🃏 Marked Cards: The Illusion of Global Rankings — and How to Rewrite the Rules
h-index, QS, WADA, ESG — who actually deals the deck? And what to do if you're mathematically not supposed to win.
"Your opponent wrote the rules. And can rewrite them mid-hand."
Would you stay at that table? Because we're still sitting there.
Imagine sitting down to a card game. You've studied the rules and built a strategy. Then at the table you find out: the rules were written by your opponent — for himself — and he can rewrite them on the fly.
In the real world of business, science, education and sport, we've been playing exactly this game for twenty years. And most people still sincerely believe global rankings are an objective mirror. They aren't. They're a filter tuned for specific players. Let's break it down.
TL;DR — five facts that should keep you up at night
The science illusion: h-index as a tool of invisibility
The h-index was invented by physicist Jorge Hirsch in 2005 — basically a back-of-the-napkin side project (see Wikipedia). Twenty years later that "napkin" is the global currency of an academic career: grants, faculty positions, media citations — all run through h-index.
Under the hood it gets interesting:
Language monopoly
Scopus and Web of Science are 90–95% English-only. Japan's 2016 Nobel laureate in physiology Yoshinori Ohsumi published mostly in Japanese for decades — and in global indices he basically "didn't exist" until the prize.
Dictatorship of "trending" topics
In 2023 every 5th AI paper cited at least one arXiv preprint from the same year. In applied agronomy the citation cycle is 7–10 years. Guess whose h-index grows faster.
Legalized gaming
In 2024 Retraction Watch and Nature exposed dozens of citation rings — cartels where scientists cross-cite each other (citation cartel on Wikipedia). In one Saudi case a single author grew his h-index from 12 to 58 in a year. And Google Scholar still lets you merge other people's papers into your profile.
The paradox: a scientist whose irrigation system actually saved a Sahel region from famine has an h-index of 6. The author of fifty throwaway "ChatGPT prompt" papers in a niche English journal has 42. Guess who gets the grant, the conference, the chair.
The h-index doesn't measure usefulness to the world. It measures integration into one specific coordinate system.
The "Eternal Harvard" effect
Open the top 20 of QS World University Rankings over the last 15 years. It's barely changed by 5%. MIT, Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard — same brands, same order. Looks like a sign of unrivalled quality.
of the QS weight is academic + employer reputation (essentially: surveys)
— citations per faculty (Scopus again, English again)
— actual teaching quality. That's it.
Classic Matthew effect: top universities are historically known → they get named in surveys by inertia → they keep their position → name recognition grows → they get named again. The loop closes.
In 2023 a scandal broke: Columbia University admitted it had been inflating data for US News for years — then dropped from #2 to #18. If Columbia does it, ask yourself what everyone else is doing.
The net result: universities worldwide aren't doing education, they're doing metric-hacking — hiring star professors on 1-day-a-year contracts just to claim their publications, and inflating PR budgets to tens of millions.
Sport as agreement: the Enhanced Games case
We're used to treating sport as the last bastion of pure objectivity. "Faster, higher, stronger" sounds like a law of physics. But the foundation here is just as artificial: who decides what counts as doping? Why was caffeine banned until 2004, then dropped from the WADA list? Why are Nike Vaporfly super-shoes (+4% running economy) allowed, but the Speedo LZR Racer swimsuit banned?
⚡ Enhanced Games: May 21–24, 2026, Las Vegas
- · An alternative Olympics. No doping control. Pharma use is open.
- · Prize pool: $500,000 per win + $1,000,000 per world record.
- · In February 2025 Greek swimmer Kris Gkolomeev already swam 50m butterfly in 20.89 — 0.02 faster than the official world record. On pharma, outside WADA rules.
- · Investors: Peter Thiel, Donald Trump Jr., 1789 Capital. Not fringe — serious money.
Why patch the old system at all?
The world no longer rotates around one axis — and the numbers already say so:
- 🇨🇳 China overtook the US in scientific publications in 2022 (NSF Science & Engineering Indicators) and leads in 57 of 64 critical technologies (ASPI, 2024).
- 🌐 BRICS+ after the 2024 enlargement is ~45% of world population and ~37% of global GDP at PPP.
- 🇮🇳 India graduates more engineers per year (~1.5M, AICTE) than the US and Europe combined.
- 🇦🇪 The UAE launched the world's first AI minister post back in 2017.
The usual offer is compromise: "let's add a new criterion to the old ranking", "let's tweak the weights". That's trying to upgrade a 1990s sedan to Euro-6 standard. Cosmetics won't fix a skewed foundation.
Right Thing: rebuild from scratch
That's exactly why I launched my own project Right Thing (righthing.org — the link is also in this site's footer): an attempt to rebuild the architecture of global metrics. Not one "correct" ranking, but a whole ecosystem of decentralized indices on AI and blockchain, resistant to manipulation.
World Right Science Index
Alternative to h-index. Counts publications in any language and measures applied impact (deployments, patents, lives saved). AI filters out citation cartels.
World Right Rating of Universities
Education 40% / Research 35% / Social Service 25% + mandatory regional slices. Comparing a university in Lisbon and Almaty on one scale is methodological nonsense.
World Right Games
Smart contracts, AI judges, transparent policy on technology and declared pharmacology. Exoskeletons and assistive tech as separate categories — not disqualification.
World Right Culture & Heritage
NFT certificates for cultural contribution. An anonymous author from Kyrgyzstan and a New York gallerist sit in one verifiable space.
World Right ESG Index
On-chain verification of real ecological impact with regional context. No more 'paper' carbon credits.
World Right AGI Governance
34% of votes (with veto) for an impartial open-weight AGI in parliaments and the UN. 66% and sovereignty stay with humans. All AGI decisions fully transparent.
Rankings aren't tables on the internet. They are distributors of global capital, attention and grants.
Whoever controls the metric controls where the money, the brains and a whole generation of students will go. One question is left.
Will we keep playing by rules where we're cast as extras — or do we have the nerve to write our own?
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