Reputation Is Dead: It’s Time To Overlook Our Indiscretions
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I also think it is somewhat naive about how this is going to play out. People are not going to accept with good humour that their reputation is being trashed on line. And they are also not going to magically ignore other's indescretions. We're pretty much biologically incapable of that - when we see someone portrayed in a highly compromising light it makes psychological impressions that we can't just dismiss. The reason this hasn't really been a problem yet is just that it's still so new.
What is going to happen as time goes on is that the lawyers are going to start getting involved. People are going to start suing left right and center. It's already happening - there was a case just today where a school is suing a parent for making disparaging comments on a web site:
http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/school-sues-parent-for-bit...
Things are going to deteriorate into a very messy and ugly fight until we sort out new norms and social conventions on line, and possibly, if things get bad enough, new regulation by the government (which I really hope we avoid, but the morons who routinely give up all their privacy on facebook for the fun of it don't give me much hope).
Facebook has over 400 million users. That's more than there are people in the USA and Canada combined. When you reach those kind of numbers you can't credibly dismiss people who throw away their privacy as being morons.
I bet that people will just grow numb of scandals in the way that people have grown numb about inefficiency in the government, misconduct by the police, or gross negligence in finance or about wars in foreign countries. People just shrug and go on with their lives.
I'm not going to vote you down, even though I'm one of those "morons." Just remember that not everyone else has the same values as you do, and some of us weren't tricked by the Big Evil Facebook Button, and made a conscious decision to put our information out there.
I am with you 100%.
Once it becomes obvious that everybody does certain things, they will necessarily become better accepted - unless they are really bad things (e.g. if what because obvious was that, say, a large percentage of the population engaged in pedophily or murder something equally unacceptable), in which case making them visible might help stamp them out.
For those trivial things that everyone does and a few people get up in arms about, morality will have to change. Hopefully, out of date laws will change along with it.
I think this is an unavoidable trend of the internet. And it's a good thing. Privacy is dead. Long live tolerance.
It's a cliche that it's the anonymity of cities that "loosened morals", e.g. gay meccas are usually pretty densely populated urban areas. People in the countryside live in fear of the opprobrium of their neighbours.
If anything reputation would be more important, somebody has to put their reputation on the line to criticize someone else.
I'm extremely unlikely to hire a person who I can't find online somewhere, unless I know them personally. I don't trust anonymous, and in this world, without that online identity, that's what you are.
Unless... of course people claim ownership of their accusations. In which case the laws against libel come into play again.
More like "does someone think you're a chronic liar or a drunken slut" or "have you got on the wrong side of someone"?
Better hope you can please everyone or this reputation of yours is ruined.
This entire concept seems creepy, judgmental and open to abuse.
A story from the spooky future...
Father: "I told you to do your homework before flying on your jetpack with your space friends! You're grounded! Go to your room."
Child stomps up stairs. Soon, the soft sound of typing "...and he routinely abuses his children, both sexually and psychologically. And he's a drunk."
Right now children can effortlessly destroy the lives of parents, family members or teachers... by spreading exactly those kinds of lies.
An example: most of us would agree that there's nothing wrong with being gay, but most gay people wouldn't put it on a resume, knowing that there's still 1 out of 10 people who will have a problem with it. There's also nothing to gain, in a job search, by being public about heterosexuality. So sexual preference is (like politics and religion) just an area that many people choose to keep professionally private. One's political views could be beneficial-- most people would agree with my posts where I call Bush a fucking moron-- but generally people prefer to hold these cards close to their chests and be judged on their professional merits alone.
Privacy is necessary not only for the few who have objectively bad (drunken slut, chronic liar) things to hide but also for the much greater pool of us who have things that they might be proud of (political activism, religious views) but wouldn't want to inject into their professional lives.
Also, as with small towns in the past, there's the problem of reliability. Old-style small communities may have done a good job of policing some "indiscretions", but many have witch-burnings on their hands too... and we know those accusations weren't based in any reality whatsoever.
For some more enlightened bosses, this is an extremely valuable trait (I'm thinking the Feynman & Bohr story at Los Alamos). But for most bosses, this is a pretty large negative. Maybe they're insecure or think you should know your place. Or perhaps more mildly, they might think you have a chip on your shoulder.
I am pretty sure openly signalling certain traits HNers would consider good - like intellectual independence and curiosity - are a net negative socially and job-wise, especially after reading Schmidt's Disciplined Minds.
This new startup's only real use will be as a honeypot for 4chan trolls.
This is one of those major shifts to society that one day will just be there and change everything.
Are you ready for it?
Are we?
I think a small team of folks with CS backgrounds plus an insurance company's claim data (or a bank's loss data) for a year plus a Hadoop cluster would make FICO obsolete, at least until they were regulated out of existence for being too darned efficient at what they do. (The basic theory is "Birds of a feather flock together": if most of your friends are losers, it is probably net-beneficial to the business to assume you are a loser, if most of our friends are solid debt-paying responsible citizens, it is probably net-beneficial to the business to assume you are a solid debt-paying responsible citizen.)
I think this would be so effective (prices risk appropriately, far cheaper to maintain than the current reporting infrastructure since folks helpfully update the social graph for you) you'd almost have to illegalize it. (Let me hum a few bars: "disparate impact".)
On the other hand, such an inefficient classification mechanism ought to create sufficient surplus for profit for those specialized enough to look for it. But there are other systemic inefficiencies that might prevent those niches from being profitable enough.
There already are insurance companies that only insure people with a university degree. Their rates are lower than those of other companies. They aren't prejudiced and they do not discriminate: they estimate risk based on solid information about a person and the mere fact that they can stay in business suggests there is indeed a good correlation between their estimates risk and the actual risk.
If they could determine who has many university educated friends, then they would perhaps want to extend their service to those people, because they have determined that those people share the characteristics of university educated people that cause the insured risks to be smaller. (Assuming these reasons that are independent of the reasons for not doing/finishing a university education, etc.)
If I know the chance of crashing my car and losing a leg is exactly 1 / 50000 (per year), and if I can insure against that at roughly that rate, I would still get insurance, because $20 bucks a year doesn't affect my life, but a million will help a lot when I do lose that leg.
In this case risk is still pooled and the insurance company can still function because the misfortune of the individual is paid for by the more fortunate.
There is still a need for insurance companies exist in a world with perfect information. Of course the insurance rates would shift. For example, when in a large group of people a few have a high chance of an expensive disease the insurance company wouldn't give the same rate to everybody. You'd still want to get insurance, though.
I am pretty sure that picking only people with a university degree is called discrimination.
Now, is it a good discrimination is a whole another matter.
Actually, it's not. When insurance is correctly priced, the payout for a group is close to its premiums, no matter how the group is defined. (Yes, including factors that weren't considered by the insurance company.)
If you don't price that way, some group is getting a subsidy and another group is paying one. An insurance company that figures out how to identify the latter can offer its members better rates than a company that doesn't. Or, if the smarter company can figure out how to avoid the former, it can have higher profits (which attracts competitors).
Insurance companies like to make money. People like to pay the minimum for their insurance. These two facts have economic consequences.
It sounds like you haven't quite decided whether this would be less accurate than FICO (maybe! But there's no reason to be outraged that some random person's prejudice is costing them money) or more accurate than FICO (in which case your argument seems to be "Yes, this kind of prejudice is accurate--or, at least, more accurate than the alternative. But that makes me feel bad, so misallocate capital and make more bad loans.")
The world economy just went through a couple very bad years caused by making wishful-thinking loans instead of unpleasant-truth loans. I hope that doesn't have to happen again.
"the kind of accusations that can kill a career today will likely be seen as a badge of honor."
umm... right.
Absolutely not. This is why I have forearm tattoos and stretched ears.
But many other people absolutely do care. My mom was incredibly upset when I got my first visible tattoo. "You're never going to find a job."
Those of us here are of a different breed than out in the greater world.
Yes. I would not bet my life that I will never need to, though I've always been more fortunate than that. I wouldn't last very long, the way we treat the homeless.
For me all throughout college I put up this fake front of who I wanted to be because I wanted to be popular and accepted by the world. It wasn't until after college that I came to realize (and still am) that internal acceptance and living truthfully with others removes such a huge mental burden. I have my utter failings, and I have my great successes, and both of them I am more than willing to share with others because that's who I am.
Reminds me of the Billy Joel lyrics...
Well we all have a face
That we hide away forever
And we take them out and
Show ourselves
When everyone has gone
Perhaps we are moving toward a society that overlooks minor indiscretions. That doesn't mean we overlook everything. With the increase in data, we can start paying more attention to substantive things (that indiscretions were only a proxy for anyway).
There's no reason not to jump ahead here. This is a good time to take a look at your own habits in judging people and make sure you're doing it fairly.