On Sunday, March 24, 2002, at 12:30 PM, Declan McCullagh wrote: > On Sat, Mar 23, 2002 at 06:45:20PM -0700, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >> - posts to the list are like currency. lurkers > > Not a useful analogy. For some people, the more they post, the > lower their reputation falls.
A lot of the current/recent "reputation schemes" make a fundamental mistake: they attempt to assign a scalar value to "the" [emphasis] reputation of an actor. Even the schemes which attempt to assign a vector rating, e.g, "Declan' s rating of Detweiler is..., Tim's rating of Detweiler is...," make a fatal mistake. There are no reputations attachable to actors in this way. What there are are _beliefs_ about certain actors held by others. "I have seen 8 years' worth of posts from Detweiler, with some mult-year gaps, and I have seen some fraction of comments made by other people, some of whom I respect (believe to some extent) and some of whom I don't believe (ignore, criticize, believe the opposite of usually). Based on all of these inputs, but very heavily weighted by my own past (Bayesian) experience, I tend not to take Detweiler's posts very seriously, even when he attempts to behave and attempts to put forth content rather than gibberish." (Readers will recognize that this goes beyond even a tensor, the generalization of a vector, and involves "stories" (possible worlds semantics, a la Kripke). Belief is partly Beyesian (or Dempster-Shafer-centric), partly a semantic net of many factors. Evolution has given us very good tools for assessing danger, deciding who's worth listening to and who's not, and how to plan for certain futures. Most of the mechanistic models for reputation are overly simplistic.) To paraphrase, "I made not be able to define bullshit, but I know a bullshitter when I see one." I encourage Detweiler to reify his ideas into code. Shouldn't take more than a short while programming in Python or Squeak to generate a filtering method he can apply to _his_ instance of the list. Though from what I just read a few minutes ago, with him excoriating the list for not rushing to begin implementing his latest ideas, it looks like DejaNews all over again. I give him 3 weeks of pounding headaches before he begins referring to An Metet as a tentacle of me, Koder bin Hackin', as a tentacle of Declan, etc. --Tim May
