Evolution of Freedom
Part II: TEAM SPORT - Chapter 19
Reputation
We have now settled on the unit of selection, the cell, and its maximum size of 100 individuals. When we build a multicellular society based on this reasoning, we also have to identify the ideal selection criteria and process by which we select these small groups over others. In competitive cooperation, we have to identify what these cells are competing over
.
The simple answer is that the cells should compete over their ability to create wellbeing for their community.
All cells that have any impact on the world produce some kind of a good or service. The arena where goods and services traditionally compete against each other is the marketplace. This means that most cells are already under tremendous selective pressure from market forces. Whether we want it to be or not, the marketplace is the main arena where cultural evolution and its three-step algorithm exert themselves.
The problem is that market forces are generally agnostic on whether a seller and their products are good or bad for the community. And more often than not, market forces actually reward bad behavior like cutting corners and exploiting others. Much of the world’s problems can be attributed to the terrible incentives that money creates in our marketplace. As a value, money seems to override almost all other human values–with horrendous consequences.
Our task, then, is to create a pro-social marketplace that rewards altruism. To do this, we are looking for a counterweight that can be as valuable as money and can, in fact, be converted into money. What could that be?
The answer is found in our seventh hypothesis:
.
The simple answer is that the cells should compete over their ability to create wellbeing for their community.
All cells that have any impact on the world produce some kind of a good or service. The arena where goods and services traditionally compete against each other is the marketplace. This means that most cells are already under tremendous selective pressure from market forces. Whether we want it to be or not, the marketplace is the main arena where cultural evolution and its three-step algorithm exert themselves.
The problem is that market forces are generally agnostic on whether a seller and their products are good or bad for the community. And more often than not, market forces actually reward bad behavior like cutting corners and exploiting others. Much of the world’s problems can be attributed to the terrible incentives that money creates in our marketplace. As a value, money seems to override almost all other human values–with horrendous consequences.
Our task, then, is to create a pro-social marketplace that rewards altruism. To do this, we are looking for a counterweight that can be as valuable as money and can, in fact, be converted into money. What could that be?
The answer is found in our seventh hypothesis:
7. As a form of value, reputation offers the best counterweight to money since it can itself be converted into money.
Reputation is an impression and evaluation people share about a subject. Reputations are created by our collective evaluations, but they are never an objective description of the world. Instead, reputations are subjective distillations of the world as we perceive it, filtered through our collective values. They are a qualitative description of reality created spontaneously without a central authority.
Our collective ability to act intelligently is greatly dependent on the information reputation provides us. Reputation helps us navigate the complexities of the world and make better decisions. If we have to choose between A and B, their respective reputations will drive our decisions. The more accurately reputations correspond to reality, the better equipped we are to make good decisions.
Since reputation is a key driver in decision-making, it can have an enormous impact on our lives. It can make or break almost any human endeavor. In our communities, reputations define who we are, what we are capable of and whether we can be trusted. Reputation determines which doors open before us and which close. Our reputation has a crucial bearing on our ability to function in the world. A good reputation is said to be more valuable than gold.
Since reputation is reflective of our values, it is a great proxy for the common good. If we want to accrue a good reputation, the best way is by acting altruistically and in the best interest of our community. Acting selfishly has the opposite effect, giving us a bad reputation in our community. Everything we esteem has a good reputation, and everything we dislike has a bad reputation.
In Martin Nowak’s book SuperCooperators we learn that by introducing reputation into the game of prisoner’s dilemma, we can induce stable cooperation in the form of indirect reciprocity in the players. What makes reputation just the right type of information is that it’s always pro-social. Pro-social deeds generate a good reputation and antisocial behavior generates a bad reputation. Reputation is, in fact, a direct reflection of our value system.
Since reputation plays such an important role in society, it acts as a great means of social control. In the terms of systems thinking, reputation is a powerful feedback loop that encourages self-regulation. The understanding of our own reputation curbs our bad impulses and spurs us toward pro-social behavior. When we want to engage in bad behavior, what do we do? We cloak our identity by wearing a ski mask or shielding our identity online. We do this so that our reputations will not be damaged by our actions.
For hunter-gatherers, reputation provided an indispensable regulatory tool. When populations grew, this tool stopped working, and for the past 10,000 years, we have been unable to find anything comparable with which to regulate our societies. To make up for this loss, we have created libraries full of written laws, a massive law enforcement infrastructure and religious institutions that tell us how to live–much of it for naught.
Despite dedicating enormous resources to all forms of regulation, our societies are plagued by cheaters, bullies, free riders, criminals and all sorts of antisocial behavior that was mostly absent in hunter-gatherer communities. It is time we made reputation the center of our regulatory framework once again. The internet and the technology behind social media platforms finally make this possible.
If we can make reputation an integral part of our marketplace, money finally gets a proper counterweight in our decision-making. Instead of just thinking about dollars and cents, we now have to balance this by thinking about the impact our work and our consumer choices have on our community, as our choices now impact our reputation.
This brings us to our eighth hypothesis:
Our collective ability to act intelligently is greatly dependent on the information reputation provides us. Reputation helps us navigate the complexities of the world and make better decisions. If we have to choose between A and B, their respective reputations will drive our decisions. The more accurately reputations correspond to reality, the better equipped we are to make good decisions.
Since reputation is a key driver in decision-making, it can have an enormous impact on our lives. It can make or break almost any human endeavor. In our communities, reputations define who we are, what we are capable of and whether we can be trusted. Reputation determines which doors open before us and which close. Our reputation has a crucial bearing on our ability to function in the world. A good reputation is said to be more valuable than gold.
Since reputation is reflective of our values, it is a great proxy for the common good. If we want to accrue a good reputation, the best way is by acting altruistically and in the best interest of our community. Acting selfishly has the opposite effect, giving us a bad reputation in our community. Everything we esteem has a good reputation, and everything we dislike has a bad reputation.
In Martin Nowak’s book SuperCooperators we learn that by introducing reputation into the game of prisoner’s dilemma, we can induce stable cooperation in the form of indirect reciprocity in the players. What makes reputation just the right type of information is that it’s always pro-social. Pro-social deeds generate a good reputation and antisocial behavior generates a bad reputation. Reputation is, in fact, a direct reflection of our value system.
Since reputation plays such an important role in society, it acts as a great means of social control. In the terms of systems thinking, reputation is a powerful feedback loop that encourages self-regulation. The understanding of our own reputation curbs our bad impulses and spurs us toward pro-social behavior. When we want to engage in bad behavior, what do we do? We cloak our identity by wearing a ski mask or shielding our identity online. We do this so that our reputations will not be damaged by our actions.
For hunter-gatherers, reputation provided an indispensable regulatory tool. When populations grew, this tool stopped working, and for the past 10,000 years, we have been unable to find anything comparable with which to regulate our societies. To make up for this loss, we have created libraries full of written laws, a massive law enforcement infrastructure and religious institutions that tell us how to live–much of it for naught.
Despite dedicating enormous resources to all forms of regulation, our societies are plagued by cheaters, bullies, free riders, criminals and all sorts of antisocial behavior that was mostly absent in hunter-gatherer communities. It is time we made reputation the center of our regulatory framework once again. The internet and the technology behind social media platforms finally make this possible.
If we can make reputation an integral part of our marketplace, money finally gets a proper counterweight in our decision-making. Instead of just thinking about dollars and cents, we now have to balance this by thinking about the impact our work and our consumer choices have on our community, as our choices now impact our reputation.
This brings us to our eighth hypothesis:
8. To better allocate our resources, we need to create a machine-readable reputation system and integrate this information into our marketplace. By combining this information with price signals, we create a pro-social marketplace with a new incentive system that corresponds to our values. The machine-readable reputation system is the mechanism by which an ordinary marketplace can be turned into a pro-social marketplace.
Now, let’s be clear: since our unit of selection is the cell, the evaluations we make are focused only on groups and their activities, and not on individuals. The focus is specifically on evaluating the goods and services each group produces and the impact, good and bad, they have on the community and the planet.
The evaluation criteria we set for the groups correspond directly with the goals we articulated for our challenge at the beginning of the book. cells should therefore be evaluated based on their purpose and the impact they have on maximizing the long-term well-being of humanity and the planet as a whole. Their reputation should also include accurate data on their use of all natural resources, and carbon in particular.
As we only evaluate groups, individuals get their reputations based on the cells they work for and the cells whose goods and services they consume. An individual’s reputation is constructed in direct proportion to the hours worked and the share of their income they spend on specific cells. Teams do make internal evaluations of their team members to determine compensation, but this information is available only to the group and on a need-to-know basis.
The private lives of individuals are not subject to evaluation and are shielded from public scrutiny altogether.
The evaluation criteria we set for the groups correspond directly with the goals we articulated for our challenge at the beginning of the book. cells should therefore be evaluated based on their purpose and the impact they have on maximizing the long-term well-being of humanity and the planet as a whole. Their reputation should also include accurate data on their use of all natural resources, and carbon in particular.
As we only evaluate groups, individuals get their reputations based on the cells they work for and the cells whose goods and services they consume. An individual’s reputation is constructed in direct proportion to the hours worked and the share of their income they spend on specific cells. Teams do make internal evaluations of their team members to determine compensation, but this information is available only to the group and on a need-to-know basis.
The private lives of individuals are not subject to evaluation and are shielded from public scrutiny altogether.
