Star-Crossed Systems: The Philosophy of Rating Humanity
If you want people to behave well, rating them looks like an efficient shortcut. In practice, rating humans with five little stars mostly builds a thin layer of anxiety on top of already messy systems. And things become dystopian’ish fast. The core problem is simple: we try to compress complex behavior, unequal power, and shifting moods into a single metric, then pretend it is neutral. That is good for dashboards, bad for dignity....