Grading is BS

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And to prove how I feel about it, I never have had a Facebook account, I do not presently have a Facebook account, and I never will have a Facebook account. My "social medium" is getting in a car, or on an airplane, or ON AN AMTRAK TRAIN, and interact with the giants of numismatics face to face.

Anyone, and I mean A-N-Y-O-N-E who uses Facebook as their source of news deserves the label "ignorant".

 

For better or worse, with the recent developments in Artificial Intelligence and neural networks, not only CAN machines take over coin grading, they most certainly WILL.

It no longer even involves teaching a computer a grading algorithm, or "programming" one. They can "figure out" coin grading just kind of "on their own" given enough examples to learn from.

 

Once they've got that down, along with a consistent "eye appeal" measure, automated valuation should be much easier -- just machine-learning over all the completed-sale datasets. And all the human collectors can go over to full-time social interaction -- they won't have to deal with those annoying physical coins at all.

 

Eye appeal maybe, but value should have nothing to do with grading. You have two coins in the same condition with the exact same amount of wear but one is worth $10 and the other $10,000 would be no justification for giving the $10,000 coin a higher grade.

 

I couldn't agree more, Conder, and I am waiting to see Doug's reply as he's taken me to the woodshed on more than one occasion on this very subject.

 

If anything, it would make the grading more accurate. If you removed eye appeal altogether, it would further make grading less subjective. It would make the dealers mad, but at least you would have a grade based on the preservation of the coin. Down to market grading!

 

It sure would make buyers happy, because you could then buy some premium eye candy for the same price as an ugly terminal-toned dog.

Or you'd have to pay premium money for the dog. Which is preferable?

 

I believe that is what Doug said: "they are slabbing the same classic coins over and over and over again."

One member wrote: "For a person who wants to put a coin in their vault for personal enjoyment, there is no benefit to grading the coin."

Actually there is, it keeps it out of the elements in the safe.

 

yes, insider, but he then quoted populations of existing classic coins and used the number of submissions to show how many of them were being slabbed.

These calculations are absent the resubmissions.

 

depends on the dog... they usually "fetch" a premium. Cats, OTOH, may be priced at a discount.

 

If your goal is protection from the elements wouldn't you be better off with air-tite snaps + air-tite tube at a fraction of the price? ...

Why are we changing the color of our posts?

 

well, I thought you were trying to say that due to a limited number of classic coins that there were fewer and fewer to grade and through the context of your comments that's what I inferred.

 

and there's your proof of gradeflation

 

Because we can! Kinda neat too as it keeps my comments separate from the posts I'm commenting on such as yours.

 

The attractive coin would still cost more. The desirability of the coin would still factor into the cost. The eye appeal simply wouldn't be factored into the grade.

 

In my "personal" grading system, I won't go up a grade just on eye appeal unless the coin was already at the top of the grade, and it better look like a Battle Creek Morgan to get that much. Decidedly unattractive coins, though, by nature ought to be penalized.

I'm looking at this from the standpoint of this decision: Do I, as a seller of this coin, wish to trust only in the grading skills of my potential buyers, or do I not, in order to get the price I want? I cannot ever see the former being possible. Too much of the potential market is still more or less dependent on the grade on the slab, and we can't just completely freeze these people out of numismatics. Should you have to take a grading test before you're allowed to buy a coin?

That's what makes the (true) premise of this thread all the more horrifying.