Everything’s overrated. That’s not just my opinion, and I’m not just having a hypercritical day. I mean, scientifically, literally, I think everything’s overrated. We rate a lot of things in everyday life, things like books and movies and restaurants and stupid blog posts and, anyway, I think there’s a rating bias. I think people, in very large numbers, say they like things more than they really do. It’s counter-intuitive really because most humans love being haters. We love to criticize and point out flaws and kick the wounded YouTube video while it’s down. So what gives? Well, it’s something I call crowd or associated bias.

This kind of bias is super common when it comes to books (well, and movies and many, many of the other things we now have the burning desire to rate). Here’s how it works. You get a book by a popular writer. The general public is already predisposed to like anything ever produced by this writer and before the book is widely available they pay people to say nice things about it so that before any books are even sold, it’s a buzz-worthy bestseller. As such, the book’s “bestsellerness” becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So by twenty-first-century nature, a ton of books are overrated. When people start reading these books they perpetuate the lie because people are sheep and they want to be in the club – any club. As they start to turn the pages and they discover that the book is just average or maybe outright bad, instead of giving the book the two- or three-star ranking it deserves they tilt their rating based on what the crowd says. Well, it’s by this really great author who has a lot of other award-winning books so it must be great, I’m probably just missing something … and I certainly don’t want to be the one person who dings the book that everyone else likes because then people – all these people I don’t know and will never meet – will view me as simple-minded and borderline illiterate … they’ll think I’m not smart enough to get the book’s brilliance …

And so our mostly three-star world gets a mostly five-star rating which means in essence that we’re all just really fuckin’ each other over.

So far in 2018, I’ve read twenty-two books. I research these books kinda seriously and I rarely read one that doesn’t have a “four-and-half or five-star” rating. I know it’s unscientific, but I personally rated twelve of the twenty-two as “three-star” books. I only ranked two of the twenty-two books as “five-star.” That means that nearly sixty percent of these books were just average when the world at large considered them fantastic. That’s because almost all people rate something – a book, a movie, a bottle of wine, a cigar, an employee’s performance – based mainly on how the crowd rated it. There’s crowd/associated bias and when our opinion differs from the masses you know what we do? We assign our stars the way the majority does, most often assuming we must be wrong and the angry mob is right.

Most people will give a two-star piece of crap book a four- or five-star rating because they don’t want to be viewed as the “bad guy,” the only guy who doesn’t get the joke (even though their judgment is totally anonymous). And these inflated evaluations, in turn, result in me purchasing a boatload of average books, thanks a fuckin’ lot!

♦

Turns out the workplace is just as biased and gutless as the online bookstore. About five years ago the human resource dudes at work started noticing that almost every worker in the place was, essentially, a standout employee. For all intents and purposes, the way employees are evaluated at work is the same as the book-world star system … one star means that you shot up the place in a workplace rage incident, two stars means you should be put on probation and will soon be fired, three stars indicates you did everything the job requires, a four-star review says that you’re a high achiever who should get a raise and the employees that get a five-star rating at work are given an ownership stake in the company and access to the wives of the other employees.

HR found out that there were really very few one-star and five-star employees, but there was a disproportionate amount of four-star employees. In other words, almost every employee was a rising star and, if left unchecked, the company would go broke handing out raises and bonus checks. What the company decided to do was “adjust” the ratings every year after the managers completed their reviews. What that “adjustment” sounded like was a memorandum to employee review givers that said, “Hey man, no way every guy in your department is a high achiever deserving promotion, reevaluate your ranking (that is, turn almost all of those four stars into threes and twos) or we’ll do it for you.”

The company knew that the average manager, like the average book reviewer, will always artificially assign high value to something or someone because they want to be associated with a thing that is “five stars” more desperately then they want to be associated with the truth.

If the average human can associate himself with a “five-star book” or a “five-star movie” he will think that in some contrived way that makes him five stars.

And this phenomenon, my friends, explains why there are too few five-star books and too many Star Wars movies and people dressed up as Jedis.