Moving beyond "Reputation"--the Market View of Reality

[georgemw at speakeasy.net]

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.