A single score is a beautiful interface. It converts years of conduct into something sortable. Lenders, employers, marketplaces and strangers can make fast decisions. The system seems to replace prejudice with measurement.
Then the measured person starts living for the number.
Goodhart’s law is the familiar warning: when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure. Ratings inflate. Reviews are purchased. Drivers avoid difficult passengers. Creators optimise engagement rather than value. The platform adds hidden signals to defeat gaming, making the judgement less contestable.
The score invents a person
No global trustworthiness exists to be discovered. There are narrower questions:
- Will this seller ship the item?
- Does this maintainer review cryptographic code carefully?
- Has this borrower repaid loans under comparable conditions?
- Is this neighbour reliable with a spare key?
Combining them creates a new political object: the generally trustworthy person. Whoever chooses weights decides what kind of life counts.
The score also creates an attractor. High-ranked people receive more opportunities, generating more evidence and stronger rank. Newcomers face a cold start. A mistaken penalty can propagate across contexts. The interface looks neutral while amplifying its own history.
Better systems preserve plural statements, uncertainty and domain boundaries. They show who made a claim and allow relevance to be argued. This is slower. The slowness is the cost of not pretending a human being is one variable.