... The best approach is simply to use your opinion, completely subjective, and come up with your own ranking of the courses you see. I like the deck of cards analogy - the top card is Pine Valley and the bottom card the muni up the street. You play a new course and decide where in your deck you want to slide it where those above, you think are better, and below, not as good. No one can argue with your "system" as its purely your opinion...
I'm not sure why I went on this long rant about objectivity, but I've decided to go ahead and post it. It was inspired mainly by coming across a philosophical summary about subjectivity and objectivity.
Dwayne Mulder, PhD, a faculty member at Sonoma State University in California, has published a summary about the concept of objectivity. It can be found here:
"Objectivity", Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
https://iep.utm.edu/objectiv/"We confront, then, an epistemological challenge to explain whether, and if so how, some subjective impressions can lead to knowledge of objective reality."
-- Dwayne Mulder
In the essay Dr. Mulder discusses the concept of intersubjective agreement, which occurs when several or more people agree on a subjective matter. His example was the agreement of a few people that it was cold outside on a 68 degree day.
"Would we have a high likelihood of objective truth if we had intersubjective agreement among a large number of subjects? This line of reasoning seems promising, except for another observation from Locke about the possible discrepancies between subjective impressions and objective reality."
-- Dwayne Mulder
John Locke notes how the human perception of sound (mechanical waves) and color (electromagnetic waves) have nothing to do with the actual nature of these things. Here I'd argue that a golf course has measurable physical qualities that are perceivable as the "thing-in-itself."
Jonathan, I struggle with the assertion that golf course evaluation is purely subjective. I'm not saying you're wrong, but it's a discussion that could become quite philosophical in nature.
Subjective means "based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes or opinions."
Objective means "(of a person or their judgment) not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts."
Preferences in artwork is a classic example of subjective opinion. There are no facts to consider, other than the artist's name.
Golf courses serve a dual role as a landscape design and a playing field that facilitate a game for which statistics can be compiled. What if I played two courses a hundred times each and evaluated each shot purely in physical terms, like distance to hole, elevation change of shot, orientation of bunkers from the shot origin, how the ball will roll, etc.? In other words, a massively complex database which characterizes the nature of the shots.
If we broke down the types of shots that the highest ranked courses yield, I think we'd find that they would tend to feature moderate elevation changes with more uneven lies, with sloped and undulating greens that required a keen understanding of gravity and momentum. There would be fewer straight, flat shots devoid of danger. And fewer lost balls.
A decade or so ago, one of our former regular contributors was studying in school whether golf course architecture could be refined and perfected through statistical analysis. I disagreed openly with him at the time, as I felt a golf course was too complicated to characterize, but I can see some similarities in the argument I'm making here.
In golf we rely on our own computer brains (plus some aids to measure distance) to assess the course. Some analysis is quantitative and some is qualitative.
What if a thousand raters played two courses and the composite average rating of one course was better with a 99% degree of statistical confidence? Why do the great Mackenzie courses maintain their lofty ranking as great through three or more generations of golfers? It feels unfair to the best architects to say there's no basis in fact. When do statistics and consensus opinion become a significant fact? These best-of lists stay pretty stable over decades of using different raters. Pine Valley has been #1 in the world for 30 or more years on virtually every list.
Once again, I submit that evaluation is a significantly objective exercise, but the physical properties are too complex to represent as facts, even as your mind is constantly assessing the real, physical nature of the course.