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Yui Unifex · 08-16-2003, 11:24 PM

The general consensus of a person is a social metric. Math only helps with the technical details of what your modeling, but you won't know what it is you are modeling (or if it's accurate) without some knowledge of the social interactions behind the model.

I think the general consensus is still too vague though, mainly because such a thing doesn't exist in any meaningful form. There has to be a general consensus on some *thing*, such as expertise at a certain task, moral values, security at different tasks, etc.

Now if you want to model the general consensus of someone at role-playing on a scale of 1 to 10, the most accurate model is the one where people directly rate that person's work. This isn't always feasible because with a large base of things to rate you will not have the resources to properly evaluate everything. So instead you delegate this rating to another entity (e.g., Consumer Reports, movie critics), which is still another form of trust. It's all based on abstraction, and different people use this abstraction in different ways. In fact, this abstraction is quite easy to represent if you use a very simple social model with a few key elements such as the amount and type of trust you delegate to an entity, and that entity's rating of the object or action in question. Finding that value for a particular person is just a weighted average traversing the delegated links for each entity. The general consensus is a bit more complex though, as you need to take into account how much delegated trust a particular entity has in order to determine how influential that entity is.

Unless we know what the ultimate goal if the network is, though, we could talk forever on creating a general value that represented none of the things you are considering. You mentioned that it shouldn't be gameable, which leads me to believe that there is some in-game effect for this value. What is that effect?

Edit:
Oh, also, not allowing people to consciously manipulate the number is a strange request. I know that certain actions will raise or lower my level of trust for other people, and this is most certianly a good thing within any society, as it helps keep people's actions in check.

08-16-2003, 11:24 PM	#6
Yui Unifex Senior Member Join Date: Apr 2002 Location: Florida Posts: 323	The general consensus of a person is a social metric. Math only helps with the technical details of what your modeling, but you won't know what it is you are modeling (or if it's accurate) without some knowledge of the social interactions behind the model. I think the general consensus is still too vague though, mainly because such a thing doesn't exist in any meaningful form. There has to be a general consensus on some thing, such as expertise at a certain task, moral values, security at different tasks, etc. Now if you want to model the general consensus of someone at role-playing on a scale of 1 to 10, the most accurate model is the one where people directly rate that person's work. This isn't always feasible because with a large base of things to rate you will not have the resources to properly evaluate everything. So instead you delegate this rating to another entity (e.g., Consumer Reports, movie critics), which is still another form of trust. It's all based on abstraction, and different people use this abstraction in different ways. In fact, this abstraction is quite easy to represent if you use a very simple social model with a few key elements such as the amount and type of trust you delegate to an entity, and that entity's rating of the object or action in question. Finding that value for a particular person is just a weighted average traversing the delegated links for each entity. The general consensus is a bit more complex though, as you need to take into account how much delegated trust a particular entity has in order to determine how influential that entity is. Unless we know what the ultimate goal if the network is, though, we could talk forever on creating a general value that represented none of the things you are considering. You mentioned that it shouldn't be gameable, which leads me to believe that there is some in-game effect for this value. What is that effect? Edit: Oh, also, not allowing people to consciously manipulate the number is a strange request. I know that certain actions will raise or lower my level of trust for other people, and this is most certianly a good thing within any society, as it helps keep people's actions in check.