Erin Thought Paper 2

Reputation

Clay Shirky's “A Group is its Own Worst Enemy” contains a subtle internal contradiction. Shirky calls learning from one's own experience “the worst possible way to learn something,” as opposed to learning from others' experiences. Reputation provides just that kind of aggregated social judgment, enabling a person to develop expectations about someone else's future behavior based on a third party's past experience. Later in the piece, however, Shirky dismisses “[a]lmost all the work being done on reputation systems today” as “either trivial or useless or both,” because social reputation is not portable; he instead urges that the only way to really track reputation is to allow each individual to make her own judgments about others. What distinguishes reputation from other types of knowledge that are worthy and capable of being shared?

One significant difference is that reputation results from complex social interactions. Shirky is correct that interpersonal interaction is too nuanced to parse into eBay-style itemized and rated transactions, but he fails to acknowledge the value that even imperfect reputational cues can have as inputs to decision-making. Further, reputation doesn't have to be perfectly portable across all contexts in order to be helpful in one context. A person who cheats at cards doesn't necessarily cheat on his spouse, so that information may not be relevant on a dating website, but it would certainly interest the members of his weekly poker game.

Systems that track reputation across multiple contexts are especially problematic for this reason: a global reputation may be more prejudicial than probative when it informs fine-grained evaluations in particular contexts. Zittrain's proposed “reputational bankruptcy” allows individuals to escape the negative consequences of a bad global reputation, but also denies everyone else the benefits of a particular individual's bad reputation – for example, knowing not to lend money to a habitual spendthrift. Reputation in this sense serves a similar goal with respect to individuals as does trademark law with respect to commercial products. Trademark rights exist for the benefit of the consuming public, not the entity who owns mark. Similarly, reputation represents the public's valuation of an individual's character traits, and giving a person the power to censor or reject her reputation threatens the other people's ability to make informed judgments about that person.

This illuminates the other significant difference between reputation and other knowledge: reputation necessarily implicates privacy. I believe the best way to balance their competing values is to let people adopt and discard multiple pseudonymous identities, with strong social norms and limited legal rules against unmasking or collating particular identities. This preserves the public benefit of persistent reputation without anchoring an individual to one global reputation, which she may be incapable of escaping or reluctant to abandon altogether. Multiple discrete reputations avoid the contextual problems attendant to a global reputation, and one reputation among a dozen is easier to give up than an entire unitary history. Of course, this is only a benefit as long as multiple identities can remain discrete.