Presidential greatness ratings chiefly reflect the rater’s values

Evidence

What is presidential greatness? Perhaps it is impossible to define. First, we can never know all the facts about a president’s actions and what independent effects these actions had on historical outcomes. Even with these facts, moreover, any ratings of greatness will mostly reflect the values attached by the rater to these outcomes. For example, raters who value military greatness will tend to rate highly presidents who involved the United States in victorious wars. Second, presidential greatness probably has many separate (and uncorrelated) components. How can these be weighed and synthesized into a single rating? — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 1345

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The observation that greatness judgments rest on unknowable counterfactuals (what effects actions ‘had’ on outcomes), rater values, and incommensurable components is a genuinely hard problem that resists quick summary and generalizes far beyond presidential ratings.
• XREF: Connects to the broader ‘great man vs. structural forces’ debate in history-of-military scholarship elsewhere in this library, and to measurement/evaluation theory in social science.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 1345