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Dean Valentine

7Viliam2y

I imagined something more distributed, because people disagree on what a "good person" means, so maybe the solution could be to let everyone use their own personal definition, and make a system that supports that. For example, you could specify whether someone is a good person, and separately whether you trust someone's judgment about whether other people are good. And then you could ask about someone, and the system would tell you what is the opinion of the people whose judgment you trust. But the problems are obvious. People with power would punish you in real life for giving them negative ratings. If most people are afraid to give a bad rating to their current boss or their priest, then this simply becomes a database of people with political power. And the more specific feedback you provide on others, it makes the system more useful (information like "this person may steal your money" or "this person may try to rape you" is way more useful than unspecific "I think this person is bad"), but it also makes them more likely to sue you. Conversely, people would provide false information about the ones they hate. Where you now see a twitter mob trying to get someone fired, in this system they would probably all enter some false information about having a specific negative interaction with given person. You could try to detect this behavior, but then people would learn to overcome detection, leading to an arms race (e.g. the system could detect that if million people across the planet say on the same day that you punched them, it's probably a lie; but then the twitter mob leader would say "only people living in area X report physical violence, everyone else report online harassment; also everyone don't make the report on the same day, I will send to each of you a personal reminder on a randomly chosen day"). And basically all of this applies to gossip, too.

Dean Valentine2y42

Why aren't there institutions that certify people as being "Good people"?

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StartAtTheEnd2y30

I think defining "good person" is very hard, and that it's very hard to prevent people from gaming this metric, and very hard to judge people correctly (imagine a group of 4th graders trying to judge which one of their teachers is more intelligent, for instance. My point is that judging something which is above yourself is difficult as you judge relatively to your own standards which aren't as universal as you assume)

For now, what society considers a "good person" is mostly somebody who they have no dirt on, which ends up being somebody who is harmless and... (read more)

1Dean Valentine2y

I think the prestigious universities mostly select for diligence and intelligence and any selection for prosocial behavior is sort of downstream of those things' correlates.