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What happens to boring, antisocial, or introverted people in places with rep economies?

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Tue, 2015-09-29 02:08
#1
FrankManic FrankManic's picture
What happens to boring, antisocial, or introverted people in places with rep economies?
So obviously people who are the life of the party, or have in demand skills, or are aggressive at networking will do well anywhere that relies on @-rep. But I've got to wonder what happens to people like me in these places. See, for various reasons I was depressed to the point of being unable to work, socialize, or function normally in society for the better part of ten years. Now, I have a comparatively mild case - I never tried to kill myself or hurt anyone else - But some people are even more difficult to deal with than I was. All I did was lose all my friends, eat up tens of thousands of dollars of drugs and therapy, and produce nothing of economic value for nearly a decade. So what does an @-rep society do with people who are mentally ill? Or who have no useful skills? Or are just boring or unpleasant to be around or sort of annoying? What does a severely resource constrained society that runs on how much everyone likes you do with people who aren't likable and aren't likely to produce anything useful? I mean sure, psychosurgery is a thing, but the thing about therapy is that it's extremely expensive - It takes a lot of time and the attention of dedicated, highly trained specialists. At least in a cash economy you can pay people to do it. In a rep economy you'd have to, you know, have a rep. And maintain some kind of rep when your disease is causing you to actively, maybe aggressively push people away from you. I'm asking because the whole autonomous collective thing sounds great on paper, but at the end of the day most people individually don't have the compassion, resources, or inclination to care for mentally ill loved ones, let alone mentally ill strangers, and societies as a whole have no use for the mentally ill and have made it abundantly clear to people with mental illnesses that if they can't hide what they are they risk being imprisoned or murdered, whether directly by violence or indirectly by neglect. There's a great big goddamn elephant in orbit. After your ego is shot to pieces because you were dealing with horrifying Exsurgent threats that no one is going to give you rep for because you can't tell them about it who is going to take care of you in the outer system? Please tell me I'm wrong and there's a mechanism for this. The world we live in now is kind of a horrific place if you've got a mental illness, and while EP certainly isn't a bright and happy future it's one that requires confronting some pretty radical new social concepts. I'd like to believe that those new societies aren't using the old "shove them out into the cold/vacuum" method of dealing with socially undesirable populations.
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What is boils down to is that "Killer Robots exterminate humanity and escape to the stars" is one of the *good futures*.
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Tue, 2015-09-29 04:17
Trappedinwikipedia Trappedinwikipedia's picture
Having a mental illness is a
Having a mental illness is a pretty different thing in AF10 compared to the modern world. Muses can serve as PhD psychiatrists, and have been with most people since they were children, that combined with transhumanity's vastly better understanding of the transhuman brain and mind should make living with mental illness significantly easier than today. Someone in a morph with a puppet sock could even have their muse front for them when they can't. Stuff like endocrine control or similar can probably ameliorate the symptoms of mental illness fairly well. Someone who is unpleasant to be around, and has no skills will probably be in trouble. A lot of gear comes with AR walkthroughs for use, so learning how to do something useful should be really quick. I'm not sure if it's written somewhere, but I was under the impression that a lot of rep gained through community service was handled in a largely automated manner. People choose to ping people who keep things running, and their muse can handle the rest. That said, it's very difficult to have no useful skills in a rep economy. Most of the grunt work needed to keep a hab operating day to day can be handled by automated systems, which only one or two sapients overseeing the whole thing. A lot of outer system habs are also going to be pretty small, especially anarchist stations. That means they're going to operate more like an extended family (the transhuman monkeysphere is likely at least an order of magnitude larger than the human monkeysphere), which means that getting help with something is going to be pretty easy, especially if you aren't draining a ton of resources. If you're staying very alone and not communicating, you should have a while before people get annoyed (months to years probably), but that would go down pretty quickly if you're also requesting 50,000 liters of water a week, and won't explain why. A lot of places are pretty much post-scarcity, in that a single person living a fairly modest life, does not put an appreciable strain on the resources of most habs. That has more to do with how sparsely settled the whole outer system is more than anything else though. It's also a tenet of anarchist theory that if people are freed from the rat race of capitalistic life that they'll naturally be more empathetic and compassionate than people who need to produce value or die (after a while anyway). If you accept that, than the outer system would generally be a pretty good place. That said, most of this is only true for habs with a population of a least 100 egos, places smaller than that probably don't use rep much. They can just keep track of everything conventionally, and a lot of the really small habs are weird. This has been kind of rambling, and it's really late for me but the TLDR would be something like: Mental illness is much easier to treat, cure, and cope with than in the modern world. Needing to take time off from earning rep isn't really a problem, unless you need a disproportionately large amount of resources. People in the outer system are generically helpful, possibly much more so than people in the modern world.
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Tue, 2015-09-29 11:26
ShadowDragon8685 ShadowDragon8685's picture
I figure that, under "normal"
I figure that, under "normal" circumstances, your rep would float/plateau at ~20 or so. To drive it below 20, you have to really be at odds with the ethos of the people throwing pings your way; not just flying under the radar antisocially, but actively pissing them off, like being an extropian somewhere virulently anti-indenture and anti-corporate.
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Skype and AIM names: Exactly the same as my forum name. [url=http://tinyurl.com/mfcapss]My EP Character Questionnaire[/url] [url=http://tinyurl.com/lbpsb93]Thread for my Questionnaire[/url] [url=http://tinyurl.com/obu5adp]The Five Orange Pips[/url]
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Tue, 2015-09-29 13:53
DivineWrath DivineWrath's picture
From what I recall reading, a
From what I recall reading, a living wage on an anarchist habitat can be earned by dedicating a few hours every month, or the equivalent of a moderate favor. Basically, you are not required to do a whole lot of work to survive on such habs. A person who is not adept at being social could potentially survive. Also a muse can be a useful resource. While they don't have rep or networking scores, they can do online research. I would expect that there would be some mesh sites on most anarchist habs that posts jobs that needs doing. The muse could spend plenty of time to research jobs that you could do despite any disability that you might have, or skills that you lack. There are even some places that are all about teachings skills. DIY Shipyards at Twelve Commons (Rimward p. 86) are all about teaching ship construction skills. If you want them to build you a ship, you have to help. They see it as a means to help spread useful skills among like minded automonists.
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Wed, 2015-09-30 13:02
Tango Tango's picture
Imo. the @-rep system is the
Imo. the @-rep system is the weak link in EP-setting. I've tried to bend my mind around it in every possible way, but i just cant get it to work in my mind. Job opportunities will be lost because of real or perceived biases by the applicant towards certain factions as indicated by his @-rep. He might even face bigotry & harassment. Clandestine ops will not pay you rep (for obvious reasons), so why bother as a freelancer? So you want to rent a car? That will be 500 hertz-rep, thank you very much. Oh you only have 490? How about you give me a massage in the backroom and after that i'll like you in facebook, deal? <--how stupid is that? Then you have social issues OP mentions. How much rep means you're a "good guy"? What about "just average" or "yes man"? Who determines that? Does the values change over time? Is there rep inflation? Just imagine the amount of bitcoin/@-rep miners out there, creating botnets that forge identities that in turn shower you with rep. It has to happen, and because it does, it will destroy the credibility of the entire system. A dude with hertz-rep of 9000 zillion walks in to rent that car. Whats going to happen? How about a social situation, where somebody gives you rep. Is it polite to ping him back with some rep as a thank you? I mean, you don't lose anything. And if you didnt ping him, they might think you as an asshole. You all have those "friends" in facebook, who start whining how you never comment on any of their shit. And when you tell them the honest truth, it's a shitshow. Will that happen, if you just happen to disagree with somebody in a heated debate in EP? Will there be a rep hit? In EP this culminates to a economic system that encourages people to behave in a very specific way. Fake smiles and white lies, as nobody wants to offend or challenge the norm. In 2015 you might be castigated for having thoughts & beliefs that differ from the norm, but in EP those ideas might cost you your livelihood with the added benefit of a solar system wide character assassination. rep-system at its core is a mob justice system. Why anyone (except for the "rep central bankers") would install such a system is beyond me. Reputation is a natural side product of an endeavour by a group of people or an organization of any kind. You dont need a bookie for it. If you did well, they will remember you. Maybe they owe you one. Pushing the definition beyond that changes it's meaning to something more sinister. So whats my alternative? Currency backed by tangible assets. Enter Outer Rim Space Bux0r, or ORSB! ORSB is issued by the Outer Rim Uber Bank and the currency is backed by tangible assets like mining facilities, raw materials or corp shares owned by the bank. Simple to understand and familiar to players. And it makes sense. Im not saying the rep system shouldnt exist in EP, but i cant see it working in large scale. Players might encounter it in some fringle hab , or in small communes in the outer rim, where trust & teamwork is paramount to survival.
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Wed, 2015-09-30 15:22
uwtartarus uwtartarus's picture
A direct exchange of goods
A direct exchange of goods doesn't require Rep. If you give someone a massage for something, rep never came into the exchange. Rep comes into play when you want to borrow some guy's bike, and your rep indicates that you're a cool guy who in your spare time creates art or gives massages to others. If a direct exchange of favors or goods take place, it really isn't a rep transaction. I run a lot of games in my social network, I have a decent rep among these folks, even people who don't play games that I run, but are part of the social network, friends of friends, would do me a favor and help me out if I asked. That's rep. I don't have any leverage, nor did I offer to run games for these (non-gamer) folks, but they'd help me if I asked. The rep system is just a larger, more diffused system for favors. I don't need to give someone a favor in exchange for a favor, but I owe the community at large, which due to advanced social media, has spread pretty far. Rep system = super social media and the alternative economies that can arise from it.
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Exhuman, and Humanitarian.
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Wed, 2015-09-30 16:17
DivineWrath DivineWrath's picture
Rep economies aren't free for
Rep economies aren't free for alls. I'm pretty sure that there are checks and balances to try to find people who try to cheat the system. Since anyone can contribute, I'm fairly sure that there are number of solutions. For instance, there could be AIs out there who look for anomalies. Anomalies that might be looked for could include looking for AIs that pretend to be people in order to bump up the rep of one person. They could also look for a groups of people who only do favors for each other to boost their rep but use their high rep to draw from the rest of the rest of the rep system without giving anything in return. Another might have habs that require that a new guy who recently farcasts in to do some favors for the locals to verify that he does do favors and he can do what he says he can do. Another hab might require that rep to atrophy over time, that you can't achieve a high rep score and then live the good life for the rest of your days. Your rep might drop a few points every month so you have to do new work to restore back to where it was before.
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Wed, 2015-09-30 16:18
Sandras Prime Sandras Prime's picture
I think you're viewing Rep as
I think you're viewing Rep as a currency, which it is expressly not. Job opportunities may very well be lost because of reputation just as they are in traditional markets. If you're Joe Random off the street and no one will vouch for your services ala Yelp chances are you're going to lose out when there's a 4-star available even if you're cheaper. Clandestine ops might 'pay' (again monetizing) you in Rep in that they will open doors to other members of their network. They won't dog-ear it and say '+10 Rep for icing that Hab', but the effect is the same, you performed a task for X and they vouched for you as a reliable asset. Being an Anarchist affiliate doesn't mean you have to lack ambition either. Altruism aside, freelancing to increase rep means that when you need things people will provide for you. If you're an ass to people and refuse to partake in necessary day to day operations, yeah you'll likely get dinged into the mud over time. If you're an ass that gets things done, carries their weight, and make a name for yourself as an asset people will still dislike you but will respect the fact that you're doing stuff they don't want to do. It's fluid and it's likely to be one of those unstable elements of the rep economy, but that's what the AI oversight is for. As far as botnets go you are describing one of the things the ID Crew participates in. However they spend time making credible 'fakes' that can bypass the AI screening that the Rep Economies use. Memetic campaigns can occur, however the single user rep-ding is considered insignificant. Generally though something like that is earned because it takes a bit of effort. If you pissed off someone with enough clout to get the whole hab to want you out an airlock then you've probably made the wrong move. This is again, no different than Traditional economy setups and blackballing. The thing is, generally in an @rep system basic needs are met, anything else is extra. You'll have food, water, and air. A good example of Reputation economies would be the couch-crashing apps. You have a user who's traveling and wants to not pay (or pay less) for a room. They get online and people can check their user rating to see if they have a history of theft / cleanliness / etc before they offer up a bed for the night. Only in EP your muse and reputation network AIs verify the user ratings of hundreds/thousands of pings/dings over time for fidelity. If you have a good rating after all is said and done you get the room (or favor). No currency, no direct trade of services, reputation network. Your alternative to the reputation economy is to make it a traditional economy set on a variant of the 'gold standard'. Unless I'm missing something. That only gives you the option of a traditional economy, but a couple different faces on the space-bucks.
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Wed, 2015-09-30 19:24
Trappedinwikipedia Trappedinwikipedia's picture
Tango wrote:Imo. the @-rep
Tango wrote:
Imo. the @-rep system is the weak link in EP-setting. I've tried to bend my mind around it in every possible way, but i just cant get it to work in my mind. Job opportunities will be lost because of real or perceived biases by the applicant towards certain factions as indicated by his @-rep. He might even face bigotry & harassment.
Rep isn't relevant in this case. Every transitional and new economy is a panopticon, so regardless of rep, everyone is going to have a decent idea of everyone else's factionalism and personal habits. This has largely created less judgmental and vastly more open societies, according to Panopticon. Glass houses and stones and such.
Tango wrote:
Clandestine ops will not pay you rep (for obvious reasons), so why bother as a freelancer?
That's not necessarily true. A reliable covert operative is definitely going to have a rep in certain highly secretive circles. It won't be an easy score to keep track of (and keeping that kind of thing secret in the panopticon is hard, but not necessarily impossible). It definitely won't be a simple social media site like covertops.mesh, but someone will definitely get a rep. That's more of a transitional economy kind of rep than a new economy one though.
Tango wrote:
So you want to rent a car? That will be 500 hertz-rep, thank you very much. Oh you only have 490? How about you give me a massage in the backroom and after that i'll like you in facebook, deal? <--how stupid is that?
It is pretty stupid, but that's not how rep works. It isn't expended like a currency. For @-rep especially it's important to remember that rep usually handles use of resources in collectives and communes more than anything else. You're not renting a car from space-hertz, you're asking to use one of the collective's vehicles. Your rep serves as a way to prove to new people that you return the vehicle on-time, clean, and with a full battery. It also tracks how much you ask for, so that people can tell if you're hogging resources or not.
Tango wrote:
Then you have social issues OP mentions. How much rep means you're a "good guy"? What about "just average" or "yes man"? Who determines that? Does the values change over time? Is there rep inflation?
I'd imagine that relative rep is just that, relative. Being a "good guy" just means having a rep higher than the local average. Most of a person's rep is from testimonials, so rep inflation should only happen in large and closely socially tied areas. It can't really get inflated in a traditional sense though, as rep is not money.
Tango wrote:
Just imagine the amount of bitcoin/@-rep miners out there, creating botnets that forge identities that in turn shower you with rep. It has to happen, and because it does, it will destroy the credibility of the entire system. A dude with hertz-rep of 9000 zillion walks in to rent that car. Whats going to happen?
Rimward goes into some detail about efforts to game rep economies. It's a fairly complicated thing, and varies a fair amount of by location and network. The single most important thing is that rep is not currency. Having a lot of rep isn't the same as being wealthy, so someone with really high rep asking for a vehicle would simply appear as someone who takes great care of vehicles. That doesn't mean they get it, but it does mean that people have fewer qualms about letting them use a vehicle.
Tango wrote:
How about a social situation, where somebody gives you rep. Is it polite to ping him back with some rep as a thank you? I mean, you don't lose anything. And if you didnt ping him, they might think you as an asshole. You all have those "friends" in facebook, who start whining how you never comment on any of their shit. And when you tell them the honest truth, it's a shitshow. Will that happen, if you just happen to disagree with somebody in a heated debate in EP? Will there be a rep hit? In EP this culminates to a economic system that encourages people to behave in a very specific way. Fake smiles and white lies, as nobody wants to offend or challenge the norm. In 2015 you might be castigated for having thoughts & beliefs that differ from the norm, but in EP those ideas might cost you your livelihood with the added benefit of a solar system wide character assassination.
Most people don't even think about rep pings or dings in normal social situations, generally muses handle that. Either way, reactive pings aren't going to effect anyone's rep much at all. As for the rest? The panopticon changes pretty much everything about most social interactions. If you manage to piss off absolutely everyone in a heated debate, then your rep will probably tank, but pissing off everyone would take a lot of work. You can't really have little white lies and fake smiles, because everyone sees everyone almost all the time. Actually tanking your rep solar system wide would be extremely impressive, so much so that I don't think it's possible to do accidentally.
Tango wrote:
rep-system at its core is a mob justice system. Why anyone (except for the "rep central bankers") would install such a system is beyond me. Reputation is a natural side product of an endeavour by a group of people or an organization of any kind. You dont need a bookie for it. If you did well, they will remember you. Maybe they owe you one. Pushing the definition beyond that changes it's meaning to something more sinister.
There are no rep central bankers. There's no interest on it or anything like that analogy just doesn't make sense. Rep scores are basically a more convenient version of a background check, so that doing well can help you with people who don't already know you.
Tango wrote:
So whats my alternative? Currency backed by tangible assets. Enter Outer Rim Space Bux0r, or ORSB! ORSB is issued by the Outer Rim Uber Bank and the currency is backed by tangible assets like mining facilities, raw materials or corp shares owned by the bank. Simple to understand and familiar to players. And it makes sense. Im not saying the rep system shouldnt exist in EP, but i cant see it working in large scale. Players might encounter it in some fringle hab , or in small communes in the outer rim, where trust & teamwork is paramount to survival.
There aren't any banks in the outer system, or even really legal claims to various rocks people use. A currency backed by physical assets would fall apart even faster than the version of rep you wrote about. Mining facilities are basically free to make, so long as some kind of seed exists to start powering the nanofabs which make them. Resources permitting, a single one of those could von-neumann it's way to millions of installations in a week or two. Anyone could be competitive with the ORUB within a month if they felt like it. Conventional economics just doesn't make sense with 500 million people with a decades from Kardashev-I tech base built. Supply exceeds demand pretty massively, especially in the in the more sparsely populated outer system.
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Thu, 2015-10-01 09:53
GreyBrother GreyBrother's picture
Is Rep even used as a score
Is Rep even used as a score in character? I always thought the numbers on the char sheet are super abstract representations.
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Thu, 2015-10-01 10:20
uwtartarus uwtartarus's picture
GreyBrother wrote:Is Rep even
GreyBrother wrote:
Is Rep even used as a score in character? I always thought the numbers on the char sheet are super abstract representations.
I like to think of it that way, but I have read posts on the forums prior that imply that there is in fact a numerical number associated with your profile in-game. So I guess it depends on who you ask.
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Thu, 2015-10-01 11:27
Trappedinwikipedia Trappedinwikipedia's picture
I imagine that rep score is
I imagine that rep score is similar to Klout scoring (they're both 1-100 after all), but more complicated. It's not a direct score, but it is based on who you know and how much power you can wield through a social network.
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Thu, 2015-10-01 13:18
UnitOmega UnitOmega's picture
I believe there's an art
I believe there's an art asset in Core which shows an image of a character and then has an overlay of their rep in scores ala the character sheet. So personally, I say that rep does have a "score" or "value", as while this is an abstraction (albeit one generated by the complexity of the software and the AI systems built to monitor it all), abstraction is better than "subjective", which is something people do have a problem with grokking the Reputation system if true. If somebody's social network profile just says "good guy" that's meaningless - as it can have many meanings. If somebody has a solid score of say, 60, backed positive reviews, comments and notes, that gives you a much more firm understanding of what the rep [i]system[/i] says about them.
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Thu, 2015-10-01 14:38
Tango Tango's picture
I'm sorry guys, i'm still not
I'm sorry guys, i'm still not convinced. I'm not against facebook or linkedin -types of services running on your AR as you meet people, but to install @-rep as a solar system wide -service that'll work as the primary avenue of economic interactions in many places is just begging to be abused. Let me list just a few from the top of my mind: - Instead of botnets, people can create their own rep whoring circles. Everybody gets upvotes! Good luck trying to prove any given ping wasnt legitimate. - Corp managers & CEO's promising goodies for the workers in exchange for pings. If you dont participate, expect to have your next shift unclogging toilets. And on the other side, if you meet a manager or CEO with high rep, do you think they're good at their job, or just corrupt assholes? What's in a rep? - You work your entire life for one company. Your entire "rep-wallet" consists of pretty much one instance. Should things go south with that company, your rep will crash through the floor and you'll be "radioactive" to everyone. Character assassination of the 22st century. - So you live in this hab in the belt that's set up so that every person will have to do 5 hours of community service each month if they wish to hold onto their visas. Your job is to change the air filters. You like to tinker stuff, and so you build a space roomba that will do the job for you. 5 more extra hours in a month woooo. How is this action perceived in the hab? Will you receive a rep hit if you refuse to receive other jobs while your robot's slaving away? Are you an innovator or a lazy bum? - @-rep is managed by someone, and that someone has access to incredible amount of personal data. Imagine Prism & Boundless Informat on crack. Given enough time & exposure to @-rep, your entire life can be reconstructed from your rep exchange. Spice in some ASI, and you and your entire firewall cell will be sniffed out. Or the social structure of the entire transhumanity for that matter. Of course, creating identities or destroying them is just a matter of snapping your fingers. If you have that power, you will use it. And the question is, if you're not the entity at the helm of this monster, why would you subject yourself to it? Rep will just keep on accumulating in the system like the gold supply of some MMO. There is no real rep sink as long as you live a normal life ( and remember that you're immortal now), so you will just keep on accumulating that rep. Lets say you weld spaceships and you're very good at your job. The company/organization you work for just keeps on pinging you. You have reached the peak performance. Your welding seams are perfect on the atomic level. Yet your rep keeps on rising. Last month your spaceship welding inc. -rep was 10000, and now its 20000. What does it mean? How would a random person interpret that metric? Will there come a point, where people will just automatically assume foul play when they see absurdly high rep ratings? People will always seek to improve their standard of living. If it can be achieved by accumulating money, they'll try to do that. Some will pursue it by criminal means. Same is true when we replace money with the @-rep. Human nature doesn't change, it just adapts to the new system. It will seek out the most cost efficient way to accumulate this new resource. In the case of @-rep i just think its more trouble than its worth. You can counterfeit money and get caught, but when we're talking about social relationships as base of an inter planetary economic model, lines can get very blurred. Because the system is so full of holes, people will abuse it. That will eventually lead to a point where you dont know what the metrics mean anymore (because they dont mean anything). I dont think it could ever work, but even if it did, it would need a shit ton of rules. Like, mapping out every possible way of giving/receiving rep and then determining if it was legitimate or not. The system would need to probe a crap ton of personal data, cross reference it to the other party then somehow make the judgement if the ping was ok or not. What if it make a mistake? Imagine working in the customer service at @-rep. 10000 calls on hold as you frantically try to dig up files associated with the ping in question. All while the customer is cursing you to oblivion on the other end, because somebody didn't lend him a pig-floatie at a pool party.
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- "Mom's chicken soup, maybe?"
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Thu, 2015-10-01 16:07
Noble Pigeon Noble Pigeon's picture
Just wanted to pop my head in
Just wanted to pop my head in and say I do enjoy someone poking at the faults of the reputation economy for once, since the books never seem to do so. Gives me lots of stuff to work with in-game when proponents of the new economy discuss stuff with proponents of the mixed economy (what I call the "transitional" economy in the setting, which is a rather silly and assumptuous name). Not that discussing economics would normally be fun for RPGs, but fortunately my current crop of players love it for some reason.
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"Don't believe everything you read on the Internet.” -Abraham Lincoln, State of the Union address
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Thu, 2015-10-01 17:24
DivineWrath DivineWrath's picture
I'm a little worried that you
I'm a little worried that you might be trying to deliberately misunderstand how the rep economy works. The rep system isn't supposed to be a new currency system. It is supposed to a critique and alternative to economic systems that allow people to become fucking filthy rich, those who could cause problems by spending quantities of money that thousands (maybe even millions) of people could not make a in a life time, and prevent families from becoming a permanently entrenched upper class. Imagine a corrupt system where things have got so bad that there was no alternative but to rebel. A system where people have been ripped off to the point where they starve by the millions in first world countries. Imagine what kind of world the people of a successful rebellion might try to create if they had access to advanced technology. Create a society where people can't get too rich, you can't buy elections or lobbyists, you can't hoard material goods -- especially if someone has a dire need for it. A world where you have rep with not just with your friends and family, but also with people who you never meet before. The tech will allow them to monitor and verify your rep. EP is a panopticon after all, as everyone can watch everyone else. It is a system that rejects the old world. No CEOs who make more in an hour than most make in a year, no corporations that can neglect responsibilities, no organizations so monolithically huge that they can abuse others without consequence, no one is required to slave away for a living wage (automated tech covers that), etc. It might sound naive, but its entire purpose is to be something new that fixes problems that the old system creates. There are a great many who think it is their moral duty to try to strive for something better. It has worked thus far in the outer system. How close are these system to crumbling to dust (if at all) would be an opinion that vary from person to person, and will vary from location to location. I'm not saying that not everyone likes living under a rep economy. Some people, possible because of their own fault, have wound up with crappy lives. Some people wind up with crap jobs and crappy morphs because their rep doesn't allow them to get anything better. I recall reading this one guy whose job it is to clean an industrial recycler. He would much rather move to Mars, spend 10 to 20 years as an indenture, then live the inner system dream by making loads of money, then eventually buy a big house, a big car, and pleasure pod. Maybe not the most noble of life styles, but the rep economies aren't built to cater to those people.
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Thu, 2015-10-01 18:57
DivineWrath DivineWrath's picture
Quote:I'm not against
Quote:
I'm not against facebook or linkedin -types of services running on your AR as you meet people, but to install @-rep as a solar system wide -service that'll work as the primary avenue of economic interactions in many places is just begging to be abused. Let me list just a few from the top of my mind:
Rep doesn't work well in the inner system. Credits exist as the currency of choice. The way the hypercorps ensure that credits entropy over time, by convincing people that they should buy, consume, and throw away stuff, they can ensure that the people need to return to the hypercorps for jobs. The rep system undermines that by encouraging people to be good and be more equal.
Quote:
- Corp managers & CEO's promising goodies for the workers in exchange for pings. If you dont participate, expect to have your next shift unclogging toilets. And on the other side, if you meet a manager or CEO with high rep, do you think they're good at their job, or just corrupt assholes? What's in a rep?
Rep is supposed to measure the quality of a person's character. Being skilled helps, but you are expected to put that skill to help others or it might as well not exist. People outside (and even inside) the company can ding you for being corrupt assholes. Few things in EP are truely private. Politicians are always watched. If the system misses something, you could always add emails, videos, and even XP. If that doesn't work, then you could add the fact that you were punished for not being bossed around to the list of evidence. It is hard to fool the system, especially if they already think you are assholes and are looking for proof. The real reason why these people can be corrupt assholes is because people need money to live, and those jerks will have plenty of it. People will be quite able to suffer working for you if you give them what they are owed. More so if they need the stuff to live. Any place where rep matters, this doesn't work well because you could move on to some other job, so such threats are not something you can easily follow through with.
Quote:
- You work your entire life for one company. Your entire "rep-wallet" consists of pretty much one instance. Should things go south with that company, your rep will crash through the floor and you'll be "radioactive" to everyone. Character assassination of the 22st century.
Big companies don't exist in rep economies, so it shouldn't be a problem. Likewise, your rep doesn't exist in just one place. It is supposed to be copied and spread far and wide. It should be possible to expect to find copies of your rep just about anywhere where rep is used. It should be an easy to find facts that you spent your entire life working for one company. They should be able to get a quick summary of what you did there and what quality of work you did, or get a more detailed summary if they so desire.
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- So you live in this hab in the belt that's set up so that every person will have to do 5 hours of community service each month if they wish to hold onto their visas. Your job is to change the air filters. You like to tinker stuff, and so you build a space roomba that will do the job for you. 5 more extra hours in a month woooo. How is this action perceived in the hab? Will you receive a rep hit if you refuse to receive other jobs while your robot's slaving away? Are you an innovator or a lazy bum?
You will get a rep bump for your invention. Maybe a large one. However, you will be expected to find new work. You should be trying to make a world a better place, not retiring after doing one thing right. You could find a new labor job, or decide to make inventing stuff your primary job. Of course, there are places where this role seems to be reversed. Some Scum fleets are only able to continue to function because only a handful of scum can sit a in a room and do negotiations with hypercorp personal for more than 10 minutes without going bonkers. And then they get criticized because it is not very democratic to use the same people over and over...
Quote:
- @-rep is managed by someone, and that someone has access to incredible amount of personal data. Imagine Prism & Boundless Informat on crack. Given enough time & exposure to @-rep, your entire life can be reconstructed from your rep exchange. Spice in some ASI, and you and your entire firewall cell will be sniffed out. Or the social structure of the entire transhumanity for that matter. Of course, creating identities or destroying them is just a matter of snapping your fingers. If you have that power, you will use it. And the question is, if you're not the entity at the helm of this monster, why would you subject yourself to it?
A single person? I think you missed something. No single person or group of people control the rep. The mesh is its own ecosystem with the AIs managing data, and the world is a panopticon with cameras everywhere. There are few things about you that you can keep hidden. It is something of deal if there does not exist a video of your birth on the mesh. Some of that missing information exists because you are either so old that you predate the panopticon and the mesh, or significant data was lost during the fall. The TITANs did use viruses to either corrupt or delete data on a massive level. You could also use encryption to keep some data secret and hope no one is interested enough in you to bother breaking the encryption.
Quote:
Rep will just keep on accumulating in the system like the gold supply of some MMO. There is no real rep sink as long as you live a normal life ( and remember that you're immortal now), so you will just keep on accumulating that rep. Lets say you weld spaceships and you're very good at your job. The company/organization you work for just keeps on pinging you. You have reached the peak performance. Your welding seams are perfect on the atomic level. Yet your rep keeps on rising. Last month your spaceship welding inc. -rep was 10000, and now its 20000. What does it mean? How would a random person interpret that metric? Will there come a point, where people will just automatically assume foul play when they see absurdly high rep ratings?
Different places have different solutions than others. Some are better or worse. Nova York (Rimward, p. 26) is a place where they use the "noyo" as their currency of choice. A single noyo will devalue to 0 in 2 months. It is a process that can be speed up or slowed down to 1 to 3 months depending if you rep has been positive or negative. Both the currency and rep are locally unique, and they don't allow outside trading of their currency. It is very much designed to prevent the accumulation of wealth.
Quote:
People will always seek to improve their standard of living. If it can be achieved by accumulating money, they'll try to do that. Some will pursue it by criminal means. Same is true when we replace money with the @-rep. Human nature doesn't change, it just adapts to the new system. It will seek out the most cost efficient way to accumulate this new resource. In the case of @-rep i just think its more trouble than its worth. You can counterfeit money and get caught, but when we're talking about social relationships as base of an inter planetary economic model, lines can get very blurred. Because the system is so full of holes, people will abuse it. That will eventually lead to a point where you dont know what the metrics mean anymore (because they dont mean anything).
You could also try to improve the community instead of just improving your own social standing. Not everyone likes that, so I would expect there to be criminals. Nonetheless, it is not supposed to be a system where everyone ignores what everyone else is doing. If someone finds holes in the system, or somehow becomes excessively wealthy by any standard, evidence will eventually show and people will take action. Being excessively wealthy in an arachist hab is not a virtue. If you have the means to provide, more will be expected of you. If you do provide, it'll help your rep score. If you don't, it'll hurt your rep score. In contrast, the psychology of those in arachist habs can lead to some surprises when traveling to hypercorp habs. "I see a guy being robbed. I come to help. I beat the crook up. No one thanks me. I'm arrested. Now I'm being sued by the thief to pay for his medical bills? What am I supposed to do? Sit back and watch while a crime was being committed and let the criminal get away?".
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I dont think it could ever work, but even if it did, it would need a shit ton of rules. Like, mapping out every possible way of giving/receiving rep and then determining if it was legitimate or not. The system would need to probe a crap ton of personal data, cross reference it to the other party then somehow make the judgement if the ping was ok or not. What if it make a mistake? Imagine working in the customer service at @-rep. 10000 calls on hold as you frantically try to dig up files associated with the ping in question. All while the customer is cursing you to oblivion on the other end, because somebody didn't lend him a pig-floatie at a pool party.
Panopticon and AIs. There is a lot of work that can happen automatically without a person needing to anything about it. There does exist a lot of personal data about you on the mesh. What is rare is privacy and secrets. For the record, the AIs can understand data much like how humans can (many have copied pieces of code from uploaded human minds), so the AIs can write up new rules and tag things they aren't so sure about.
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Thu, 2015-10-01 19:46
Trappedinwikipedia Trappedinwikipedia's picture
Tango wrote:I'm sorry guys, i
Tango wrote:
I'm sorry guys, i'm still not convinced. I'm not against facebook or linkedin -types of services running on your AR as you meet people, but to install @-rep as a solar system wide -service that'll work as the primary avenue of economic interactions in many places is just begging to be abused. Let me list just a few from the top of my mind:
@-rep isn't system wide, it's pretty much only super prevalent in Martian Barsoomian circles, Anarchists, and Titan. Technically, brinkers use it, but they don't a lot, and only do so because of proximity.
Tango wrote:
- Instead of botnets, people can create their own rep whoring circles. Everybody gets upvotes! Good luck trying to prove any given ping wasnt legitimate.
This is why most rep networks besides FAME don't weight pings from friends very highly. The easiest way to "game" rep networks would be to make good impressions on lots and lots of new people, which isn't really gaming the system well.
Tango wrote:
- Corp managers & CEO's promising goodies for the workers in exchange for pings. If you dont participate, expect to have your next shift unclogging toilets. And on the other side, if you meet a manager or CEO with high rep, do you think they're good at their job, or just corrupt assholes? What's in a rep?
This isn't really a problem with @-rep, but could happen with C-rep for sure. I'd imagine that it's partially mitigated by preventing indentures and such from pinging their owners, and most hypercorps don't actually have very large workforces. It's a way to game C-rep certainly, but C-rep is a lot less meaningful than @-rep when it comes to getting goods and services.
Tango wrote:
- You work your entire life for one company. Your entire "rep-wallet" consists of pretty much one instance. Should things go south with that company, your rep will crash through the floor and you'll be "radioactive" to everyone. Character assassination of the 22st century.
This could be a problem, but I doubt many people work for a single company. For those people, getting contacts and networking with people outside the company would probably be a good idea, in order to help mitigate fallout. Kind of like diversifying stocks, but not really.
Tango wrote:
- So you live in this hab in the belt that's set up so that every person will have to do 5 hours of community service each month if they wish to hold onto their visas. Your job is to change the air filters. You like to tinker stuff, and so you build a space roomba that will do the job for you. 5 more extra hours in a month woooo. How is this action perceived in the hab? Will you receive a rep hit if you refuse to receive other jobs while your robot's slaving away? Are you an innovator or a lazy bum?
I imagine that a lot of the work which can easily be automated already has. If you're good with creating and maintaining automated systems, than that's probably what you end up doing. More innovator than lazy bum, so long as you keep the systems you create working well. I could see this leading to problems in certain habs where only a few people actually understand certain hab systems.
Tango wrote:
- @-rep is managed by someone, and that someone has access to incredible amount of personal data. Imagine Prism & Boundless Informat on crack. Given enough time & exposure to @-rep, your entire life can be reconstructed from your rep exchange. Spice in some ASI, and you and your entire firewall cell will be sniffed out. Or the social structure of the entire transhumanity for that matter. Of course, creating identities or destroying them is just a matter of snapping your fingers. If you have that power, you will use it. And the question is, if you're not the entity at the helm of this monster, why would you subject yourself to it?
Rep networks aren't centrally managed. They do compare to Prism and Boundless Informat, but anyone who is interested can fully access them. That's the panopticon society. Everyone has access to essentially the complete personal lives of everyone around them. Most people don't even care that much, unless something or someone catches their fancy. An ASI could pretty trivially unravel a lot of conspiracy memberships, but that's kind of small potatoes for them. Firewall enjoys the patronage of some of the few ASI that exist though, which is probably why they still exist. The Panopticon does make keeping something like Firewall a secret harder, but they seem to manage somehow. I'm honestly a little unsure of how, as I haven't put a ton of time into countermeasures for the Panopticon.
Tango wrote:
Rep will just keep on accumulating in the system like the gold supply of some MMO. There is no real rep sink as long as you live a normal life ( and remember that you're immortal now), so you will just keep on accumulating that rep. Lets say you weld spaceships and you're very good at your job. The company/organization you work for just keeps on pinging you. You have reached the peak performance. Your welding seams are perfect on the atomic level. Yet your rep keeps on rising. Last month your spaceship welding inc. -rep was 10000, and now its 20000. What does it mean? How would a random person interpret that metric? Will there come a point, where people will just automatically assume foul play when they see absurdly high rep ratings?
Rep isn't money, so it increasing is more like the amount of upvotes on Reddit increasing than a change in the money supply. A really high rep score should probably be cross-referenced with the age of the owning ego to see how much it matters. Still, it just means that a lot of people have a decently high opinion of you.
Tango wrote:
People will always seek to improve their standard of living. If it can be achieved by accumulating money, they'll try to do that. Some will pursue it by criminal means. Same is true when we replace money with the @-rep. Human nature doesn't change, it just adapts to the new system. It will seek out the most cost efficient way to accumulate this new resource. In the case of @-rep i just think its more trouble than its worth. You can counterfeit money and get caught, but when we're talking about social relationships as base of an inter planetary economic model, lines can get very blurred. Because the system is so full of holes, people will abuse it. That will eventually lead to a point where you dont know what the metrics mean anymore (because they dont mean anything).
Thanks to the various weightings of pings and dings, and the inevitable fallout if someone gets caught manipulating their rep in underhanded ways I don't really see a better way to game rep long-term than being aggressively prosocial. Meet and impress a lot of people, keep in contact with a lot of people. Don't shirk obligations. It doesn't matter a ton how game-able rep is if none of the gaming methods really outcompete it's intended function. Additionally, most new economies operate in near-post-scarcity conditions, so there won't be as much of a drive to improve their standard of living, as it'll be generically high. This may not be true in practice, but a lot of people in new economies think so.
Tango wrote:
I dont think it could ever work, but even if it did, it would need a shit ton of rules. Like, mapping out every possible way of giving/receiving rep and then determining if it was legitimate or not. The system would need to probe a crap ton of personal data, cross reference it to the other party then somehow make the judgement if the ping was ok or not. What if it make a mistake? Imagine working in the customer service at @-rep. 10000 calls on hold as you frantically try to dig up files associated with the ping in question. All while the customer is cursing you to oblivion on the other end, because somebody didn't lend him a pig-floatie at a pool party.
I think you're still thinking of rep as more similar to money (and more centralized) than it is. Rep economies are really strange, but have existed fairly stably in the real world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy That may differ a certain amount from the system present in EP, but provide an interesting framework for how rep/gift economies might function.
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Thu, 2015-10-01 21:32
UnitOmega UnitOmega's picture
DivineWrath makes a very
DivineWrath makes a very important point which you should always, [i]always[/i] remember when discussing the Reputation Economy and the Autonomist lifestyle. No matter how jaded and cynical you personally are, you [i]must[/i] admit there are idealists in the world. Just as it is human nature to be tribal, selfish and self-interested, there is also some people who by nature are selfless and driven to achieve and even die for their principles and ideals. The Autonomist Alliance and the Circle-A List we think of when we are defining a Reputation Network are systems and societies built by such people. They are engineered by people of ideals and talent backed by aggregate AI expert systems not possessed of human limitations. Their whole purpose is to exist roughly as they are and promote the value of their model society. Almost all Autonomist factions are made up of those who desire to live in those societies, and EP does actually address what happens for those who are introduced into them and were not already possessed of those value systems (Reboot gangs on Titan). While I am myself critical of some elements of the [i]A[/i]narchist society and the supposed perfection of the Reputation Economy, I always do so in it's intended context. Many anarchists would look at an armchair economist telling them they must somehow intrinsically hoard resources or defraud the system of their community as some kind of strange mutant or alien. It would go against their value system as much as you might find many practices from historical cultures alien and unconscionable. Part of transhumanism is overcoming intrinsic boundaries, after all. The "New Economy" only functions in a handful of regions of the space where it has been specifically arranged by these groups. Reputation and Networking function largely like today within the Old and Transitional Economies. And in fact, I like to point out the book even says that when outside the Rep economy one should be expected to pay cash money for favors to be performed, Networking simply means you're often buying things directly, or buying things not normally for sale.
—
H-Rep: An EP Homebrew Blog http://ephrep.blogspot.com/
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Thu, 2015-10-01 22:35
Wikrin Wikrin's picture
I'm a big fan of the Rep
I'm a big fan of the Rep system, and find this discussion quite interesting. Lot of good points made. Reputation is already a powerful thing. Forgive the arrogance, but I'd like to use myself as an example. I have Asperger's Syndrome. I tend toward confrontation, and have used the phrase "not worth the effort" to describe easily a half-dozen people. I hold grudges. When I was in college, there was one person I flipped off every time we crossed paths (roughly twice per week) for two years. No idea what his name was. Didn't really matter; he'd been rude to me once, but didn't justify any substantial investment of mental effort. Thing is, even with all these supposedly negative things, I've still got a pretty good reputation. Folks know me as being brutally honest, maybe a bit off, but generally well-intentioned. When I attempted to quietly resign from my (admittedly meager) employment, they offered me higher wages and better hours. Why? Because I'm reliable, hard-working, and courteous, and that counts for a lot more than whether or not people can relate to my rambling. I think that in a Rep-based economy, doing what's expected of you means you don't have much to worry about. Your social qualities will rarely outshine services rendered. Having a reputation as "a great guy, but not a very hard worker" won't get you near so far as some would hope. Also, UnitOmega's post is crushing it. Idealism for the win! :)
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Fri, 2015-10-02 01:52
FrankManic FrankManic's picture
I have to say
I'm happy to see that a moment of feeling crappy about my lot in life produced this interesting discussion that has helped me understand and contextualize some of the aspects of the rep economy in EP.
—
What is boils down to is that "Killer Robots exterminate humanity and escape to the stars" is one of the *good futures*.
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Fri, 2015-10-02 02:52
DivineWrath DivineWrath's picture
I suppose the gist of how the
I suppose the gist of how the rep economy works is, 1 part disgust over how the very rich have used money to abuse the societies they live in, 1 part idealistic belief that they could and must do better, and 1 part really advanced technology (possibly a century or two better than what we have now) to make everything work smoothly. The first two is easy enough to remember. What most people might have difficulty understanding is how different society has become because of technology. Death is an inconvenience. So long as you have a backup, you can be brought back to life. You don't need to play it safe if you have friends and/or wealth to bring you back. Likewise you are not required to remain organic if you think that is too fragile. There are many practical reasons to throw away the flesh and become a synthmorph. Or go fully digital and leave the physical work to robots. Or even fork and have multiple copies of yourself running around doing stuff in any combination of physical and digital bodies. Everyone has a wireless computer in their head. Anyone who does not have such a device practically have a mental disability. With wireless comms, AR (Augmented Reality), the ability to activate programs with a thought, built in tools to measure your health, the ability to research any fact you have doubts about, etc, you live a very different world than someone who does not have mesh inserts. You even have a second voice in your head, your very own personal aid. This program, called a muse, can manage your schedule, bank account, your rep, wake you in the morning, make recommendations, and provide you with some psychotherapy (important considering that many still have PTSD after transhumanity was nearly wiped out a decade ago). Nanofabrication can produce any good that a habitat needs, and nearly anything that anyone might want (excluding what hasn't been invented yet). No need to import an important part from Mars. By the time it arrives, you could be dead because of system failure. Everything you need has to be build able locally. This applies to even the tiniest habs. Habitat fabricators have the all the blueprints you need for survival and then some. Likewise limited AIs and many simpler programs manage a lot of systems that can be automated. These programs can even be expert programs, software that can know a lot about broad or narrow topics (in fact many are both). While many have copied bits of neural structure in their code, they have built in limitations so they never become bored, and can never render humans obsolete (hopefully). Transhumanity can make better AIs, but limited AIs are plenty good for the niche they fill. So when one wants to do away with money, you should keep in mind that the resources and technology for a single person to become a hermit does exists. Not just exist, but exist in an advanced enough form that you would could be live a fairly comfortable life. Any exist anywhere that people have figured out how to live at. The folks who use @-rep are merely adding a society on top of such a system. Because the system can mostly run itself, there is a lot of room to be able to experiment with any new economic system. In many ways, this technological foundation is used by everyone in the solar system, not just new economies, but even those who support the old economies. The real difference is not how they produce do goods and services, but rather how they motivate people to do stuff and what they push societies to achieve.
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Fri, 2015-10-02 03:11
uwtartarus uwtartarus's picture
Rimward goes on about how
Rimward goes on about how folks try to game the rep economy of the autonomists. It isn't perfect but it seems like you are deliberately misconstruing some things Tango. A lot of it is nebulously under control of AI's who automate the crap out of it, and Prism is a statist concern, everyone publishes a ton of things. Constantly. Read Rimward re: gaming the system, and Panopticon, re: privacy. I am sure it happens. No system is perfect, but frankly money means jack all when you will spend months away from outside influences and you live in nigh-post-scarcity. Every hab is not going to invent their own private currency nor waste bandwidth downloading the latest market trends for a systemwide currency when you live light hours apart. I mean some folks invent weird money, see Nova York and its weird decaying social money. The Titanian currency gets loads of flak for being kind of odd, is it monetized volunteer work or a real money pegged to a depreciating resource?
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Exhuman, and Humanitarian.
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Fri, 2015-10-02 16:05
Tango Tango's picture
Alright, so i rereaded the
Alright, so i rereaded the rep-material mentioned above, and yes, i might have remembered some details differently. However, i stand by my arguments that the rep system as a whole is just a cumbersome attempt at "the next step" for the transhuman collective. First of all, reputation as a sociological glue is as old as dirt. It matters so much in our daily lives that it's pointless to even talk about it; we all know how important it is and how it shapes our social lives. However when you slap a number on it and make it global, it changes everything. It grants you access to resources thus making it social capital. In a moneyless society it IS the money. And with it comes all the other things we associate currency with. In essence, rep-system turns our social networks into a digital battlefield. Now let's talk about money. The core rule book's take on it goes like this: "Money is for those who cant take care of themselves". I prefer to call it efficiency. I referred to a tangible asset based currency before, so let me expand on that. When you get paid in EP (provided its asset based currency), the note/coin/ string of code appearing in your online wallet is just a claim to a resource. One space buck might represent a metric ton of hydrogen that's being stored in a bank warehouse. It could be a commodity ETF. It's something you can touch. You can measure the energy potential in that mass of hydrogen. You can calculate exactly how far it will take you. You know exactly how much its worth. Money also gives you the freedom to self actualize even if your neighbors don't like you. It's flexible and doesn't come with expectations. And tell me, what is the fundamental difference between a corp drone slaving away for a bigger flat and an autonomist kissing ass for a more spacious cabin? Money's got a bad name because people don't understand it. Rep will get that rep too (eh eh), once it really hits the mainstream. There will be class division, rich & poor (however you define that in AF+10), because there is no denying human nature and physics. People are just pursuing their own separate interests. You know that cleaning that air filter nets you some rep so you'll do it. Not out of the kindness of your heart, but because you'll need to greace some cogs to get that cabin swap -application rolling. Or you could just buy it and avoid any potential blowback from the local social e-scene. Last you checked, the hab's reactor still ran on helium 3, something your money is backed by, and the closest registered ORUB-associated refinery is just 0,4 AU away on Ceres orbit. Will the hab still laugh at your "barbarous relic" bucks, when the helium freighter arrives to save the day? The money is not the note, but the helium 3 in those tanks. Surely any autonomist can appreciate that? Now that I've reread the material recomended for me, it has just reinforced my opinions on the rep system as a whole. Lots of subsystems to manage this and that. Rules of diminishing pings based on the social proximity of whoever. Tens of micro pings & hits a day while riding an elevator or walking a dog. Pings that dont really matter except that they do once some arbitrary limit has been breached. Getting side hits from your friend's profile because he farted while someone was talking. Writing reviews on people. Holy shit. Do you really think a normal person could keep on evaluating every interaction 24/7? My guess is, that within 24h the subject's attached notes on his pings would read something like "ASDDWASDFJEHWNF!!!" "lollolspacecat!" "( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) dat ass" or "KILLMENOW!". But thats just me. Saying its all automated is just a cop out. Imagine the work going into coding such an automatic rep bot. You would have to code in rep hit values for things like "farting in elevator -2" a silent one would be just -1 because the subject might hit the wrong person, right? And what if the subject disagrees with the bot's decisions? The list for these values would be endless and then you would have endless numbers of permutations of these social interactions. Need i go on about how ridiculous this is? Also, rep pinging culture would be different from hab to hab, as some habs just might dislike some specific action more, resulting in disproportionate rep buildup. Maybe some habs have a culture of pinging back rep? so 2 identical nuke reactor engineers in different habs would have differing rep values, even if they did everything exactly the same. Give it a couple of years, and one of these guys would be running the entire show, while the other was still stuck in his first assignment. So what's in @-reputation? Nothing, because it cannot be measured objectively. You might get accurate information on somebody, or you might not. My question is, do you really want to build a society that's economic model is hinging on such a nebulous concept? You need exact measurements because you need to have the ability to plan ahead. One space buck will buy you reactor fuel worth of 5 hours of operation including the cost to rent the reactor itself. You can work with that. How much reactor time will 26 @-rep buy you? Will 52 @-rep buy double the amount? Yes. No. Maybe. Depends on the habitat and the manager? See what i mean. You would have to negotiate everything beforehand anyway, because you wouldn't know for sure if you had enough brownie points, thus wasting precious time. And just in case somebody misunderstood me: I am not against PC:s having allies. When i read these space hippies slamming currency, i just have to conclude that they dont know what they are talking about. They paint a picture of monolitic corporations opressing the poor, when they are really taking about is the human nature, not money.
—
- "Mom's chicken soup, maybe?"
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Sat, 2015-10-03 05:00
DivineWrath DivineWrath's picture
I don't know about everyone
I don't know about everyone else, but I want to move on to something else. I'll settle with agree to disagree. Basically, we seem to be disagreeing over details such as human nature or the nature of economics. Is human nature unchangeable or does the environment play a big part? Is capitalism really the most efficient system, or it a system that seeks to increase profits at any expense, even creating additional waste so long as it doesn't need to pay for it? Not every person gets the rep economy, nor does everyone have the right mind set for it. I'm not saying that the rep economy is the best system, only that it works for the people accustomed to using it.
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Sat, 2015-10-03 05:39
Chaplain Chaplain's picture
DivineWrath wrote:I suppose
DivineWrath wrote:
I suppose the gist of how the rep economy works is, 1 part disgust over how the very rich have used money to abuse the societies they live in, 1 part idealistic belief that they could and must do better, and 1 part really advanced technology (possibly a century or two better than what we have now) to make everything work smoothly.
You forgot massive catastrophe of the Fall. In real life such ideas could only exist in times of massive social upheaval and destruction of socio-political institutes, when desperate people could see anarchism as solution. Thing is, no matter how many idealsits are involved, it only lasts until hierarchy is re-established: Paris Commune was spawned by Franco-Prussian War and lasted for 72 days, russian anarchism was spawned by WW1 and civil war and managed to hold for a few years, Eclipse Phase anarchism was spawned by decades of Old Earth ecopocalypse spiraling out of control and ending in WW3 / TITAN wars - they might survive until AF50-AF70 in one form or another, but ultimately they will have to succumb to some kind of hierarchy, whether it will be Titanian Plurality or post-indenture hypercapitalism (infugees are numerous but not numberless, and sooner or later there will be only convicted criminals offering themselves on IndEx) is irrelevant. Essentially, anarchy (just like any other extremist ideology) is a side effect of transition period between different socio-political paradigmas. I'm 100% sure that if it wasn't for the disasters on Earth since 60BF, there is no way anarchists, scum, ultimates or jovians could have emerged as political entities to be reckoned with.
—

“Any AI smart enough to pass a Turing test is smart enough to know to fail it.”
― Ian McDonald, River of Gods

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Sat, 2015-10-03 07:23
Tango Tango's picture
DivineWrath wrote:I'm not
DivineWrath wrote:
I'm not saying that the rep economy is the best system, only that it works for the people accustomed to using it.
I do get the rep system, and i wouldn't have a problem with it if the books didn't insinuate it being the next big step in the evolution of human condition. A rep system can work. Any system can work given that you have homogeneous enough group that shares values & culture. Once you inject different/opposing political, religious or ethnic factions in it though, it will fall apart. Powerblocks will form, and you'll have upvote/downvote wars all over the place. And nothing will get done because reaching a general consensus is impossible.
—
- "Mom's chicken soup, maybe?"
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Sat, 2015-10-03 16:47
uwtartarus uwtartarus's picture
The persistence of the Inner
The persistence of the Inner System and Extropians implies that it may not be the next big step, just an experiment that may or may not work (ala The Dispossessed). The reason why the number is there and has been made global is because the social network has gone global, that is the entire point of rep economies, it stipulates that your rep is no longer a localized thing, but a wide-ranging thing, complete and total strangers can have rep that you are aware of because of social media and greater flow of information. Look at all the viral celebrities and the like that we become aware of thanks to the internet and facebook and the like. Rep isn't money, you don't spend it, it is a metric to determine whether people want to share with you. It doesn't grant you any claims to any resources, it merely indicates whether people ought to share with you or not. It doesn't simplify like money does. Money and currency represents a fluid and exchangeable possession, whether it is digitized credits, pieces of precious metals, or sand dollars and seashells, it is a possession. Full rep economies don't have possessions that are not intrinsically personal. I owe my wedding ring, and my personalized tools that I use frequently and have a lot of meaning to me. I don't own the truck I drive to work, I don't own my vacsuit, and I don't own bits of things that I am going to immediately trade away to get things, and which represent a repressive wage-work economy that automation has completely undone. The rep economy is one which goes beyond the basic income future that people are predicted, and just does away with the entire money, everyone gets food and shelter and health, and people pursue their passions and if their passions are things we enjoy, we laud them and praise them. The books and their authors posit that rep economies are the future, and the next big step in transhuman progress towards the utopian post-human whatever that awaits us, but that is just one presumption that while intrinsic to the writing of the books, there are in game examples where folks flout it and disagree. Just as the Jovians represent an alternative viewpoint re: transhumanism, the Extropians, many brinkers and odd sorts (like Nova York), and the Inner System all believe that wage-work and the money-based economies are not some stepping stone, ala Marxism's historical inevitability thing, to a future without money. I'm not saying you're wrong to disagree with it, just that you keep ascribing qualities to it (like rep = money) that are not right.
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Exhuman, and Humanitarian.
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Sun, 2015-10-04 12:55
consumerdestroyer consumerdestroyer's picture
Tango wrote:DivineWrath wrote
Tango wrote:
DivineWrath wrote:
I'm not saying that the rep economy is the best system, only that it works for the people accustomed to using it.
I do get the rep system, and i wouldn't have a problem with it if the books didn't insinuate it being the next big step in the evolution of human condition. A rep system can work. Any system can work given that you have homogeneous enough group that shares values & culture. Once you inject different/opposing political, religious or ethnic factions in it though, it will fall apart. Powerblocks will form, and you'll have upvote/downvote wars all over the place. And nothing will get done because reaching a general consensus is impossible.
Instead of replying point by point to your larger posts, I'll just say that every rep network has both paid and volunteer individuals as well as AI oversight that specifically is there to counter these kinds of things. In-game, that means it's easy (given high skills specialized at it, anyway) for a Firewall agent to set up a bot-net of fake IDs to get the rep they need for something, but they better apply it to a throw-away fake ID themselves bc it's going to get caught, maybe even before they can use the rep to secure something. It's probably a lot easier to forge digital assets in creds and then shunt it through enough places that when financial AIs find the initial discrepancy, it's too hard to track down. You can't give rep to someone else, which eliminates this particular problem of money economies. Honestly, I see way more weak links with credits still existing than I do with rep networks, especially given c-rep existing. Edit: also, look in Sunward at the stuff about the LLA, both Earth Orbit and Luna. They make a distinction between the extreme ethnic and religious divisions in Earth Orbit and on Luna (moreso in orbit IIRC) and the nearly complete lack of it elsewhere in the system. Even the Jovians, who preserve some of those distinctions, aren't mentioned as having internal strife along those lines. I actually run the Junta as a place where people of all religions make migrations to since it's implied they have the last remnants of nearly any faith of which there is still last remnants, so if anything it'd be Orbital or Loonie pilgrims bringing that shit with them. I don't think your points are about the setting-as-written, but your homebrew.
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Sun, 2015-10-04 15:53
Tango Tango's picture
uwtartarus wrote:Rep isn't
uwtartarus wrote:
Rep isn't money, you don't spend it, it is a metric to determine whether people want to share with you. It doesn't grant you any claims to any resources, it merely indicates whether people ought to share with you or not.
If rep is the only thing that determines your access to resources in a moneyless society, then it is money. You can give it some other name, but your rep is (apparently) the stored potential energy of your life. Here's the thing though, what incentive do i have to give you free stuff no matter how high your rep is? I don't care if somebody else likes you. If you were counting on getting some mission critical item/service based solely on your rep, well, better luck next time.
uwtartarus wrote:
The rep economy is one which goes beyond the basic income future that people are predicted, and just does away with the entire money, everyone gets food and shelter and health, and people pursue their passions and if their passions are things we enjoy, we laud them and praise them.
And if those passions go against the mainstream? Your'll have less voice in matters as your rep tanks. You'll be pushed to the margins. So what will you do? Stop doing the things you love to do? Get on with the program? Change your ways to please the mainstream by "self actualizing" in activities that are accepted? You can have millions of admins going through all the rep pings and hits, taking in account every last detail to ensure a fair system. But what is rep? It is just an opinion on something. If some dude just doesn't like somebody else's face, well, it is his genuine opinion, and he will make it heard in the rep system. Now an admin sees this hit, and will have to determine if its "valid". But how do you even determine that? The only way to measure opinions is to have a standard, and the biggest and most important question in this whole rep-discussion is, who sets this standard? Whoever it is, and whatever's the standard, it will reward & punish people based on their thoughts, actions (even if obectively positive) and background. “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” ―George Carlin Realization of this utopian rep-society ultimately hinges on the quality of its citizens. I think it sets its rim too high for the average joe (or someone with radically differing ideas) so that it will never be anything other than an fringe group consisting of very homogenic population. It has no tolerance for social conflict. edit: I'm happy that the rep-system is in the game. Not because i think it would be a great system irl. but because of its flaws. For me, it is the seemingly utopian society, where every indentured servant wishes to land some day. Little do they know that beyond the shining surface lies a monster conjured from the darkest corners of the human collective mind. No matter what it says, deep down you just know that nothing is free. So whatever if offers, you will pay with your soul. Makes for a great storytelling.
—
- "Mom's chicken soup, maybe?"
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Sun, 2015-10-04 16:58
Wikrin Wikrin's picture
Tango wrote:If rep is the
Tango wrote:
If rep is the only thing that determines your access to resources in a moneyless society, then it is money. You can give it some other name, but your rep is (apparently) the stored potential energy of your life. Here's the thing though, what incentive do i have to give you free stuff no matter how high your rep is? I don't care if somebody else likes you. If you were counting on getting some mission critical item/service based solely on your rep, well, better luck next time.
This bit seems odd to me. I think of it thusly: Your friend wants to borrow your car to run errands. You are staying home all day, and aren't going to need it. You know them well enough to say with confidence that they will not abuse your vehicle, and will return it with at least as much fuel as it presently has. You could demand compensation, or you could say "sure, go for it," knowing that they're more likely to help you out if you need it at some point later. It isn't a buy, so much as just doing a nice thing for someone. Now, with the Rep system, you have an opinion to go off, even if you haven't had a chance to form one yet. Think of it as Carfax for people. "Tommy smokes in cars. Tommy is a dick to pedestrians." So on, so forth. Lending to him might not be a great idea. Alternatively, maybe you find out he's a super responsible guy that's been looking for new hab duties, and he needs the car to that end. Lending it is a nice thing to do, and your community appreciates it. No skin off your nose, right? Biggest problem I see is, well, have you ever met your friends' friends? If they're anything like folks I've known, easily half of them are utterly terrible. But then, modern socialization is entirely too reliant on geography.
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Sun, 2015-10-04 18:02
Tango Tango's picture
The rep system makes the
The rep system makes the (wrong) assumption that i would loan my car to anyone, including a friend. There could be a myriad of reason for that, but they dont really matter. All that matter is, that i wont loan my car. The more social pressure is laid on me, the more i'm going to recoil. I don't want to owe anyone anything so that they can later expect something out of me. And if i helped a friend, i would do it because i wanted to and would not expect anything in return. Frankly, the whole idea of keeping book on favors disgusts me. It cheapens the relationship to a point where it turns to something else entirely. Now i might be wrong, but i think there are more people out there who think like me on this issue. If we were thrown into a rep society, we would do poorly. We would live our lives in a manner where we wouldn't put burdens on others so that the cycle of favors and return favors would never start. You know the quiet type who just wants to work and mind his own business. Our footprint in the rep-system would be minimal. And so, why would we want to live in a such system? btw...Holy shit, we're circling back to OP:s topic!
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- "Mom's chicken soup, maybe?"
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Sun, 2015-10-04 20:14
Wikrin Wikrin's picture
Tango wrote:The rep system
Tango wrote:
The rep system makes the (wrong) assumption that i would loan my car to anyone, including a friend. There could be a myriad of reason for that, but they dont really matter. All that matter is, that i wont loan my car. The more social pressure is laid on me, the more i'm going to recoil. I don't want to owe anyone anything so that they can later expect something out of me. And if i helped a friend, i would do it because i wanted to and would not expect anything in return. Frankly, the whole idea of keeping book on favors disgusts me. It cheapens the relationship to a point where it turns to something else entirely. Now i might be wrong, but i think there are more people out there who think like me on this issue. If we were thrown into a rep society, we would do poorly. We would live our lives in a manner where we wouldn't put burdens on others so that the cycle of favors and return favors would never start. You know the quiet type who just wants to work and mind his own business. Our footprint in the rep-system would be minimal. And so, why would we want to live in a such system? btw...Holy shit, we're circling back to OP:s topic!
I don't think it's "keeping book" on favors, as such. Any more than the decision "so-and-so is a good guy" or "that guy's a dick" is keeping book. Human nature is to judge and evaluate everything, people included. It's just a shorthand version of exactly that. Clear that you would not do well in a Rep-based economy. Not for antisocial tendencies, but for the ideas of ownership and the like. I would love it, but I also abhor the concept of currency. Guess I'm just the sort of idealist that's been previously discussed.
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Sun, 2015-10-04 21:53
UnitOmega UnitOmega's picture
Not that I want this to come
Not that I want this to come across like a personal attack or anything, but have you, Tango, considered the possibility that you think categorically different than some others, and that you're too strongly projecting your own mentality on to all humans? Obviously the idea and system of the rep economy isn't some alien thought, not to be conceived by man, the writers of this game worked on it and developed it into the current model. You, yourself, explicitly are not one for the reputation economy. the New Economy is built on societies which are inherently socialist, collectivist or in effectively a tribal state enough that sharing resources or having resources redistributed. Many are directly democratic or organized via non-hierarchical councils and groups of experts. These ideas weren't made up for EP, they've been bandied about before in our human history. And the people developing their ideas weren't rubbing their hands together thinking about humanity selling its soul for the free lunch of communism (or whatever). So because these ideas and ideals exist, we have to assume that people of differing mentalities and values exist (never mind that it is proven by simple experience, that's a completely different ontological argument). And many readers/players of the Eclipse Phase game system are willing to accept enough of them exist to populate the regions of the Outer System which formulate the New Economy. Which, in relative terms to our modern day, isn't all that many. I find it quite easy to assume those who are possessed of the value system of the Reputation economy could build it and engineer it in a form to roughly function as @-rep is supposed to in EP. I can easily see with the technological advancement and sociopolitical upheaval of the Fall them having it work for 10 years. I could see it lasting maybe 50 or 100 years more. It might last indefinitely among humans, though probably not without undergoing ongoing evolution. That again, is a different discussion. The Rep Economy is not for you, you do not subscribe to the same zeitgeist it's participants do. But there are plenty of people who would. They exist right now, as evidenced in this thread. Plenty of people would subscribe to the idea of offering and sharing equally, especially with a lot of basic needs taken care of by small pop size (on an individual hab basis) and advancing technology. And when placed in what could be not only a life and death situation for you, but for all members of your habitation (since, y'know, Earth isn't just there right outside your house anymore) you might decide to act differently for the sake of not only yourself but others (all of whom nearly went extinct ~10 years ago). I'd also point out, rep isn't a book-keeping scheme either. You don't trade favors for favors on a 1-to-1 basis. Rather, doing favors (i/e, supplying the gift economy, sort of) keeps your rep level maintained and balanced. If you do lots of little favors or one big favor, the system doesn't necessarily care - it just keeps note of your reliability to your community so that when you ask your community for something in return, the individual members who make it up can see your positive qualities and decide if they feel like imparting unto you your desire (need, in most cases, is a strong word). Your friend asking you if they can borrow your car is actually a bad analogy - that's a social interaction with people already inside your social circle. The Rep system allows you do go next door, or down the block, or into the next [i]country[/i] and ask for a car, and still have your general reputation in the [i]extended[/i] community carry over. Now obviously, some people just wouldn't buy it. Those people aren't in the Rep economy, or if they are, they have poor value. As makes sense in mostly collective society. tl;dr: The Rep Economy makes perfect sense and functionality - if you actually think and feel like a commie
—
H-Rep: An EP Homebrew Blog http://ephrep.blogspot.com/
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Sun, 2015-10-04 23:21
Trappedinwikipedia Trappedinwikipedia's picture
It's also worth noting that
It's also worth noting that all of the people who are saying that the rep economy is the future are all autonomists, and definitely have some bias there. There are just a disproportionate amount of autonomist POV sections in the book.
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Mon, 2015-10-05 01:05
uwtartarus uwtartarus's picture
"People who don't fit in will
"People who don't fit in will be marginalized" yes. That's rep. If you want to have unpopular opinions, and still have clout, live in a system where you just need to grind away at wage-work, allowing you to be as unpleasant as you want, to get whatever you want, even if it means you might also starve because shit happens. Transitional economies (ones that mix credit market economic action with rep and basic income notions) are the norm in Inner System space, so even in those economies, you could work your arse off to earn all the credits you want, and if you're a dick that people don't like, you may be screwed. Rep or money only go so far. Nouveau Riche as a concept exists to highlight this idea: you may have the money, but you lack the clout/culture/social-inertia that the old guard maintain. If you like how the rep economy works, because of and not in spite of its flaws, that's fine than. If the stories you want to tell with EP's setting are the sort of "The Dispossessed" idea that idealism fades and people return to their old behaviors which are succinctly described with your complaints about unpopular opinions and need for ownership, than so be it, tell those stories, they are just as valid. The outer system and the rep economies are not, populationwise, a serious contender against the vast majority of transitional and old economies, which dominate, per capita speaking. The Inner System is what, like 90% of the Transhuman population now? The rep economies exist because people fled from the Inner System areas. Gift economies exist today, in odd and rare moments, like burning man, or anarchist communes throughout Europe and the like, and it was these sorts of examples (I suspect) that inspired the writers I suspect. But money is liquid currency, not your potential stored life energies, it is a diffusion of whether people like you within a certain political faction. Rep and rep economies are two separate things. The Inner System has rep, like job resumes with references. These character references are like a proto-rep. Rep economies are systems whereby people don't work for money, but instead get access to things beyond certain basic necessities, via the good opinion of others. It tacitly assumes that people who thrive in these systems do so because they don't flout the social norms of their groups. If you don't act like an Autonomist, than other Autonomists don't like you, and thus they won't help you. The rep economies function solely on whether people like you. Similarily, it doesn't matter how much money you have, you act like a dishonorable crook, one without face, guanxi and the like, than other criminals won't help you, all the while you trade with cash and credits. The fact that rep exists BEYOND rep economies, shows that tangling them up confuses the issue. If you are unpopular, you don't thrive in rep economies, whether this negates the utility of the rep economies is a question that can and should be answered or dealt with if you are so inclined, in game, in the setting things. But rep is not money, rep economies are explicitly non-money economies. Like Palace Economies of yore (( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palace_economy )) to list one example of a non-rep and non-money economy.
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Exhuman, and Humanitarian.
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Mon, 2015-10-05 08:05
Chaplain Chaplain's picture
UnitOmega wrote:tl;dr: The
UnitOmega wrote:
tl;dr: The Rep Economy makes perfect sense and functionality - if you actually think and feel like a commie
And on top of it, we've seen a lot of weird economic systems emerge IRL during the course of history. But can those rep economies survive in the long (>100 years) run, especially if they are vastly outnumbered and outgunned, without strategic resources of the inner planets, forced to use slow-as-hell IST instead of gravitational maneuvers, and mostly spread out in 100-man isolated tin cans? Answer should be obvious.
—

“Any AI smart enough to pass a Turing test is smart enough to know to fail it.”
― Ian McDonald, River of Gods

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Mon, 2015-10-05 08:27
DivineWrath DivineWrath's picture
Some loose ends. Most are
Some loose ends. Most are pointed towards to what Tango has said. First off, saying that AIs manage the rep system is a cop out is wrong. The tech of Eclipse Phase really is that good. Limited AIs can have active skills up to 40 and knowledge skills up to 80. I think it is safe to say that limited AIs can know their stuff. To put things in perspective, a starting character starts with 70 in their native language. So AIs can know any topic better than what a starting character might know their own native language. Saying that using AIs is a cop out is like saying driving a car to the grocery store is a cop out. Likewise, efforts can be done to ensure that the AIs are objective, not subjective, so their evaluations of your character can be more fair. They can't learn, or in this case change, so they shouldn't have biases (at least don't get any that weren't there before). Second, having your rep dinged down because of things like farting is petty, excessive, and useless. So what if you fart? What does that have to do with whether or not I should trust a guy to fix my bike? What about whether or not I should consider accepting a person's request for help fixing their computer? I would argue that dings for such stuff should be deleted. They get in the way. "I'm sorry but you rep says that you farted 4 years ago in an empty hallway. I know this because your rep logged that the environmental sensors there detected a rise in methane gas and other chemicals that have foul odors when you were the only one there. I not going to help you because you might offend me when I'm trying to help you.". Thirdly, there is a video that addresses why we work: http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_the_way_we_think_about_work_is_b... If you don't have the time to watch and think about it, let me give you a quick overview. If you think that your bad fortune is due to God's will, you pray to fix it. If you think your bad fortune is due to oppression, you rebel. Your ideas determine how you interact with the world. Bad technology will disappear, but bad ideas will not go away if people believe that they are true. With bad ideas, people will create ways of living and institutions consistent with those ideas. With capitalism, you have this idea that personal gain is the only goal or reason for doing work, so the ultimate and only reward is money. Of course, the guy points out that people are shaped by institutions, so a system that offers money as a reward also produces people who only value money as a reward. If you become a person who only values money, what sense does a rep system have? You are not looking to improve the well being of your society, you are looking to maximize your personal material gain. In your own words, you said that rep is the new money. You are not trying to see what rep could mean for the community, or in terms of non material rewards, you are trying to see what material things it can get you (to use it like it was money). Likewise, gaining rep is very different than getting money, so you are making many mistakes and bad assumptions as to how it works. Not only does that thinking lead people to see no value in a rep economy, but they will actively fight it.
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Mon, 2015-10-05 19:49
Tango Tango's picture
DivineWrath wrote:First off,
DivineWrath wrote:
First off, saying that AIs manage the rep system is a cop out is wrong. The tech of Eclipse Phase really is that good. Limited AIs can have active skills up to 40 and knowledge skills up to 80. I think it is safe to say that limited AIs can know their stuff. To put things in perspective, a starting character starts with 70 in their native language. So AIs can know any topic better than what a starting character might know their own native language. Saying that using AIs is a cop out is like saying driving a car to the grocery store is a cop out. Likewise, efforts can be done to ensure that the AIs are objective, not subjective, so their evaluations of your character can be more fair. They can't learn, or in this case change, so they shouldn't have biases (at least don't get any that weren't there before).
My whole point was, that reputation is just an opinion on someone. It is not valid nor invalid. It's just a thought. Objectively judging someone's opinion is fundamentally impossible. It doesn't matter how good your AI;s are. Or your admins. If they were to make a judgement on a ping you received, even if they completely agreed with the ping, they engaged in thought control. They rewarded you for thinking the way they think.
DivineWrath wrote:
Second, having your rep dinged down because of things like farting is petty, excessive, and useless. So what if you fart? What does that have to do with whether or not I should trust a guy to fix my bike? What about whether or not I should consider accepting a person's request for help fixing their computer? I would argue that dings for such stuff should be deleted. They get in the way.
Again, who are you to judge how i feel about somebody farting in my presence? Maybe i come from a culture where its a taboo or a death threat, whatever. Are you downplaying my feelings about the issue? Why do you think its only -1 instead of -50? How did you come to that conclusion? What is your method of weighting this totally arbitrary thought and then somehow giving it a precise value that we can use to measure a person's character? And the measurement has to be accurate, since it will have an impact on my life & living standards. And if there is a set standard for social etiquette in the rep-system, why not just let your muse spy on your behavior and let it rat directly to the powers that be? Same difference.
DivineWrath wrote:
If you don't have the time to watch and think about it, let me give you a quick overview. If you think that your bad fortune is due to God's will, you pray to fix it. If you think your bad fortune is due to oppression, you rebel. Your ideas determine how you interact with the world. Bad technology will disappear, but bad ideas will not go away if people believe that they are true. With bad ideas, people will create ways of living and institutions consistent with those ideas. With capitalism, you have this idea that personal gain is the only goal or reason for doing work, so the ultimate and only reward is money. Of course, the guy points out that people are shaped by institutions, so a system that offers money as a reward also produces people who only value money as a reward. If you become a person who only values money, what sense does a rep system have? You are not looking to improve the well being of your society, you are looking to maximize your personal material gain. In your own words, you said that rep is the new money. You are not trying to see what rep could mean for the community, or in terms of non material rewards, you are trying to see what material things it can get you (to use it like it was money). Likewise, gaining rep is very different than getting money, so you are making many mistakes and bad assumptions as to how it works. Not only does that thinking lead people to see no value in a rep economy, but they will actively fight it.
I'll let Dr. Friedman make my point better than i could ever do: [youtube]RWsx1X8PV_A[/youtube] It seems money has somehow become a bad word. Yes, rep is money; it is something else too, but if you want anything in a rep society, it's your rep that makes it possible. That is the practical application of rep in said society. The friendly disposition by locals is just a plus. There is a direct correlation between your rep and your standard of living. I know what you guys are thinking; that my greed blinded dirty little mind is just incapable of wrapping itself around this magnificent and revolutionary new system of enlightenment. Well, i would like to ask you this: Is there a Rep-system in place somewhere in the world? Is it outpacing other systems with its superior economic engine? If it exists, does it exists only because there are free market enterprises supporting it from below with infrastructure and logistics?
UnitOmega wrote:
Not that I want this to come across like a personal attack or anything, but have you, Tango, considered the possibility that you think categorically different than some others, and that you're too strongly projecting your own mentality on to all humans? Obviously the idea and system of the rep economy isn't some alien thought, not to be conceived by man, the writers of this game worked on it and developed it into the current model.
There is so much material out there to draw pretty far reaching conclusions about the human nature. And just about any type of society. Economies. At the very least, we know which ones don't work. Armed with all this data, i just see the rep-society as a pipe dream.
—
- "Mom's chicken soup, maybe?"
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Mon, 2015-10-05 21:45
Trappedinwikipedia Trappedinwikipedia's picture
I don't feel like wrangling
I don't feel like wrangling with the forum's quote system, especially for multiple posts, so I'll try to keep this short. Rep isn't an objective measure of anything, rep/gift economies are generically qualitative rather than quantitative economic systems, as the wikipedia page I posted said. There definitely isn't a system, AI driven or not, in place for judging which pings are "valid" or not. Pings and dings just don't matter that much individually. According the Rimward it takes hundreds to make a noticeable change, mechanically that would mean that a single interaction would have a value of around 1/100 rep, high end. The end effect of that is that rep ends up serving as kind of an aggregate for the opinion of the entire community. This occurs a few times a day generally, so making big changes to rep is hard to do quickly, which definitely implies that the requirements for getting a ping or ding are reasonably high. Further, rep isn't well compared to money, as this passage from Rimward shows:
Rimward page 176 wrote:
If you’re in non-Extropian autonomist space (mutualists aside, Extropians are excluded from this example since they normally still use money), most of the basic things you need can be gotten for free, no matter what your rep. Food, clothing, and even basic tools, electronics, and weapons can be acquired from publicly acces- sible makers, common cafeterias, community storage lockers and warehouses, and upcycling centers. As long as your rep isn’t non-existent or so low that people view you with suspicion, no one will bat an eye at you taking what you need.
That's like an monetary system where so long as you have 100$ in your bank account, almost everything you buy is free. AKA nothing like a monetary system. This is a major point because it means that rep has almost no effect on how someone's day to day life happens, as practically everyone in a hab will have enough rep to get above the "getting some food is suspicious" line. This also explains why there aren't any rep/gift economies in the modern world. They are incompatible with centralized industrial societies. Historical gift economies only existed in non industrialized areas where division of labor and ownership of the means of production are much less rigid, such as tribal agrarian societies. Or, as they are in Eclipse Phase, decentralized New Economies, where everyone either personally owns or has complete access to the entire means of production, the Cornucopia Machine. The rep economy works, because the supply of basics completely eclipses the demand. This seems to, at least in part, be due to the less material attitudes of AF10 humanity. It's basically a setting axiom that unlimited access to personal goods, and the extreme power and versatility of those goods has made a want for a lot of stuff largely fade. New economies aren't necessarily rep economies, but all rep economies (written so far at least) are new economies. Excluding the Titanian Commonwealth, rep economies are also generally anarchist societies, which decry ideological hierarchies of all kinds, which is a helpful social lubricant for a rep economy. This also means that rarer goods are likely to be communally owned, which is important, as a lot of examples in the thread have used comparatively rare goods. (Car examples are especially ridiculous as the only rep economy with cars is Titan, and with the prevalence of AI, I'd expect most people use publicly owned self driving car networks, rather than personal vehicles) What that means, is that everyone has access to them, but some people may need to wait longer than others. If someone wants to use a communal vacsuit, and a hab technician needs it for something, they are probably going to need to wait until it's done. I'd expect that waiting times must be pretty short, or people would just fab up more, vacsuits aren't super hard to nanofac. Not to derail this, but Titanian society is really much more alien than it's typically given credit for, socialist cyberdemocracy is really strange. As for Milton Friedman, I'd expect him to change his answer quickly in a post-cornucopia machine world. I'm specifically referring to his comments around there being no viable alternative system to capitalism as of yet. The cornucopia machine allows for that viable alternative. It'd likely be the single most disruptive piece of technology ever created, and excluding seed AI, is the single most disruptive piece of technology in EP. (ALI/AGI and immortality are really the only things in competition, but neither of those changed as much) Now, they won't instantly destroy capitalism, but they do provide a viable alternative. As I said earlier, CM reliant new economies are also not necessarily rep economies, with Extropians serving as a model of a money-based new economy. (Though most basic goods are extremely cheap on extropia, thanks to the sheer economic power of the cornucopia machine). Anyway, to try to TLDR this post: Most EP societies are extremely different from any modern one, and the conditions which invalidate a rep economy aren't always present. (Though they are in much of the inner system, through debatably artificial means)
Tango wrote:
There is so much material out there to draw pretty far reaching conclusions about the human nature. And just about any type of society. Economies. At the very least, we know which ones don't work. Armed with all this data, i just see the rep-society as a pipe dream.
Until you post it you're not really armed with it, it is proverbially sitting in an armory. It's kind of difficult to properly discuss something without using the same starting points.
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Tue, 2015-10-06 02:38
Chaplain Chaplain's picture
While becoming possible with
While becoming possible with nanotech, new economies are still inferior. You can't print a biomorph on your desktop CCM, you have to grow it for years in exowomb. You can't build a capital-class spaceship alone in any reasonable time - you need massive, centralized robotic assembly arrays like Pontes, Vesta or Korolev. You can't do large-schale terraforming or infrastructure projects. You need hierarchy - a mobilizing, centralizing and unifying subject which cannot be replaced by any amount of idealism.
—

“Any AI smart enough to pass a Turing test is smart enough to know to fail it.”
― Ian McDonald, River of Gods

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Tue, 2015-10-06 06:53
DivineWrath DivineWrath's picture
Trappedinwikipedia wrote:Or,
Trappedinwikipedia wrote:
Or, as they are in Eclipse Phase, decentralized New Economies, where everyone either personally owns or has complete access to the entire means of production, the Cornucopia Machine. The rep economy works, because the supply of basics completely eclipses the demand. This seems to, at least in part, be due to the less material attitudes of AF10 humanity. It's basically a setting axiom that unlimited access to personal goods, and the extreme power and versatility of those goods has made a want for a lot of stuff largely fade.
This has got me thinking. Maybe Tango hasn't connected the dots between the existence of nanofabrication technology and the impact it'll have on capitalism. Or many other forms of technology.
Tango wrote:
Again, who are you to judge how i feel about somebody farting in my presence? Maybe i come from a culture where its a taboo or a death threat, whatever. Are you downplaying my feelings about the issue? Why do you think its only -1 instead of -50? How did you come to that conclusion? What is your method of weighting this totally arbitrary thought and then somehow giving it a precise value that we can use to measure a person's character? And the measurement has to be accurate, since it will have an impact on my life & living standards.
I'm going to dismiss this point. I'll do it by asking for the important questions. What exactly do you think the act of farting is worth in a rep economy? Don't just give a number; tell us why we should give a damn that it should have a number at all. You're the one who brought it up.
Tango wrote:
My whole point was, that reputation is just an opinion on someone. It is not valid nor invalid. It's just a thought. Objectively judging someone's opinion is fundamentally impossible. It doesn't matter how good your AI;s are. Or your admins. If they were to make a judgement on a ping you received, even if they completely agreed with the ping, they engaged in thought control. They rewarded you for thinking the way they think.
You're missing the point. It isn't all opinion. I can say with experience that one guy fixes cars better than another guy. If I go this guy, I can expect my car to be done in an hour, instead of a day somewhere else. I can say that he is the best mechanic in the city. I can say it without it just being an opinion, I could do so by showing a stat chart. Likewise, I could prove that a company dumps toxic waste into a river. I could prove that a politician had embezzled money. Those aren't just opinions, they are factual statements about the world, statements that can be true or false regardless of what someone else opinion on the matter is. A rep economy is supposed to ensure that those facts will follow you around. They won't show up in a newspaper, get read once, get recycled, and then get forgotten about. In a rep economy, terrible deeds are something that is supposed to follow you around until you either take an effort to make things right, or change your life style. There are some immoral things that people can do in this day and age, that they can keep doing, because their reputation doesn't follow them around.
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Tue, 2015-10-06 07:45
DivineWrath DivineWrath's picture
Tango wrote:I'll let Dr.
Tango wrote:
I'll let Dr. Friedman make my point better than i could ever do: [youtube]RWsx1X8PV_A[/youtube]
I'll take your Dr. Friedman and raise you a Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Tobacco https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UsHHOCH4q8 If you don't have time to watch, let me give you the short version. Tobacco companies have been suing entire countries to force those countries to not label tobacco products as harmful, or get rid of inconvenient laws. Many big countries, such as Australia, have had to fend off several attempts to force them to change their laws. In other cases, small countries can get slammed with legal cases from tobacco companies that exceed their entire GDP. They don't stop there, as they will out right lie about what had happened in other countries. They might say things they won cases that they lost, quote the few judges that were on their side while leaving out the many more that were against them. They will even say that it will hurt trade agreements that don't exist. This is a strong real life example of companies that long since stopped being for the common good. I can also point out that America suffers from a great many social injustices. To name a few, it has been ravaged by housing bubble bursts, banks needing bailouts, lack of a good health care system (its been a struggle to get what they have now), trillions in dept, student dept, civil asset forfeiture (cops can seize money), money is used to buy elections, politicians have tried to shut down the government to get their way, etc. They are not the bastions of all that is good in the world that they might think they are. America to be blunt, has a hard on for capitalism. They suffer for it. It is hard for them to have a serious discussion about it. I would also like to mention that I did a little reading on the guy in video you provided. Dr. Milton Friedman. He has been criticized for falling into the mistake in thinking that markets always work and that only markets work. It seems to be hard to find cases where he would admit that markets could fail, or that governments could serve useful roles in markets.
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Tue, 2015-10-06 08:02
DivineWrath DivineWrath's picture
Quote:It seems money has
Quote:
It seems money has somehow become a bad word. Yes, rep is money; it is something else too, but if you want anything in a rep society, it's your rep that makes it possible. That is the practical application of rep in said society. The friendly disposition by locals is just a plus. There is a direct correlation between your rep and your standard of living.
Every citizen of a rep economy gets an allowance for goods produced by advanced technology. The allowance is certainly enough to be able to host a party for dozen people, supply you with multiple suits of clothing, and so on. If you want to exceed those limits, you have to call upon rep to get more or find some people to pool your resources with. Before you reach the limits of your allowance, you don't have much need for this "rep money". Technology is the great liberator in such a world.
Quote:
I know what you guys are thinking; that my greed blinded dirty little mind is just incapable of wrapping itself around this magnificent and revolutionary new system of enlightenment. Well, i would like to ask you this: Is there a Rep-system in place somewhere in the world? Is it outpacing other systems with its superior economic engine? If it exists, does it exists only because there are free market enterprises supporting it from below with infrastructure and logistics?
I need some time to think about this one. Taking a moment to think about it, it seems that different economics systems tend to be toxic to each other. The winner seems to be the most productive one. More than that, some have collapsed in funny ways (see cargo cults for an example). Again, I'm going to give this one some thought. Capitalism wins out today for various reasons, some of those reasons can be quite unethical, but it still wins. However, the technology used by the rep economies in Eclipse Phase are even more productive than what we have today. With blueprints, energy, and the right materials, you could nanofabricators to build anything! You don't even need to live in a society any more. You could build a house somewhere remote and go full hermit, yet live like a king. The things that the capitalistic economies must do to still do business is to use DRM on their blueprints, nanofabs, and software to prevent people from getting everything they want without paying them. I'm going to go read up on communism later. A lot of it will be on Soviet Russia, and to see why it failed. From what I understand, nothing in communism really prevents it from using factories and division of labor, or any other tools that capitalism can use. From what I understand, its downfall was largely due to a number of social and political issues that hurt its economy.
Quote:
There is so much material out there to draw pretty far reaching conclusions about the human nature. And just about any type of society. Economies. At the very least, we know which ones don't work. Armed with all this data, i just see the rep-society as a pipe dream.
I've seen many cases where the bad people try to convince people that their actions are human nature, so that they should not be punished for their actions. They do this so that they can continue their bad behavior. To convince people that they should not only not be punished, but to clear road block to enable them to do more. Also, there is plenty for data for opposite conclusions you present us. Some even suggest that human nature is strongly dependent on the environment. That you can create societies where the poor are lazy and stupid, another where everyone (or most people) is a great neighbor, another where people in a society can't work with each other, and another where people feel that they might enforce their spiritual beliefs on others and make it law. I might address this more later. I'm busy right now.
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Tue, 2015-10-06 11:34
uwtartarus uwtartarus's picture
"Greed is good" is a
"Greed is good" is a philosophy completely antithetical to rep economies. Embracing such a philosophy will make something different like a gift economy seem alien or absurd.
—
Exhuman, and Humanitarian.
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Tue, 2015-10-06 11:46
Trappedinwikipedia Trappedinwikipedia's picture
Chaplain wrote:While becoming
Chaplain wrote:
While becoming possible with nanotech, new economies are still inferior. You can't print a biomorph on your desktop CCM, you have to grow it for years in exowomb. You can't build a capital-class spaceship alone in any reasonable time - you need massive, centralized robotic assembly arrays like Pontes, Vesta or Korolev. You can't do large-schale terraforming or infrastructure projects. You need hierarchy - a mobilizing, centralizing and unifying subject which cannot be replaced by any amount of idealism.
TBH the Eclipse Phase setting doesn't seem to fully use the power of the CM. Ignoring feedstock and power requirements, a single desktop cornucopia machine can create more copies of itself than there are atoms in the visible universe in about two weeks. (The population of CMs doubles every 5 hours) Obviously that'll never happen in the real world, as it's absolutely impossible to have enough feedstock and power to do that, but it does demonstrate that massive industrial facilities can be built in a short time. Building a full robotic shipyard should only take months at most, depending on how easy it is to acquire power for the factories. Similarly, self-replicating technology allows for a single person with blueprints to create the arbitrarily large industry needed for terraforming in days to weeks. Setting up the logistics to support that kind of installation would be harder than building the infrastructure itself. The logistics angle is probably a large reason why hypercapitalism continues to be a powerful and viable economic system. As an aside, I've never understood why it takes years to grow biomorphs, as redesigning a brain takes an hour for a man portable device, and regrowing an entire body from the neck down takes a matter of days with a healing vat. Unless brains are incredibly hard to make from scratch or something it does not make sense. So either nanofabrication has some serious limitations which have never been written about constraining it in the background, or the manufacturing singularity is only a matter of time. It might be that large scale automated manufacturing has thus far been avoided for the simple reason that it is the most likely way to kick off the second Fall. Anyway, this post is starting to get kind of off topic. The point being, adjusting the economy of scale for a given hab or group won't be a difficult task, within reason. As for (really any) human nature based argument: I don't buy it in EP, at all. If human nature is mostly nurture, than new societies should have new natures after a brief time, and the experimental societies of EP are really different from any in the past. If human nature is predominantly biological/natural in origin, than "human nature" mostly died out over a decade ago. There's only a single polity where natural human genetics are more than expensive collector's items. If human nature is some inherent psychological thing, than voluntary minor psychosurgery isn't remotely rare in Eclipse Phase, so even that kind of nature has become commanded and partially mastered by transhumanity. It would be reasonable to expect a lot of people in rep economies have boosted social tendencies and such. Human nature is a pretty weak argument in a strongly transhuman society, and its potential destruction and replacement is one of the best potential sources for the horror aspect of the setting. That's especially true when psychosurgery isn't being used to make extra friendly and prosocial anarchists, but mercenaries who don't feel fear or mercy, or Exhumans in general.
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Tue, 2015-10-06 18:50
Tango Tango's picture
DivineWrath wrote:If you don
DivineWrath wrote:
If you don't have time to watch, let me give you the short version. Tobacco companies have been suing entire countries to force those countries to not label tobacco products as harmful, or get rid of inconvenient laws. Many big countries, such as Australia, have had to fend off several attempts to force them to change their laws. In other cases, small countries can get slammed with legal cases from tobacco companies that exceed their entire GDP. They don't stop there, as they will out right lie about what had happened in other countries. They might say things they won cases that they lost, quote the few judges that were on their side while leaving out the many more that were against them. They will even say that it will hurt trade agreements that don't exist. This is a strong real life example of companies that long since stopped being for the common good. I would also like to mention that I did a little reading on the guy in video you provided. Dr. Milton Friedman. He has been criticized for falling into the mistake in thinking that markets always work and that only markets work. It seems to be hard to find cases where he would admit that markets could fail, or that governments could serve useful roles in markets.
Trade agreements & legal issues have nothing to do with capitalism. North Korea has trade deals. What you are describing is corruption and you fight it by changing legislation. Yes, those tobacco companies are pure evil, but the true enemy are the officials that let themselves to be bought. A quick google search gave the number of lobbyists in Washington dc in 2009 as 12553. Yeah. And no it's not because of capitalism. Those corporations are pursuing their own self interest, but it is the government that lets them get away with it. If the gov didn't have its fingers in every market, there would be nothing to lobby for. The whole market-thing is a very large topic, so here's the (extremely) short version; It is simply supply and demand. It self regulates. Every customer is trying to get the best deal, and every supplier tries to get as much profit as possible. Somewhere in the middle we discover the products real value. However, there are no markets anymore. We live in the era of fiat money & central banking. Every market is distorted (to the breaking point) by unlimited money supply. Price discovery is impossible because central banks are directly involved in trading. This is all coming to and end of course, 2008 being the first hick-up and now in 2015 we're starting to see the maximum entropy of monetary stimulus. We live in interesting times.
DivineWrath wrote:
This has got me thinking. Maybe Tango hasn't connected the dots between the existence of nanofabrication technology and the impact it'll have on capitalism. Or many other forms of technology.
Nanofab capabilities are indeed a great improvement to any community. I fail to see how it would make free markets obsolete? People will develop better CM models, and sell those. You could sell blueprints from any of your inventions. There should be a big market for blueprints. Nanofab tech does help you alot if you want to literally start from scratch, but the blueprint library in your machine will be obsolete in 10 years. The items will work fine, but the world around you has moved on. You might want to consider buying some newer designs? Or maybe a new fabber thats more power efficient and can consume wider array of materials?
DivineWrath wrote:
farts
My point was, that it could be anything. Maybe a snide remark on your shoes. Anything that gets a reaction thus a ping/hit. Any social encounter. According to the books, this happens normally several times a day.
DivineWrath wrote:
You're missing the point. It isn't all opinion.
So you would agree that at least some of it IS opinions. The big question is, how big part of your total rep does it cover? The bigger that value is, the blurrier the image people get from your rep stats becomes. As to injustices in our society: That's why we have Law Enforcement. If somebody walks, blame the imperfections in our laws. And we do remember assholes even without facebook. Word gets around. Do you think Gordon Brown will ever land another political seat anywhere after the latest scandal(fucking a severed pig's head in the mouth. Seriously, look it up!)?
DivineWrath wrote:
Every citizen of a rep economy gets an allowance for goods produced by advanced technology. The allowance is certainly enough to be able to host a party for dozen people, supply you with multiple suits of clothing, and so on. If you want to exceed those limits, you have to call upon rep to get more or find some people to pool your resources with. Before you reach the limits of your allowance, you don't have much need for this "rep money". Technology is the great liberator in such a world.
What i'm trying to get at is this: The value in rep cannot be measured. If you want 2 tonnes of hydrogen from the hab's fuel reserves, how much rep would it require? If 25 is not enough, will 30 suffice? What is the fundamental difference in those numbers? What is the thing that goes *klick* in the manager's mind, that'll make him think you're suddenly worthy?
DivineWrath wrote:
"Greed is good" is a philosophy completely antithetical to rep economies. Embracing such a philosophy will make something different like a gift economy seem alien or absurd.
You guys are misinterpreting the term greed to mean something straight out from Revelation. In the context of my posts i'm talking about people/entities pursuing their separate interests. Do you think we have the modern medical industry only because they want to help the sick? Did IBM develop the modern computer because they just love people so much and want to give them new toys? Did Edison invent the light bulb out from the kindness of his heart? All these entities were/are being driven by their self interest, yet they produced something that changed the world for the better. This is free market in action. It reigns the natural human tendency for want for producing items & services to the free market. And it all happens without any central planning.
—
- "Mom's chicken soup, maybe?"
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Tue, 2015-10-06 19:26
uwtartarus uwtartarus's picture
Does altruism exist, Tango?
Does altruism exist, Tango?
—
Exhuman, and Humanitarian.
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Tue, 2015-10-06 19:57
consumerdestroyer consumerdestroyer's picture
Tango wrote:Now i might be
Tango wrote:
Now i might be wrong, but i think there are more people out there who think like me on this issue.
This is the future. In space. And they already covered the areas of the solar system where people think like you, and those aren't the ones using @-rep. The problem is you want the entire solar system to think like you (or like people like you, if you want the broadest net to cast here), which is your houserule and nothing like what the published content of the setting say about the science fiction culture that you and others happen not to think like. Which, again, doesn't preclude houseruling, it's a game of collaborative storytelling after all. But it's weird to express your ideas for a story as "other people's ideas make no sense to me so it wouldn't happen if they had just thought this out before making up this story element" which is way more the thrust of what you seem to be saying in your posts on this one. I think like that culture, as do all the people I choose to associate with and all the members of both branches of my bio family and the one stepbranch that I regularly keep in touch with, but it doesn't matter what one person or one family or one neighbourhood or one community is constituted as because there are other communities in the same country who think differently on socio-cultural, political and economic issues (think about adjacent urban electoral districts that go for different political parties, that's even in one [i]city[/i]) much less between different countries...so why would you expect a majority opinion from wherever you're from applies even [i]today[/i] as some kind of broad rule of human relations, much less in a sci fi setting where the writers explicitly write about people who think differently from you forming habitats. And for the record, it's already been said in this thread that everyone is guaranteed the minimum, and that those who don't reciprocate are downvoted, so if you wanted the resources to have access to great stuff, you'd have to be willing to share great stuff too. Stuff that's currently in use doesn't count as a favour to ask, you can't be like "give me your only morph, indefinite amount of time I'll let ya know" without like a level 5 favour expended, but you [i]can[/i] be like "hey do you have a utilitool lying around?" and if the person's not currently using it in a project why not put it up for people to use? There are already websites built around that idea, people put their entire garages full of tools up and just mark ones in-use that are either being borrowed or, you know, in-use by the owner of the tools. Shy, quiet types just wanting to work and minding their own business get whatever they need, and their work makes people upvote them even done in isolation because of souseveillance and the way rep networks connect your activities and work to a single hub. It feels like there are just elements of the setting you disbelieve or haven't gotten around to reading or both, and if you disbelieve them that's a problem of imagination not a logical weakness of the setting material.
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Tue, 2015-10-06 21:51
Trappedinwikipedia Trappedinwikipedia's picture
Long Post Incoming
DivineWrath wrote:
Every citizen of a rep economy gets an allowance for goods produced by advanced technology. The allowance is certainly enough to be able to host a party for dozen people, supply you with multiple suits of clothing, and so on. If you want to exceed those limits, you have to call upon rep to get more or find some people to pool your resources with. Before you reach the limits of your allowance, you don't have much need for this "rep money". Technology is the great liberator in such a world.
As far as I can tell, this isn't quite true for EP. It sounds a lot like the society in Marshall Brain's Manna, but not EP societies. There isn't an allowance of goods, everyone can take as much as they want. Using what the community deems as "too much" will cause ripples in the rep. Too much will of course vary by what it is used for. Enough materials to supply a 12 person party is fine, the same amount of food, consumed alone in a day, will likely cause a backlash. I think the panopticon is critical to the rep economy, as it allows people to track how others are living, and reign in those who seem to use too much.
Tango wrote:
Trade agreements & legal issues have nothing to do with capitalism. North Korea has trade deals. What you are describing is corruption and you fight it by changing legislation. Yes, those tobacco companies are pure evil, but the true enemy are the officials that let themselves to be bought. A quick google search gave the number of lobbyists in Washington dc in 2009 as 12553. Yeah. And no it's not because of capitalism. Those corporations are pursuing their own self interest, but it is the government that lets them get away with it. If the gov didn't have its fingers in every market, there would be nothing to lobby for.
It isn't that the government lets them get away with it, it's that the government is preventing them from doing what they want. Without government interference, corporations would simply skip the lobbying, and do what they would otherwise need to lobby for. This is true for regulation at least, not so much for subsidization. Expensive cases wouldn't happen if lawsuits against national laws weren't launched, but it's not like corporations would be virtuous without regulation.
Tango wrote:
Nanofab capabilities are indeed a great improvement to any community. I fail to see how it would make free markets obsolete? People will develop better CM models, and sell those. You could sell blueprints from any of your inventions. There should be a big market for blueprints. Nanofab tech does help you alot if you want to literally start from scratch, but the blueprint library in your machine will be obsolete in 10 years. The items will work fine, but the world around you has moved on. You might want to consider buying some newer designs? Or maybe a new fabber thats more power efficient and can consume wider array of materials?
They wouldn't obsolete free markets, but that doesn't mean money doesn't leave the equation. Rep economies are hard to compare to markets, but rep changes are done freely in a social transaction between p/dinger and p/dingee, at the very least, they aren't regulated, though they aren't really markets either. Creating and maintaining useful blueprints is a very good way to keep up rep, as it's a good way to get testimonials and easily expands beyond local hab social circles. In setting, blueprints are typically cracked within a couple months of release, which complicates conventional sales. Conventional sales still seem to work ok though. That also doesn't stop donation/patreon style credit funding from potentially working as well, which the books don't really cover. Building a new CM is easy, as the old one can manufacture it, and then the new one can cannibalize the only one for feedstock. Ultimately, nanofabrication doesn't make money useless, it just allows for other systems to be viable.
Tango wrote:
DivineWrath wrote:
You're missing the point. It isn't all opinion.
So you would agree that at least some of it IS opinions. The big question is, how big part of your total rep does it cover? The bigger that value is, the blurrier the image people get from your rep stats becomes. As to injustices in our society: That's why we have Law Enforcement. If somebody walks, blame the imperfections in our laws. And we do remember assholes even without facebook. Word gets around. Do you think Gordon Brown will ever land another political seat anywhere after the latest scandal(fucking a severed pig's head in the mouth. Seriously, look it up!)?
I don't agree with DivineWrath here. Rep is 100% people's opinions of each other, it doesn't really do objective measures. It is blurry, but unless someone invents a genuinely objective measure of personal virtue a better equivalent doesn't exist. Rep however, isn't useless because it's blurry, as it represents the collective opinions of between hundreds and millions of people. Scandals are definitely a big deal in a rep economy, more so than in a conventional one (though the fallout from a scandal definitely exists with money). The biggest scandal defense is the generally more open and accepting society which exists in EP, thanks partially to the panopticon. Fucking a pig won't raise a lot of eyebrows so long as it's consensual, and EP even has taboos like cannibalism socially permitted in many places.
Tango wrote:
What i'm trying to get at is this: The value in rep cannot be measured. If you want 2 tonnes of hydrogen from the hab's fuel reserves, how much rep would it require? If 25 is not enough, will 30 suffice? What is the fundamental difference in those numbers? What is the thing that goes *klick* in the manager's mind, that'll make him think you're suddenly worthy?
There isn't really a fixed number I think, as that would be very hard to figure out due to the fuzziness of rep. Assuming you were above the "suspicious" line of no to extremely low rep, it shouldn't matter a lot. When making that request, how much you'll be able to get would probably depend more on what your stated use was rather than the rep. If it's something useful to the hab, like fueling a freighter to go pick up more hydrogen, than it's easy. If not, you'll get it as a gift, so long as reserves allow, but you'll owe the hab for it. What that means could be a lot of things, but it would likely expect a gift of similar or greater worth (as judged by the recipients of the gift) or your rep will take a nasty hit from the testimonials the hab's inhabitants leave. In either case, your rep won't change at that moment. Fueling a freighter to get more hydrogen, and then ditching that somewhere else would probably cause a hit due to blowing off what your said you'd do, while bringing it back would increase rep thanks to bringing resources to the hab. Similarly, ignoring a request for help from that hab, after being gifted 2 tons of hydrogen, would probably cause a rep hit as well. In more concrete terms, rep seems to be an aggregate of the number of people you're in good standing with, how good that standing is, and most importantly, how many people owe you for goods and services rendered. Having a high rep means a lot of people like you, and/or owe you aid for previous actions. There's a social aspect to this though, weighting it by how valuable the network of people as a whole think those goods and services are. At least I think so, I don't have a lot of textual support for all of this.
Tango wrote:
You guys are misinterpreting the term greed to mean something straight out from Revelation. In the context of my posts i'm talking about people/entities pursuing their separate interests. Do you think we have the modern medical industry only because they want to help the sick? Did IBM develop the modern computer because they just love people so much and want to give them new toys? Did Edison invent the light bulb out from the kindness of his heart? All these entities were/are being driven by their self interest, yet they produced something that changed the world for the better. This is free market in action. It reigns the natural human tendency for want for producing items & services to the free market. And it all happens without any central planning.
I generally agree with this. But, while altruism wasn't the only motive for inventions, profit was also not the only motive. I also think that personal gain is compatible with rep economy goals, as the Scum show better than any other in system group. Rep economies are definitely not planned economies, though how well they map to free economies is more debatable. Whether or not the Autonomists are right, and money is actually obsolete is an unsettled question in AF10. Who pulls ahead between the corporate mixed economies of the Planetary Consortium, Venusian laissez-faire corporate capitalism, Extropianism, Jovian regulated capitalism(?), and the many outer system rep-based economic systems isn't clear cut at all. This gets extra hard to measure because of all the covert action they are all taking against one another for economic and ideological reasons. The biggest problem this discussion has IMO, is that there isn't a dearth of information on how rep economies work, at least, not compared to how conventional ones are.
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Wed, 2015-10-07 00:09
UnitOmega UnitOmega's picture
Reputation as a guarantee of,
Reputation as a guarantee of, say, a volume of hydrogen isn't a real mechanical construct. While a high rep eases the process of a low-value favor ("Oh hey, can you spare me some of the most common element in the universe?") it doesn't guarantee it. All favors are handled via the Networking roll, your ability to socially interact with your specific Network to find people who have what you need and are willing to part with it. The mechanical difference between a Transitional/Old Economy and the New Economy is when you pass your networking roll, in the New Economy, you do not have to ever pay any amount of Credits for the favor, but instead you are limited to an abstracted "rate" of favors of levels-to-time. Drawing more favors than "allowed" by the system in the timeframe means you "burn" rep as a sign of how your reputation is reduced by you calling in more resources than you normally require from the community without a long enough time for you to give back to it. And, on a related note to basic resources, Transhuman's lifestyle mechanic, a person living in the New Economy if guaranteed the otherwise "Free" Autonomist Lifestyle, which is usually a minimum equivalent to [Moderate], so long as they contribute a Moderate-level favor a month to their community at large. Now, obviously, these are mechanical abstractions, a subject which I have before commented on the frustration of using to actually build facts on the economy of the setting from, but I think we're skipping the facts the rules represent for the sake of the purity of Rep vs No Rep Economy argument. Yes, this means a low-SAV person is unlikely to be able to pull favors from their community, though having a higher rep through other means (such as actually being good at something and contributing with if frequently) will mean many basic tasks can still be accomplished. And, such people will not be starving or anything, assuming they are capable of contributing semi-regularly to their community, regardless of their ability to draw favors. I would also say this particular situation is rapidly approaching the circular augment critical mass on the EP forums, and unless there are genuinely some real new points to go over rather than rephrasing of previous points, it's probably best to concede to fundamental differences of opinion and let it go unless there are some fresh perspectives to bring in. There's no point in going 10 rounds on the subject if there's only a couple of participants who continue to make the same arguments, just trying to use new phrasing and examples.
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H-Rep: An EP Homebrew Blog http://ephrep.blogspot.com/
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