Once it becomes obvious that everybody does certain things, they will necessarily become better accepted - unless they are really bad things (e.g. if what because obvious was that, say, a large percentage of the population engaged in pedophily or murder something equally unacceptable), in which case making them visible might help stamp them out.
For those trivial things that everyone does and a few people get up in arms about, morality will have to change. Hopefully, out of date laws will change along with it.
I think this is an unavoidable trend of the internet. And it's a good thing. Privacy is dead. Long live tolerance.
Or morality will get caught up in a panic and more draconian laws will take effect. The village of squinting windows, where everybody knows everybody's business, is no paragon of tolerance, and I speak as someone who grew up in such a village.
It's a cliche that it's the anonymity of cities that "loosened morals", e.g. gay meccas are usually pretty densely populated urban areas. People in the countryside live in fear of the opprobrium of their neighbours.
And then there are things that only a significant minority does, but nobody talks about. I don't think bringing that out into the open will benefit anyone, since the majority could more easily bully people into submission.
I don't even think it is that huge a shift from what we already accept, although it will be a quantum leap in effectiveness.
I think a small team of folks with CS backgrounds plus an insurance company's claim data (or a bank's loss data) for a year plus a Hadoop cluster would make FICO obsolete, at least until they were regulated out of existence for being too darned efficient at what they do. (The basic theory is "Birds of a feather flock together": if most of your friends are losers, it is probably net-beneficial to the business to assume you are a loser, if most of our friends are solid debt-paying responsible citizens, it is probably net-beneficial to the business to assume you are a solid debt-paying responsible citizen.)
I think this would be so effective (prices risk appropriately, far cheaper to maintain than the current reporting infrastructure since folks helpfully update the social graph for you) you'd almost have to illegalize it. (Let me hum a few bars: "disparate impact".)
Well, what you describe is all but the very definition of prejudice. It would discriminate directly against whole social classes of people irrespective of their individual behaviour, on the basis of group behaviour. From what you describe, in a private education system built around loans it would have kicked me out at 15 or so.
On the other hand, such an inefficient classification mechanism ought to create sufficient surplus for profit for those specialized enough to look for it. But there are other systemic inefficiencies that might prevent those niches from being profitable enough.
Someone that has relatively many friends that play football is probably someone that likes, and plays, football. Categorizing him as such is neither prejudiced nor discriminatory: it's a reasonable extrapolation. The same holds for more sensitive facts about someone: someone with many gay friends is more likely than average to be gay.
There already are insurance companies that only insure people with a university degree. Their rates are lower than those of other companies. They aren't prejudiced and they do not discriminate: they estimate risk based on solid information about a person and the mere fact that they can stay in business suggests there is indeed a good correlation between their estimates risk and the actual risk.
If they could determine who has many university educated friends, then they would perhaps want to extend their service to those people, because they have determined that those people share the characteristics of university educated people that cause the insured risks to be smaller. (Assuming these reasons that are independent of the reasons for not doing/finishing a university education, etc.)
Insurance is explicitly about pooling risk, and treating individuals along group lines. If the insurance companies could isolate, to the individual level, what the exact risk is for that person, it wouldn't be insurance any more.
Nope, it doesn't work like that. Insurance is about reducing variance.
If I know the chance of crashing my car and losing a leg is exactly 1 / 50000 (per year), and if I can insure against that at roughly that rate, I would still get insurance, because $20 bucks a year doesn't affect my life, but a million will help a lot when I do lose that leg.
In this case risk is still pooled and the insurance company can still function because the misfortune of the individual is paid for by the more fortunate.
There is still a need for insurance companies exist in a world with perfect information. Of course the insurance rates would shift. For example, when in a large group of people a few have a high chance of an expensive disease the insurance company wouldn't give the same rate to everybody. You'd still want to get insurance, though.
True. It would be nice if we would have different words for 'acceptable' and 'unacceptable' discrimination, because I'm not the only one that keeps falling in the trap of using the word to mean a specific kind of discrimination.
> Well, what you describe is all but the very definition of prejudice.
Actually, it's not. When insurance is correctly priced, the payout for a group is close to its premiums, no matter how the group is defined. (Yes, including factors that weren't considered by the insurance company.)
If you don't price that way, some group is getting a subsidy and another group is paying one. An insurance company that figures out how to identify the latter can offer its members better rates than a company that doesn't. Or, if the smarter company can figure out how to avoid the former, it can have higher profits (which attracts competitors).
Insurance companies like to make money. People like to pay the minimum for their insurance. These two facts have economic consequences.
That's the point. If the prediction is accurate, that's net beneficial: irresponsible people will get fewer loans, and responsible people will get more loans.
It sounds like you haven't quite decided whether this would be less accurate than FICO (maybe! But there's no reason to be outraged that some random person's prejudice is costing them money) or more accurate than FICO (in which case your argument seems to be "Yes, this kind of prejudice is accurate--or, at least, more accurate than the alternative. But that makes me feel bad, so misallocate capital and make more bad loans.")
The world economy just went through a couple very bad years caused by making wishful-thinking loans instead of unpleasant-truth loans. I hope that doesn't have to happen again.
Reminds me of the "darknet" in Daniel Suarez's Daemon, a sort of augmented reality. People could be virtually downvoted/upvoted and carried their reputation scores around floating above their heads.
I take the opposite view; this is the return of reputation. The internet ends the anonymity of urban living. Are you a chronic liar, a drunken slut, a responsible employee or a good parent? Soon the world will know so act accordingly.
Not if it is anonymous. Chronic liars will be less queasy about making their competition look bad. Heck, I bet that if it catches on, you'll be able to buy "reputation".
Agreed. With the old-fashioned rumor, there's always the chance that it will be traced back to you, providing a real disincentive to gossip. With fully anonymous rumor spreading, just go to town and make up all the shit you want.
But that cuts both ways, because anonymous internet rumors are worthless. At least with old-fashioned rumor, you were listening to somebody that you could make some judgement on trustworthiness (positive or negative).
If anything reputation would be more important, somebody has to put their reputation on the line to criticize someone else.
Worthless? Really? Assume you're interviewing 2 people for a job, and they're both good candidates. However, 1 has a nasty anonymous review about how they suck at their job, and the other doesn't. Just because it's anonymous, you're going to fully, 100% ignore it? Or, could it possibly bias your decision by just a teensy bit?
and the other guy is completely anon online? I'll take the non-anon guy who has gotten smeared.
I'm extremely unlikely to hire a person who I can't find online somewhere, unless I know them personally. I don't trust anonymous, and in this world, without that online identity, that's what you are.
You didn't. Obviously a better reputation wins over a worse one... but many people seem to think that no online reputation /is/ a better online reputation, and I disagree with that.
Reputation is already very important online. How many forums implement some sort of karma system? Imagine an anonymous rumor about a new Apple product left in a comment in some random website. How much stock would you put in that versus the same rumor printed by John Gruber as an anonymous source. Both are anonymous, but Gruber would be putting his reputation on the line when he promotes a rumor.
carma != reputation. Carma is built by saying what others on the form believe. if a job applicant has a high carma, I assume 1. they waste a lot of time on forms, and 2. they side with the herd on issues where there are strong feelings.
If that's true, then a pro-privacy group can spring up that fights trash with trash. Spread lies about everybody and you won't be able to distinguish between real gossip and fake gossip. Suddenly everybody is anonymous again, and you won't have a meaningful online reputation anymore.
Unless... of course people claim ownership of their accusations. In which case the laws against libel come into play again.
Quite the contrary. Social sites aren't a replacement for human interaction. I think there's a lot of data out there about me and everyone else. I think we're in an age where data isn't as valuable because there's just so much of it. We're no better at putting it together. Show me a website that will literally tell you if a person is a chronic liar, drunken slut, or responsible parent and then I'll be impressed.
Right, but few people have reputation worries regarding that which is objectively bad (e.g. criminal records for serious crimes). Most of it comes down to subjective preferences and events that are open to interpretation.
An example: most of us would agree that there's nothing wrong with being gay, but most gay people wouldn't put it on a resume, knowing that there's still 1 out of 10 people who will have a problem with it. There's also nothing to gain, in a job search, by being public about heterosexuality. So sexual preference is (like politics and religion) just an area that many people choose to keep professionally private. One's political views could be beneficial-- most people would agree with my posts where I call Bush a fucking moron-- but generally people prefer to hold these cards close to their chests and be judged on their professional merits alone.
Privacy is necessary not only for the few who have objectively bad (drunken slut, chronic liar) things to hide but also for the much greater pool of us who have things that they might be proud of (political activism, religious views) but wouldn't want to inject into their professional lives.
Also, as with small towns in the past, there's the problem of reliability. Old-style small communities may have done a good job of policing some "indiscretions", but many have witch-burnings on their hands too... and we know those accusations weren't based in any reality whatsoever.
Similar example: Say you're not particularly deferential to authority and can talk straight with such figures. You've got chutzpah. How should you signal this?
For some more enlightened bosses, this is an extremely valuable trait (I'm thinking the Feynman & Bohr story at Los Alamos). But for most bosses, this is a pretty large negative. Maybe they're insecure or think you should know your place. Or perhaps more mildly, they might think you have a chip on your shoulder.
I am pretty sure openly signalling certain traits HNers would consider good - like intellectual independence and curiosity - are a net negative socially and job-wise, especially after reading Schmidt's Disciplined Minds.
Wow, a lot of great comments and food for thought. Instead of answering each individually I will make some general comments here. To be clear, I think that online rep is unavoidably going to have impacts in real life. (How many here have looked at someone's profile to judge them when engaging in a discussion, or have done an online search to learn about that new girl or guy you are dating?) How this plays out I have no idea -- we are in the middle of a social revolution, see Clay Shirky "Thinking the Unthinkable". I didn't mean to imply that online rep does not have serious pros and cons and potential abuses that many mentioned -- so don't kill the messenger. Ultimately I think that one's reputation is an important value and people learning to behave in ways to protect it will be a good thing.
I think the article is really agreeing with you, in a sense. Large problems (chronic liar, drunken slut, etc...) will become even more important because knowledge of smaller things (e.g. bong smoking in college) will become so common. We'll start separating out the real problems from the stupid stuff.
This has tones of Zuckerberg's "privacy is passe" and Schmidt's "if you don't want anyone to know about something, don't do it". I pretty much despise this view.
I also think it is somewhat naive about how this is going to play out. People are not going to accept with good humour that their reputation is being trashed on line. And they are also not going to magically ignore other's indescretions. We're pretty much biologically incapable of that - when we see someone portrayed in a highly compromising light it makes psychological impressions that we can't just dismiss. The reason this hasn't really been a problem yet is just that it's still so new.
What is going to happen as time goes on is that the lawyers are going to start getting involved. People are going to start suing left right and center. It's already happening - there was a case just today where a school is suing a parent for making disparaging comments on a web site:
Things are going to deteriorate into a very messy and ugly fight until we sort out new norms and social conventions on line, and possibly, if things get bad enough, new regulation by the government (which I really hope we avoid, but the morons who routinely give up all their privacy on facebook for the fun of it don't give me much hope).
> but the morons who routinely give up all their privacy on facebook for the fun of it don't give me much hope
Facebook has over 400 million users. That's more than there are people in the USA and Canada combined. When you reach those kind of numbers you can't credibly dismiss people who throw away their privacy as being morons.
I bet that people will just grow numb of scandals in the way that people have grown numb about inefficiency in the government, misconduct by the police, or gross negligence in finance or about wars in foreign countries. People just shrug and go on with their lives.
There's something about scandals that seem to keep people interested. That's all most reality TV is, really, scandals about people that you don't even know. Tiger Woods (and Jesse James) certainly weren't the first famous men to cheat on their wives... but people still eat it up like a greasy bucket of KFC
> the morons who routinely give up all their privacy on facebook for the fun of it
I'm not going to vote you down, even though I'm one of those "morons." Just remember that not everyone else has the same values as you do, and some of us weren't tricked by the Big Evil Facebook Button, and made a conscious decision to put our information out there.
If you're making a conscious decision then I don't consider you a moron at all. And I'll readily admit that I'm being unkind to refer to those who do it unconsciously as "morons" - it's at least 50% Facebook's fault, possibly more. However I do consider it somewhat "moronic" to put all your information into a public space that openly states it is public and then complain and get upset that it is public later on. This happens regularly (last instance I saw was a bunch of people getting upset that a newspaper reprinted information, including photos, of a person from their facebook page). Politicians are all too ready to act to come to the "defense" of these people with new laws that might severely restrict or impede innovation in this space.
> However I do consider it somewhat "moronic" to put all your information into a public space that openly states it is public and then complain and get upset that it is public later on.
If the only way to protect yourself from negative information is to make the information absolutely untrustworthy, everyone will quickly be accused of everything.
This new startup's only real use will be as a honeypot for 4chan trolls.
When i filter this through my michael arrington lens, i find this article hilarious. It almost seems like he's priming his audience for some big letdown a couple months out, rather than hypothesizing about the future.
"the kind of accusations that can kill a career today will likely be seen as a badge of honor."
A reputation site for journalism could work well because it could be structured to be immune to the big problem of such sites: there would be no hearsay. One couldn't just make up a factual error written by the some author. That author actually has to go and publish the erroneous text.
Isn't the trend going away from anonymous interaction on the web? Facebook Connect is an example. Just like anonymous comments on our blogs, we see them with very little value and often just trolls causing trouble. I would never believe anything about anyone that was submitted anonymously.
I don't see it that way. I care what my friends might think, but they wouldn't be the ones that would be anonymous (nor would they believe a faceless site over their real world experiences). Everyone else? Who cares. Some of the treads on here mention getting a job or your boss seeing something. Do you really want to work with someone that would let their decisions be swayed by something like this? In reality the same thing can happen now at work, but it isn't a problem so I don't see this changing that.
> Do you really want to work with someone that would let their decisions be swayed by something like this?
Yes. I would not bet my life that I will never need to, though I've always been more fortunate than that. I wouldn't last very long, the way we treat the homeless.
A good article with a terrible and non-sequitor headline.
Perhaps we are moving toward a society that overlooks minor indiscretions. That doesn't mean we overlook everything. With the increase in data, we can start paying more attention to substantive things (that indiscretions were only a proxy for anyway).
There's no reason not to jump ahead here. This is a good time to take a look at your own habits in judging people and make sure you're doing it fairly.
It's funny how much effort goes into image and reputation management, as if we're putting more effort into maintaining this false appearance of who we are instead of simply being ourselves.
For me all throughout college I put up this fake front of who I wanted to be because I wanted to be popular and accepted by the world. It wasn't until after college that I came to realize (and still am) that internal acceptance and living truthfully with others removes such a huge mental burden. I have my utter failings, and I have my great successes, and both of them I am more than willing to share with others because that's who I am.
I don't really think reputation is dead. Sure if you publish all your live to the internet it can be found sooner or later. But if they don't have enough info about you how are they going to know which is your real self. You can web search my name and I bet you won't easily find(if you find it that is) where I live or how I look.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 132 ms ] threadOnce it becomes obvious that everybody does certain things, they will necessarily become better accepted - unless they are really bad things (e.g. if what because obvious was that, say, a large percentage of the population engaged in pedophily or murder something equally unacceptable), in which case making them visible might help stamp them out.
For those trivial things that everyone does and a few people get up in arms about, morality will have to change. Hopefully, out of date laws will change along with it.
I think this is an unavoidable trend of the internet. And it's a good thing. Privacy is dead. Long live tolerance.
It's a cliche that it's the anonymity of cities that "loosened morals", e.g. gay meccas are usually pretty densely populated urban areas. People in the countryside live in fear of the opprobrium of their neighbours.
This is one of those major shifts to society that one day will just be there and change everything.
Are you ready for it?
Are we?
I think a small team of folks with CS backgrounds plus an insurance company's claim data (or a bank's loss data) for a year plus a Hadoop cluster would make FICO obsolete, at least until they were regulated out of existence for being too darned efficient at what they do. (The basic theory is "Birds of a feather flock together": if most of your friends are losers, it is probably net-beneficial to the business to assume you are a loser, if most of our friends are solid debt-paying responsible citizens, it is probably net-beneficial to the business to assume you are a solid debt-paying responsible citizen.)
I think this would be so effective (prices risk appropriately, far cheaper to maintain than the current reporting infrastructure since folks helpfully update the social graph for you) you'd almost have to illegalize it. (Let me hum a few bars: "disparate impact".)
On the other hand, such an inefficient classification mechanism ought to create sufficient surplus for profit for those specialized enough to look for it. But there are other systemic inefficiencies that might prevent those niches from being profitable enough.
There already are insurance companies that only insure people with a university degree. Their rates are lower than those of other companies. They aren't prejudiced and they do not discriminate: they estimate risk based on solid information about a person and the mere fact that they can stay in business suggests there is indeed a good correlation between their estimates risk and the actual risk.
If they could determine who has many university educated friends, then they would perhaps want to extend their service to those people, because they have determined that those people share the characteristics of university educated people that cause the insured risks to be smaller. (Assuming these reasons that are independent of the reasons for not doing/finishing a university education, etc.)
If I know the chance of crashing my car and losing a leg is exactly 1 / 50000 (per year), and if I can insure against that at roughly that rate, I would still get insurance, because $20 bucks a year doesn't affect my life, but a million will help a lot when I do lose that leg.
In this case risk is still pooled and the insurance company can still function because the misfortune of the individual is paid for by the more fortunate.
There is still a need for insurance companies exist in a world with perfect information. Of course the insurance rates would shift. For example, when in a large group of people a few have a high chance of an expensive disease the insurance company wouldn't give the same rate to everybody. You'd still want to get insurance, though.
I am pretty sure that picking only people with a university degree is called discrimination.
Now, is it a good discrimination is a whole another matter.
Actually, it's not. When insurance is correctly priced, the payout for a group is close to its premiums, no matter how the group is defined. (Yes, including factors that weren't considered by the insurance company.)
If you don't price that way, some group is getting a subsidy and another group is paying one. An insurance company that figures out how to identify the latter can offer its members better rates than a company that doesn't. Or, if the smarter company can figure out how to avoid the former, it can have higher profits (which attracts competitors).
Insurance companies like to make money. People like to pay the minimum for their insurance. These two facts have economic consequences.
It sounds like you haven't quite decided whether this would be less accurate than FICO (maybe! But there's no reason to be outraged that some random person's prejudice is costing them money) or more accurate than FICO (in which case your argument seems to be "Yes, this kind of prejudice is accurate--or, at least, more accurate than the alternative. But that makes me feel bad, so misallocate capital and make more bad loans.")
The world economy just went through a couple very bad years caused by making wishful-thinking loans instead of unpleasant-truth loans. I hope that doesn't have to happen again.
If anything reputation would be more important, somebody has to put their reputation on the line to criticize someone else.
I'm extremely unlikely to hire a person who I can't find online somewhere, unless I know them personally. I don't trust anonymous, and in this world, without that online identity, that's what you are.
Unless... of course people claim ownership of their accusations. In which case the laws against libel come into play again.
More like "does someone think you're a chronic liar or a drunken slut" or "have you got on the wrong side of someone"?
Better hope you can please everyone or this reputation of yours is ruined.
This entire concept seems creepy, judgmental and open to abuse.
A story from the spooky future...
Father: "I told you to do your homework before flying on your jetpack with your space friends! You're grounded! Go to your room."
Child stomps up stairs. Soon, the soft sound of typing "...and he routinely abuses his children, both sexually and psychologically. And he's a drunk."
Right now children can effortlessly destroy the lives of parents, family members or teachers... by spreading exactly those kinds of lies.
An example: most of us would agree that there's nothing wrong with being gay, but most gay people wouldn't put it on a resume, knowing that there's still 1 out of 10 people who will have a problem with it. There's also nothing to gain, in a job search, by being public about heterosexuality. So sexual preference is (like politics and religion) just an area that many people choose to keep professionally private. One's political views could be beneficial-- most people would agree with my posts where I call Bush a fucking moron-- but generally people prefer to hold these cards close to their chests and be judged on their professional merits alone.
Privacy is necessary not only for the few who have objectively bad (drunken slut, chronic liar) things to hide but also for the much greater pool of us who have things that they might be proud of (political activism, religious views) but wouldn't want to inject into their professional lives.
Also, as with small towns in the past, there's the problem of reliability. Old-style small communities may have done a good job of policing some "indiscretions", but many have witch-burnings on their hands too... and we know those accusations weren't based in any reality whatsoever.
For some more enlightened bosses, this is an extremely valuable trait (I'm thinking the Feynman & Bohr story at Los Alamos). But for most bosses, this is a pretty large negative. Maybe they're insecure or think you should know your place. Or perhaps more mildly, they might think you have a chip on your shoulder.
I am pretty sure openly signalling certain traits HNers would consider good - like intellectual independence and curiosity - are a net negative socially and job-wise, especially after reading Schmidt's Disciplined Minds.
I also think it is somewhat naive about how this is going to play out. People are not going to accept with good humour that their reputation is being trashed on line. And they are also not going to magically ignore other's indescretions. We're pretty much biologically incapable of that - when we see someone portrayed in a highly compromising light it makes psychological impressions that we can't just dismiss. The reason this hasn't really been a problem yet is just that it's still so new.
What is going to happen as time goes on is that the lawyers are going to start getting involved. People are going to start suing left right and center. It's already happening - there was a case just today where a school is suing a parent for making disparaging comments on a web site:
http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/school-sues-parent-for-bit...
Things are going to deteriorate into a very messy and ugly fight until we sort out new norms and social conventions on line, and possibly, if things get bad enough, new regulation by the government (which I really hope we avoid, but the morons who routinely give up all their privacy on facebook for the fun of it don't give me much hope).
Facebook has over 400 million users. That's more than there are people in the USA and Canada combined. When you reach those kind of numbers you can't credibly dismiss people who throw away their privacy as being morons.
I bet that people will just grow numb of scandals in the way that people have grown numb about inefficiency in the government, misconduct by the police, or gross negligence in finance or about wars in foreign countries. People just shrug and go on with their lives.
I'm not going to vote you down, even though I'm one of those "morons." Just remember that not everyone else has the same values as you do, and some of us weren't tricked by the Big Evil Facebook Button, and made a conscious decision to put our information out there.
I am with you 100%.
This new startup's only real use will be as a honeypot for 4chan trolls.
"the kind of accusations that can kill a career today will likely be seen as a badge of honor."
umm... right.
Absolutely not. This is why I have forearm tattoos and stretched ears.
But many other people absolutely do care. My mom was incredibly upset when I got my first visible tattoo. "You're never going to find a job."
Those of us here are of a different breed than out in the greater world.
Yes. I would not bet my life that I will never need to, though I've always been more fortunate than that. I wouldn't last very long, the way we treat the homeless.
Perhaps we are moving toward a society that overlooks minor indiscretions. That doesn't mean we overlook everything. With the increase in data, we can start paying more attention to substantive things (that indiscretions were only a proxy for anyway).
There's no reason not to jump ahead here. This is a good time to take a look at your own habits in judging people and make sure you're doing it fairly.
For me all throughout college I put up this fake front of who I wanted to be because I wanted to be popular and accepted by the world. It wasn't until after college that I came to realize (and still am) that internal acceptance and living truthfully with others removes such a huge mental burden. I have my utter failings, and I have my great successes, and both of them I am more than willing to share with others because that's who I am.
Reminds me of the Billy Joel lyrics...
Well we all have a face
That we hide away forever
And we take them out and
Show ourselves
When everyone has gone