# Why it is the goal to achieve 5 stars in something?

Does anyone know why it is the goal to achieve 5 stars in something? Why not 3 or 6 or 9 or 358? I personally would have started the trend at getting 6 stars, being that it's a perfect number and all...

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This is just a complete guess, but I'd imagine it's because it allows for a simple breakdown of what the stars mean.

1: hate
2: dislike
3: neutral
4: like
5: love

Six stars wouldn't allow a "middle," nor would any even number. Three starts wouldn't give the level of detail required to distinguish between something that's pretty good and something that's great. Seven stars would be overly complicated.

Fingers.

Ah, that makes sense, Jack. I thought about fingers, but 10 is the base of our # system, so I wasn't sure why we would define perfection/love as half of what's possible.

Because there's 5 stars in the sky.

lisab
Staff Emeritus
Gold Member
Maybe it's because you can immediately see the rank at a glance. That is, it's easy to distinguish 2 stars from 3, and 3 stars from 4.

some people can't count to ten---

and it would take up too much space on the page, and too long to count to get right when there's a bunch to go through

turbo
Gold Member
I agree with lisab. Most people can't enumerate groups much above 7 at a glance unless they are cued with patterns like pips on playing cards. 5 or any fraction thereof is easy to enumerate at a glance.

I find it extremely frustrating myself. When we go out we like to eat in 5-star restaurants and stay at 5-star hotels. However, when you get used to it, it pales. You end up wishing for a 6-star restaurant. Boy, I'll bet you'd get some tasty chow there.

I think the most reasonable explanation is someone arbitrarily chose 5 as the maximum rank of something, then other people followed suit for other rankings. The next most reasonable is jack's explanation, combined with Lisa's.

I find it extremely frustrating myself. When we go out we like to eat in 5-star restaurants and stay at 5-star hotels. However, when you get used to it, it pales. You end up wishing for a 6-star restaurant. Boy, I'll bet you'd get some tasty chow there.

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Chi Meson
Homework Helper
some people can't count to ten---
"Our's goes to eleven."

lisab
Staff Emeritus
Gold Member
aaaahahaha...one of my favorite movies scenes of all time, and both rewebster and Chi were all over it...ahahha...:rofl:

turbo
Gold Member
My Fender Tweed Deluxe went to 12. Now that was a screaming little amp. Those little tweeds are featured on lots of recordings, and all the knobs on them went to 12.

aaaahahaha...one of my favorite movies scenes of all time, and both rewebster and Chi were all over it...ahahha...:rofl:
my thoughts went to George Bush and Sarah Palin after watching that scene

:rofl: Thanks rewebster, I had never seen that before. The final "these go to eleven" made me lol out loud.

Imagine that there is some hierarchy system in which it takes, on average, the same length in time to progress to the next level as it did for all of the previous levels. Let $t_{n}$ denote the (average) time to complete the $n$-th level. The unit of time we use is such that $t_{1}$ = 1. Also, let us denote with:
$$T_{n} = \sum_{k = 1}^{n}{t_{k}}$$
the total time necessary to complete the first $n$ steps. What my condition states mathematically is:
$$t_{n + 1} = T_{n}, \; n \ge 1$$
Using the (obvious) recursive relation:
$$t_{n + 1} = T_{n+1} - T_{n}, \; n \ge 1$$
we get the following recursion for the total times:
$$T_{n + 1} = 2 T_{n}, \; n \ge 1$$
This defines a geometric sequence with a quotient 2 and the first element is $T_{1} = t_{1} = 1$. Therefore, we may write:
$$T_{n} = 2^{n - 1}, \; n \ge 1$$

Thus, for completing 5 levels it would take 16 units and for completing 6 levels 32 units. If the available timespan is in this interval, it would make sense to define 5 levels.

lisab
Staff Emeritus
Gold Member
:rofl: Thanks rewebster, I had never seen that before. The final "these go to eleven" made me lol out loud.
Then you would *love* the movie it's from: This Is Spinal Tap!

turbo
Gold Member
Then you would *love* the movie it's from: This Is Spinal Tap!
Gotta love the Stonehenge bit!

Office_Shredder
Staff Emeritus