Re: Reputation of a Reputation
On Mon, 3 Dec 2001, Faustine wrote: Great points, but consider the example Harvard University. People are willing to pay a premium to be associated with it regardless of the academic worth of the individual programs in the eyes of specialists. A lot of students are after the cachet and couldn't care less about the curriculum. But then, I'm sure it's a mistake to assume education for it's own sake has the slightest thing to do with why the majority of people bother going to college at all. You're so close, if you'd only made the distinction you're all dancing around. Harvard has TWO reputations: one based on the social consequences of going there and the other on the academic consequences of going there. They are not congruent. Most agents have multiple reputations. -- Day by day the Penguins are making me lose my mind. Bumper Sticker The Armadillo Group ,::;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'/ ``::/|/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.ssz.com.', `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -~~mm-'`-```-mm --'-
Re: Reputation of a Reputation
On Mon, 3 Dec 2001, Tim May wrote: This is the reputation of a reputation. As soon as people tumble to the fact that Tom Clancy has sold his nym/reputation to some hack writer, that is, let them put his name on their words, then the reputation of Tom Clancy falls. Nothing new here. Fisher was a respected (high reputation) name in stereo equipment. (I don't like the term reputation, due to issues I've discussed here, but I'm using it in the commonly understood sense.) The name Fisher was bought by a Taiwan maker of equipment, and one can now see Fisher on boxes at Costco and Best Buy. Draw your own conclusions. My own sense is that no one is fooled: those young enough not to know what Fisher once was don't care. Those old enough to know aren't fooled. I expect the brand name Fisher sold for very little money, reflecting all of these issues. It seems to me that the sale of the reputation is a red herring in these cases. Tim's giving examples of instances where a particular brand's reputation for a given level of quality became devalued when the brand's product became inferior to products previously sold under the same brand name. I suspect that buyers of Fisher would find the sale of the name unimportant, if the new Taiwanese owners continued to produce equipment of the same caliber as the old Fisher. It takes significantly longer to build a brand reputation than it does to lose it. By purchasing another's name, one attempts to cut the brand building stage short -- but it is necessary to live up to the expectations associated with that brand. -MW-
Re: Reputation of a Reputation
On Mon, 3 Dec 2001, Tim May wrote: By the way, a topic I talked about a month or two ago, the bogus nature of the _Economics_ prize, has been in the news. Some of the descendants of the Nobel family want the Economics prize to have no connection to the name Nobel. Their claim is that Alfred Nobel didn't create or fund the prize, so why is it called Nobel? I think the subtext is that the Econ prize is trivializing the other prizes. It's actually called the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. And even though Moral Philosophy is not a science, it is a bit easier to award reasonable prizes in than Literature and Peace. Toni Morrison call your agent. DCF War was created so that men in primative societies would have a valid excuse for deserting the wife and kids.
Re: Reputation of a Reputation
At 10:17 AM 12/3/01 -0800, Tim May wrote: As soon as people tumble to the fact that Tom Clancy has sold his nym/reputation to some hack writer, that is, let them put his name on their words, then the reputation of Tom Clancy falls. I was coming to that conclusion thanks to the public exchange of certain extremely-high-rep folks here. The conclusion: you can't sell a nym. Nyms are best managed by their initiator. You can sell a nym's recommendation reliably but not a nym. Is this true? A grasshopper,
Re: Reputation of a Reputation
On Monday, December 3, 2001, at 02:22 PM, Duncan Frissell wrote: Special agents should read the Economist in addition to NLECTC Law Enforcement Corrections Technology News Summary http://www.nlectc.org/. http://WWW.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=S%26%2BX%28%2FQ%21%3B%26%0A The lemon dilemma Oct 11th 2001 From The Economist print edition This year's Nobel prize for economics honours work inspired by a simple observation about used cars By the way, a topic I talked about a month or two ago, the bogus nature of the _Economics_ prize, has been in the news. Some of the descendants of the Nobel family want the Economics prize to have no connection to the name Nobel. Their claim is that Alfred Nobel didn't create or fund the prize, so why is it called Nobel? I think the subtext is that the Econ prize is trivializing the other prizes. Economists win for lemon analysis does not quite compare with discovering basic laws of physics or chemistry, for example. --Tim May Dogs can't conceive of a group of cats without an alpha cat. --David Honig, on the Cypherpunks list, 2001-11
Re: Reputation of a Reputation
From: Michael Motyka [EMAIL PROTECTED] Minimizing the risk of individuals within the organization is not equivalent to optimizing the organization's performance. Good one. Reminds me of the nobody got fired for buying IBM phrase I read a few years ago. Mark
Reputation of a Reputation
On Monday, December 3, 2001, at 09:26 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 3 Dec 2001, at 13:44, Ken Brown wrote: All the discussion about certificates of speaking Navajo or whatever are slightly beside the point. If personal reputation, as such, has a market value it isn't the money you'd get by selling the reputation, because as everyone else already pointed out, if you could sell it, it wouldn't really be a reputation. Well, I thought so, but apparently not everyone does, since there's been a certain amount of discussion as to whether a nym might be sold (with associated reputation) and if so how it might be accomplished. This is the reputation of a reputation. As soon as people tumble to the fact that Tom Clancy has sold his nym/reputation to some hack writer, that is, let them put his name on their words, then the reputation of Tom Clancy falls. Nothing new here. Fisher was a respected (high reputation) name in stereo equipment. (I don't like the term reputation, due to issues I've discussed here, but I'm using it in the commonly understood sense.) The name Fisher was bought by a Taiwan maker of equipment, and one can now see Fisher on boxes at Costco and Best Buy. Draw your own conclusions. My own sense is that no one is fooled: those young enough not to know what Fisher once was don't care. Those old enough to know aren't fooled. I expect the brand name Fisher sold for very little money, reflecting all of these issues. Lots of issues here. I'm still composing a longer essay in response to Wei Dai's and others' points. Some delays. --Tim May --Tim May, Occupied America They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759.
Re: Reputation of a Reputation
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Tim wrote: This is the reputation of a reputation. As soon as people tumble to the fact that Tom Clancy has sold his nym/reputation to some hack writer, that is, let them put his name on their words, then the reputation of Tom Clancy falls. Nothing new here. Fisher was a respected (high reputation) name in stereo equipment. (I don't like the term reputation, due to issues I've discussed here, but I'm using it in the commonly understood sense.) The name Fisher was bought by a Taiwan maker of equipment, and one can now see Fisher on boxes at Costco and Best Buy. Draw your own conclusions. My own sense is that no one is fooled: those young enough not to know what Fisher once was don't care. Those old enough to know aren't fooled. I expect the brand name Fisher sold for very little money, reflecting all of these issues. Great points, but consider the example Harvard University. People are willing to pay a premium to be associated with it regardless of the academic worth of the individual programs in the eyes of specialists. A lot of students are after the cachet and couldn't care less about the curriculum. But then, I'm sure it's a mistake to assume education for it's own sake has the slightest thing to do with why the majority of people bother going to college at all. Ridiculous how so many employers put such stock in a word on a piece of paper too--pure credentialism. How ironic when you contrast that with the fact that the great Herman Kahn didn't have a PhD. I wonder where he'd end up today. Someone once remarked that the most unimaginitive, laziest Harvard graduate students at the bottom of their class tend to end up at the IMF and UN. Sort of sinkholes of mediocrity. Oh well! ~Faustine. *** The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedoms. - --William O. Douglas, Associate Justice, US Supreme Court -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: PGPsdk version 1.7.1 (C) 1997-1999 Network Associates, Inc. and its affiliated companies. (Diffie-Helman/DSS-only version) iQA/AwUBPAvjEfg5Tuca7bfvEQLJAwCeLOsOt6pEuBELu+p8zN7boPrf9z4AoJeA BVIpjCrxsgAZdMQ9ujYld9NL =1lef -END PGP SIGNATURE-
Re: Reputation of a Reputation
Faustine [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tim wrote: This is the reputation of a reputation. Ridiculous how so many employers put such stock in a word on a piece of paper too--pure credentialism. How ironic when you contrast that with the fact that the great Herman Kahn didn't have a PhD. I wonder where he'd end up today. ~Faustine. What you're complaining about is behavior that is typical of bureaucracies which often do what is easier instead of what is smarter, better or right. In a bureaucracy your risk is minimized by following procedure. Minimizing the risk of individuals within the organization is not equivalent to optimizing the organization's performance. Hardly a description of a control system that can keep away from the rails. Mike
Re: Reputation of a Reputation
At 03:39 PM 12/3/01 -0500, Faustine wrote: Great points, but consider the example Harvard University. People are willing to pay a premium to be associated with it regardless of the academic worth of the individual programs in the eyes of specialists. A lot of students are after the cachet and couldn't care less about the curriculum. But then, I'm sure it's a mistake to assume education for it's own sake has the slightest thing to do with why the majority of people bother going to college at all. Ridiculous how so many employers put such stock in a word on a piece of paper too--pure credentialism. How ironic when you contrast that with the fact that the great Herman Kahn didn't have a PhD. I wonder where he'd end up today. Special agents should read the Economist in addition to NLECTC Law Enforcement Corrections Technology News Summary http://www.nlectc.org/. http://WWW.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=S%26%2BX%28%2FQ%21%3B%26%0A The lemon dilemma Oct 11th 2001 From The Economist print edition This year's Nobel prize for economics honours work inspired by a simple observation about used cars ... This year's other two laureates, Michael Spence of Stanford University and Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia, won their prize for analysing how firms and consumers separate the gems from the lemons in a variety of industries. Mr Spence's early work focused on how individuals use signalling to communicate their abilities in the labour market. Job applicants, for example, want to distinguish themselves from the mass of other hopefuls. They may try to do this in a number of ways, from a fancy suit to a fancy education. But for signals to be believable, Mr Spence observed, they need to differ substantially in their cost of acquisition. For example, for education to work as a credible signal, it must be harder for less able employees to get. Indeed, even if such an education gives a student no tangible skillsreading classics at Oxford, sayit can still be a useful signal of relative quality to employers. Signalling is used in many markets, wherever a person, company or government wants to provide information about its intentions or strengths indirectly. Taking on debt might signal that a company is confident about future profits. Brands send valuable signals to consumers precisely because they are costly to create, and thus will not be lightly abused by their creators. Advertising may convey no information other than that the firm can afford to advertise, but that may be all a consumer needs to know to have confidence in it. Perhaps advertising, as a signal, is not money entirely wasted, as some economists argue. ... It's all about signaling. DCF What was the plea bargain which featured the greatest sentence reduction in the history of the criminal law? A reduction from a charge of Sodomy to a charge of Following Too Close. --Courtesy of the National Commission for the Preservation of Politically Incorrect Law School Jokes.
Re: Reputation of a Reputation,
...Someone once remarked that the most unimaginitive, laziest Harvard graduate students at the bottom of their class tend to end up at the IMF and UN. Sort of sinkholes of mediocrity. Oh well! ~Faustine. Luckily we now have 'open source' AP to take out the ones that get to be president.Did you see my 2 previous post F? 1) Faustine wrote... ...good old boring long-faced church-every-Sunday solid-citizen Robert P. Hanssen. If his FBI colleagues had been asked to rate him by your above criteria, he probably would have been in the high 200s all across the board. And maybe deservedly so. But since those factors weren't in any way, shape, or form relevant to the fact that he was also the kind of person who could sell out his country for the sheer pleasure of the game of it, he got away with murder for years until he got careless and his shitty tradecraft finally caught up with him. His tradecraft was rather good I thought,especially in not trusting his handlers with direct contact.Possibly he was done in by sex addiction common to many repressed septic tanks(yanks) W.Reichs,mass psychology of facism describes syndrome.Also wanted on some level to get caught,much like Ted special K.(and USAma bin laden?) Did he really get away with murder? Feh.Aldrich ames did and his rep survived polygraphs so reputations are bollocks unless panocoptincons and regular stings/tests are done.Hanssen didnt tell the russkies anything they couldnt have worked out them selves. No response? Trawling for bigger game? pot bellied,aging brilliant thorns in the side of your country? Then...'In praise of gold: ...nothing more than a cop-out. So it seems to me, at any rate. ~Faustine. Like you last week (agent ?) faustine (cop-in?) Silence speaks volumes in this house. Im calling you out as a patriotic,slightly dim little bitch at the very least,Well?
