Public reputations can give rise to several problems in real world analogues of iterated prisoner's dilemma interactions, however.
First, a public reputation can make bullying a profitable strategy. At first, a bully must take losses vis-a-vis tit-for-tat players to establish such a reputation, but that investment will pay off later once other players realize that they will get a higher payoff over the long run by not retaliating against occasional defections by a bully instead of provoking a bully into perpetual defections with a tit-for-tat response.
Second, public reputations might become associated with one's membership in a group and the most likely behaviors of its members, not with one's personal behavior. If enough members of group X are bigoted enough to arbitrarily punish members of group Y, then even non-bigoted members of group Y will no longer find cooperation with members of group X profitable and will perpetually defect when paired with a member of group X. This in turn induces non-bigoted members of group X to perpetually defect when paired with a member of group Y. Or, if the groups are unequal in numbers, the majority group may wind up bullying the minority group. In any event, group-based defections spreads from bigots to non-bigots, making prejudicial defections universal even if all the players wind up suffering from them.
While a public reputation ideally ought to focus exclusively on an individual's behavior and not on their group membership, having sufficient personal knowledge of the behavior of other individuals is not scalable to large populations--one can't really know more than a few score people well enough to form close personal relationships with them. While a computer can store lots of data about the past interactions of strangers, trust requires that you use your own limited human brain to carefully evaluate such data. Unfortunately, tor people we can't know well enough, we tend to take a mental shortcut and substitute group reputations (i.e. stereotypes) for personal reputations, which opens the door to prejudice-driven conflicts as described above.
To solve this problem, impersonal relationships within an extended social network must rely on institutions that enforce ownership rules to prevent the unilateral impositions of costs onto others as is possible in a Prisoner's Dilemma defection. We have to change the game we are playing when dealing with strangers. In scalable impersonal networks, to incentivize cooperation one must substitute trust in rights enforcement for the earning of trust by the particular individuals one cooperates with. For this to happen though, the enforcement institutions in turn have to earn trust too. It is the public transparency of the enforcement activities, not the public transparency of private interactions, that is essential for this purpose.
Third, a public reputation might be used, not just to punish defectors (or to punish people who are perceived to be likely to defect on the basis of a group reputation), but also to punish anyone who happens to cooperate with them. But what happens when different people have different conceptions of what constitutes "cooperation" and what constitutes "defection"? If I judge that a given relationship is sufficiently cooperative to advance my personal values, it is not in my interest to publicize the interaction so that a lynch mob that doesn't share my evaluation of the relationship then punishes me for my cooperation with what the mob judges to be a "bad" person.
Fourth, a public reputation might not be sufficient for resolving ambiguities about whether a defection actually occurred or not. Even the individuals involved might have honest differences of opinion, which is why it is in their interest to refer significant disputes to impartial third parties for their expert judgement before pulling the trigger on a potentially costly retaliation, and why each disputant in such a proceeding is empowered to produce their own evidence and to confront the evidence produced by the other disputant. Again, it is not in one's interest to empower a lynch mob that (1) may lack impartiality and expertise in dispute resolution, (2) acts on the basis of reputational information without permitting the production of additional relevant evidence, (3) acts without allowing relevant derogatory reputational information to be challenged, and (4) may be inclined to punish minor transgressions that even the individuals involved don't think are important enough to warrant the costs of a legal proceeding or of initiating a tit-for-tat retaliation.
Add in a mechanism to censor one or two levels of the personal (and virtual) connections if someone is shown to be a calculating fraudster as they may be promoted or promoting other bad actors. At least leave flags that they are linked to a fraudster. People can distance themselves by withdrawing their trust and then their trust falls further and the wiser old previous friend will be upgraded to previously friends with a fraud.
All this sounds great.
I would like to have an option to meet someone in person and exchange one time code books with them that would allow us to communicate without the method being broken by mathematics (quantum computing weakness).
Saw a report yesterday that someone can detect what is displayed on a computer from the radio noise that the DRAM is transmitting.
We need to airgap our crypto terminals (R-Pi) and have them some distance from our network terminals (old mobile phone with Sailfish or Graphene OS or another micro with just WiFi access) )with message transfer only via optical means (camera looking at displayed QR code) to a machine that can be expected to not be able to read info past a air gap.
Where is the prototype?
We test tomorrow
Public reputations can give rise to several problems in real world analogues of iterated prisoner's dilemma interactions, however.
First, a public reputation can make bullying a profitable strategy. At first, a bully must take losses vis-a-vis tit-for-tat players to establish such a reputation, but that investment will pay off later once other players realize that they will get a higher payoff over the long run by not retaliating against occasional defections by a bully instead of provoking a bully into perpetual defections with a tit-for-tat response.
Second, public reputations might become associated with one's membership in a group and the most likely behaviors of its members, not with one's personal behavior. If enough members of group X are bigoted enough to arbitrarily punish members of group Y, then even non-bigoted members of group Y will no longer find cooperation with members of group X profitable and will perpetually defect when paired with a member of group X. This in turn induces non-bigoted members of group X to perpetually defect when paired with a member of group Y. Or, if the groups are unequal in numbers, the majority group may wind up bullying the minority group. In any event, group-based defections spreads from bigots to non-bigots, making prejudicial defections universal even if all the players wind up suffering from them.
While a public reputation ideally ought to focus exclusively on an individual's behavior and not on their group membership, having sufficient personal knowledge of the behavior of other individuals is not scalable to large populations--one can't really know more than a few score people well enough to form close personal relationships with them. While a computer can store lots of data about the past interactions of strangers, trust requires that you use your own limited human brain to carefully evaluate such data. Unfortunately, tor people we can't know well enough, we tend to take a mental shortcut and substitute group reputations (i.e. stereotypes) for personal reputations, which opens the door to prejudice-driven conflicts as described above.
To solve this problem, impersonal relationships within an extended social network must rely on institutions that enforce ownership rules to prevent the unilateral impositions of costs onto others as is possible in a Prisoner's Dilemma defection. We have to change the game we are playing when dealing with strangers. In scalable impersonal networks, to incentivize cooperation one must substitute trust in rights enforcement for the earning of trust by the particular individuals one cooperates with. For this to happen though, the enforcement institutions in turn have to earn trust too. It is the public transparency of the enforcement activities, not the public transparency of private interactions, that is essential for this purpose.
Third, a public reputation might be used, not just to punish defectors (or to punish people who are perceived to be likely to defect on the basis of a group reputation), but also to punish anyone who happens to cooperate with them. But what happens when different people have different conceptions of what constitutes "cooperation" and what constitutes "defection"? If I judge that a given relationship is sufficiently cooperative to advance my personal values, it is not in my interest to publicize the interaction so that a lynch mob that doesn't share my evaluation of the relationship then punishes me for my cooperation with what the mob judges to be a "bad" person.
Fourth, a public reputation might not be sufficient for resolving ambiguities about whether a defection actually occurred or not. Even the individuals involved might have honest differences of opinion, which is why it is in their interest to refer significant disputes to impartial third parties for their expert judgement before pulling the trigger on a potentially costly retaliation, and why each disputant in such a proceeding is empowered to produce their own evidence and to confront the evidence produced by the other disputant. Again, it is not in one's interest to empower a lynch mob that (1) may lack impartiality and expertise in dispute resolution, (2) acts on the basis of reputational information without permitting the production of additional relevant evidence, (3) acts without allowing relevant derogatory reputational information to be challenged, and (4) may be inclined to punish minor transgressions that even the individuals involved don't think are important enough to warrant the costs of a legal proceeding or of initiating a tit-for-tat retaliation.
Add in a mechanism to censor one or two levels of the personal (and virtual) connections if someone is shown to be a calculating fraudster as they may be promoted or promoting other bad actors. At least leave flags that they are linked to a fraudster. People can distance themselves by withdrawing their trust and then their trust falls further and the wiser old previous friend will be upgraded to previously friends with a fraud.
All this sounds great.
I would like to have an option to meet someone in person and exchange one time code books with them that would allow us to communicate without the method being broken by mathematics (quantum computing weakness).
Saw a report yesterday that someone can detect what is displayed on a computer from the radio noise that the DRAM is transmitting.
We need to airgap our crypto terminals (R-Pi) and have them some distance from our network terminals (old mobile phone with Sailfish or Graphene OS or another micro with just WiFi access) )with message transfer only via optical means (camera looking at displayed QR code) to a machine that can be expected to not be able to read info past a air gap.