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

[georgemw at speakeasy.net]

On 29 Nov 2001, at 16:11, Wei Dai wrote:

> On Sun, Nov 25, 2001 at 03:05:18PM -0800, Tim May wrote:

> But there is a scalar number attached to a person which deserves the name
> "reputation capital", namely his own judgement of what his reputation is
> worth.

Even this is not a scalar.  Since reputation cannot be bought
and sold, the idea that it is worth a specific well defined amount is
false.


> The idea of reputation capital solves an important problem: How 
do
> we prevent nyms from doing bad things, disappearing, and coming back under
> a different nym? If a nym has a positive reputation capital, then
> disappearing is costly, so that provides a disincentive to do bad things. 
> 

Claiming you have a concept called reputation capital doen't really
solve the problem, it just moves it back a step, leading to questions
like how does one aquire/lose reputation capital, how does one
discover another's reputation, how does one ensure that a party
violating an agreement actually will lose reputation capital,
and so on.  These questions can be answered, at least sometimes,
but usually answering them will make it clear that reputation
capital isn't a single number.
	The idea that a party to a transaction will lose more in 
reputation capital by failing to honor his obligations than he will
gain is a very useful concept. The idea that a nym has a fixed
amount of reputation capital and will lose it all with a single failure
to comply might be useful in certain simplified models, but
it doesn't accurately reflect most real world situations.

> > 2. When in fact different people have different assessments of some 
> > agent's reputation. Thus suggesting strongly that reputation is not 
> > something attached as simply as above.
> 
> Yes, that's why we should distinguish between reputation and reputation
> capital.
>

well, maybe.  But if we define reputation capital the way you did
(the value one places on one's own reputation) then it's important
to be aware that one can only know the value of one's own 
reputation capital.

> > 3. All of the nonsense about how "Alice's reputation has been harmed," 
> > deriving from the faulty notion of this scalar property attached to 
> > Alice.
> 
> But "Alice's reputation capital has been harmed" is not nonsense. That
> just means Alice thinks her reputation is now worth less than before.
> 
right.
> > Aren't we stuck with reputation?
> > 
> > No, a broader ontology of objects and beliefs about them is a better way 
> > to go.
> > 
> > The "reputation of the dollar" is related to my belief, and the belief 
> > of billions of others around the planet, that for whatever reason a 
> > piece of paper with the right markings on it will in fact be accepted by 
> > billions of others, by millions of small banks and moneychangers, and 
> > even by the U.S. Government. And the related belief that loans, IOUs, 
> > promissory notes, bonds, and numerous other instruments denominated in 
> > these "dollars" will very likely be accepted or exchanged, blah blah, by 
> > millions or billions of other actors. Such is not the case with Monopoly 
> > money or even with E-gold.
> > 
> > Thus, what is the "reputation of the dollar"? Is it because of foolproof 
> > anti-forgery measures? Is it because of the laws of the U.S.? Etc.?
> > 
> > No, it is a kind of collective hallucination.
> 
> There are lots of situations where Alice does X only because she expects
> Bob to do Y, and Bob does Y only because he expects Alice to do X. Money
> is an example of this, and so are virtually all other social phenomena. I
> would call this collective reality, not collective hallucination. 
> 

So would I, but this is just a disagreement over the terminolgy,
not the concepts.

> I don't see why our monetary system is less provably real than the world
> of atoms and stars. Every proton in an atom can spontaneously decay.
> Everyone in the world can spontaneously decide to stop accepting US
> dollars as payment. It's all a matter of probabilities.
> 

I think you're going way too far. Proton decay has never been 
observed in the real world, and people have looked for it really
hard.  Whereas a whole lot of governments (including the US
government)  have attempted to solve their debt problems
by printing a lot of paper currency, devaluing the existing currency
in the process.

> Since you need a large number of users to
> provide cover traffic, you have to charge a low price for everyone, and
> that doesn't seems to be a profitable business.
>

I'm not convinced that you do. As I've said before, there are two
fundamentally different ways of maintaining anonymity with some
sort of digital bearer certificate
1) you can ensure the "bank" can't identify the certifcates as the
ones you bought when they're cashed in or
2) you can see to it that the bank doesn't know who
"you" are when you buy the certificates in the first place.

Number 2 still seems more natural to me.   

George