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
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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.