Record of Recommendation Source Ranking
A person maintains an informal hierarchy of whose recommendations they trust for which categories. The hierarchy was never written down, has changed at least three times, and governs more decisions than the person realizes.
Field Guide to Recommendation Source Ranking Operational Stages and Known Calibration Errors
Stage 1: The Hierarchy Exists
Every person who receives recommendations has an internal ranking of sources. The ranking is not documented. It operates without review. It governs a meaningful percentage of decisions about where to eat, what to watch, what to read, what to buy, and which opinions to take seriously.
The hierarchy exists. It has never been audited.
Stage 2: How Sources Are Assigned
A source is assigned to a category based on the outcome of one or two early recommendations. A friend who recommended a restaurant that turned out to be excellent in 2019 has been in the top tier of restaurant recommendations since 2019. The person cannot recall whether they have verified this ranking against subsequent recommendations.
They have. The results are mixed. The ranking has not changed.
Stage 3: Category Specificity
The hierarchy is category-specific in theory and loosely category-specific in practice. A source trusted for restaurant recommendations occupies a different position for film recommendations. These positions were established separately and are maintained separately.
In several cases the same source holds opposite positions in two categories: high trust for food, low trust for music, established by incidents the person can no longer clearly recall but which have continued to govern behavior for approximately four years.
Stage 4: The Absurd Self-Reinforcement
The hierarchy is self-reinforcing: a source whose recommendation worked once moves up the ranking and gets more opportunities to be right, which produces more data supporting the upgrade. A source whose recommendation failed once receives fewer future opportunities, which produces less data, which means the demotion is maintained by absence of evidence rather than continued evidence.
The top sources were mostly established early. It is difficult to unseat them because they receive the most recommendations, and most recommendations work out well enough.
Stage 5: The Governing Complication
Two sources in this person's hierarchy have overlapping expertise and frequently contradict each other. When they contradict, the person performs a rapid internal adjudication that weighs recent success rate, category alignment, and a variable factor related to how much they have enjoyed talking to each source recently.
The variable factor has determined the outcome in several cases where the fixed factors were tied.
Stage 6: What the Hierarchy Misses
The hierarchy accounts for taste alignment but not for knowledge gap. A source may share your taste exactly and also have seen only three films in the past year. A source whose taste differs slightly may be deeply informed on the category and therefore more reliably useful.
The ranking does not separate these cases. It was not designed to.
Field Note
Before following a recommendation, note which source it came from and which category you have mentally filed them under. Then consider whether that category assignment was made after more than two data points.
It probably was not.