired: it requires the movement to decide what was politically hard for each person, which is a judgment about their circumstances rather than a record of their acts.
  • An outcome multiplier — weighting by whether the vote actually changed the result. Retired: it makes a person's award depend on how everybody else voted.
  • A persistence multiplier, floors, a shared curve, a peer cohort — all retired, all for the same underlying reason: each one made the number about something other than what this person did.

What survives is the plainest possible instrument, and plain is a feature. A number a citizen can recompute with a calculator is a number they can argue with.

Reproducing one​

  1. Open a politician's award page and take the table of acts.
  2. For each act, look up its category's score and weight in the published math table.
  3. Multiply, sum, divide by the sum of weights.
  4. Round as the table says.

If your number differs from ours, that is a finding, and there is a channel for it. The equations are normative in the math table file; where the prose and the table disagree, the table wins on arithmetic.

The identifiers do not lie about the language​

Routes like /politicians/:key/score stay routable forever, and internal field names still say "score", because breaking a link somebody shared is worse than an old word in a URL. What binds is every rendered string a citizen reads.

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