The Leierkasten Incompetence

Making decisions is hard and takes a lot of energy and time, and therefore we like to be influenced by our friends or family for our daily recommendations. What dress to wear or the ideal dinner that everyone likes are just sample questions in the overgrowing complexity of decision-making.

Chances are high that you visited a foreign city got hungry and tried to find some cheap, but good food. My common strategy is to walk around the city and when I find a restaurant simply look them up on Google Maps and decide simply on the amount of stars and quality. It's fast, easy, and so I thought quite reliable.

Obviously we'd invest more time into the research if we look for a specific cuisine or want to find the best Pizzeria in town. Quite successfully we adopted our own expectations to match the amount of time we invest into research. Looking up a restaurant in a couple of minutes doesn't comprehend with a week's prior investment.

Likewise, word has got around that many of the reviews on Amazon, for example, are simply fake or have been bought. But let's leave that aside for a moment and focus on the complexity of people, i.e. real people who evaluate something and either have completely different experiences or, as in this example, simply fail consistently at something so simple.

Have a look at the following reviews and tags. Family, meat, kids, and bar. You would probably expect a restaurant or bar that was reviewed here.

Well not quite. Over 255 people reviewed a brothel and even shared pictures of their food with this Google Maps Page. The place in question is called Leierkasten and is located in Munich. The problem is that all these reviews are legit and comprehensible, but they just reviewed the wrong place. Not the restaurant Leierkasten located close to Stuttgart, but the brothel in Munich.

Now it is understandable that people are influenced by fake reviews or profiles that are bought, but how can you trust this system when people are not only in a completely different city, but have nothing to do with eating. With this in mind, it might even be better if bots wrote the reviews. At least then the location is correct, and you wouldn't end up with your children at a place full of naked people.

Same with online dating, finding reliable recommendations is our societies biggest (first world) issue. At last a quick recommendation. If you want to check how good something is don't read the positive comments, just read the negative ones and you'll get a pretty good first impression.