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

Jim Choate ravage at einstein.ssz.com
Mon Nov 26 19:42:30 PST 2001



On Sun, 25 Nov 2001, 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."

And for as many years many of us have seen that it's not as useful as it
would first seem. The reality is that trust isn't transitive and as a
result reputation isn't either.

> Reputation is an easily understandable concept which explains a lot 
> about how imperfect protocols in the real world nevertheless "work." I 
> won't go into what reputation is, even as defined by folks like us.

It may be 'easily understood', but it's also easily misunderstood (by
many).

> But there are many aspects of reputation which lead to problems:

Reputation itself is a problem. Past behaviour (toward another) is not a
reasonable predictor of future behavior (toward myself).


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