As Bryce addressed this to me as the primary recipient, I have to assume he's ascribing these ideas to me. At 12:19 PM 9/25/96, bryce@digicash.com wrote:

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It's silly to conflate ratings of people with ratings of people's opinions with ratings of people's ratings of etc.

Some of the people I work with have awful opinions on politics, other people, music, movies, books, and food, but great opinions on computer hardware, algorithms and programming languages. ...

I never said there is going to be a simple scalar rating. In my last major post on this, several weeks ago, I even elaborated, saying that even Alice's rating of Bob, for example, would have multiple components, such as her rating of his taste in movies, his taste in restaurants, his political beliefs, his technical expertise, etc. This area is complicated enough to talk about with oversimplifying-and-then-critiqueing. These are usually called "straw man" arguments. --Tim We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^1,257,787-1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."