Moving beyond "Reputation"--the Market View of Reality
georgemw at speakeasy.net
georgemw at speakeasy.net
Mon Nov 26 15:54:55 PST 2001
On 25 Nov 2001, at 19:30, David Honig wrote:
> At 03:05 PM 11/25/01 -0800, Tim May wrote:
> >For many years some of us have argued strongly for "reputation" as a
> >core concept. Someone, perhaps even one of our own, even coined the
> >phrase "reputation capital."
>
> I recently posted how ground squirrels have rep cap.
>
It was interesting, but unless I misread it (a distinct possibility)
the squirrels didn't really have something we'd call a reputation.
The squirrels would remember "that squirrel keeps claiming there's
a stuffed badger when there is no stuffed badger" and would
ignore his warnings, but a real reputation system would be more
like a new squirrel shows up and the experienced squirrels
tell the new squirrel which squirrels are reliable and which aren't.
I don't think squirrels are capable of that.
The idea of a universal scalar reputation would be that every
squirrel in the world has the same opinion of every other
squirrel's reliability. I don't think anything like that exists
in any species.
George
> >1. The assumption that an agent or actor possesses a "reputation." A
> >kind of scalar number attached to a person, a bank, an institution, or
> >even a nym.
>
> Two kinds of entities: one maintains reputations, the other doesn't.
> Guess which is exploited to extinction?
>
But that's not the issue. The point is that repution ins't a simple
scalar i.e. one can have a repuation as being highly informed in
certain circles and be considered a complete nutter in others,
or considered extremely well informed on certain topics and
woefully misinformed on others. Even a reputation for morality
implies conforming to a specific idea as to what moral behavior is.
George
> ...
>
> Again CPunks -or other analysts- are not *advocating* nearly as much as some
> might like to believe; instead IMHO there is a public discussion
> going on about essentially inevitable trends we've observed.
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