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

[David Honig]

At 03:54 PM 11/26/01 -0800, georgemw at speakeasy.net wrote:
>On 25 Nov 2001, at 19:30, David Honig wrote:
>> 
>> 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.

Aha.  I have learned something then; I didn't realize that reps
must be somewhat infectious.  But infectious-reps require a decent
medium, e.g., a decent language; squirrels don't really have the
degrees of freedom.  Though it must be obvious to new squirrels
(eg by observing other more seasoned squirrels lack of reaction) that no
one takes Spoofie Squirrel seriously.  In any case, each squirrel certainly
believes their own set of experiences (and reputations inferred therefrom)
and so would advocate the adoption of its experience, 
if sufficiently verbal to do so.  Much like primates.

In any case, "Spoofie is unreliable about badgers" seems to me to be
a reputation.

At one extreme of opinion, reps are personal; at the other they are objective
and are therefore worth transferring amongst members of so-equipt
species.

Nature *does* have joints at which it can be carved; high-rep people
will tend to recommend other high-rep people and the UFO types will
cross reference the Bigfoot folks.  Such is the nature of peer
review, of cultural epistemology.   There are objective
parts of reputation, even if no objective agreement on the *sign* of
the quality.  

Crypto/tech will only elaborate what is innate or natural in social critters.