Prestige/reputation is supposed to work like the pagerank algorithm: every person has a little bit of prestige to distribute, it flows to a few major sinks, and those sinks can themselves distribute it to the people they respect.

Real prestige isn’t like this, of course. You can improve people’s perception of your prestige, and thus your actual prestige, with the right clothes or website design. But you can also hack the pagerank algorithm. For example,  let’s say we have 3 low status entities: a website, a blogger, and a small meeting of subject matter experts.  We can improve their status by calling them an online magazine, a science writer, and a colloquium, but that’s not yet prestige hacking. The real magic comes when the colloquium introduces the writer and the magazine as if they are important, because then their presence makes the colloquium more impressive. Then the magazine can write up the colloquium as if it was important, because that makes their exclusive access more impressive.  Via tricks like this, one can manufacture pagerank weight out of thin air.

The ethics of this are complicated. I will say as a practical matter that failures of prestige hacking are punished harshly and if you are learning about the concept just now you should assume you are bad at it. The goal of this post is teaching self-defense through recognition. 

Credit allocation: I learned the term from people at Leverage, but when I asked around I found the idea originated elsewhere and no one was sure who deserved credit for the name. 

would a co-writer help?

You're only counting the core series, right? I'm into the books as a substrate for watching conspiracy videos on youtube, in which case the procrastination projects are as valuable as the core books. 

@Eric Raymond has a tweet in which he lays out a taxonomy of treaty enforcement. His three options are:

1. The US bombs non-compliant countries
   1. Eric doesn’t mention economic punishments but I put them in the same category as bombs
2. The situation is an iterated prisoners’ dilemma where sides prefer cooperate-cooperate to defect-defect. The benefits of cheating are less than the cost of moving to the worse equilibrium
3. Wordcel bullshit (worthless)

The thing is, neither 1 nor 2 require a joint agreement between countries. You, a powerful country, could always just declare that you will bomb any country that creates nukes or sneezes wrong, and let them make their choices. And if it’s an iterated prisoners’ dilemma (or stag hunt) you don’t even need to be more powerful, just have a sufficient gap between C-C and D-D. So to the extent treaties do meaningful work, it has to live in the wordcel bullshit. 

Here are some guesses as to what that wordcel bullshit/verbal magic could be:

• Treaties give all parties a chance to define cooperation and defection, so they don’t accidentally defect.
• Having defined cooperation and defection, countries have a harder time claiming a defection was a misunderstanding.
• Make a change in policy explicit. Canada pulled out of the Kyoto protocol (despite wet-noodle level enforcement), and that closes the debate as to whether they failed to meet their quota by accident despite enormous effort, or are choosing not to try. 
• These definitions would be important enough if you were negotiating between two people, but countries contain multitudes. Cease fires aren’t just an agreement between countries A and B, they’re an agreement between all the hawks and doves within A, that x will be considered defection and x’ will not. This makes countries more predictable to each other.
• Treaties help yesterday’s hawks share a definition with tomorrow’s hawks, again improving predictability. 
• If you unilaterally impose terms on one country, other countries will get nervous about what terms you will unilaterally impose on them. If the country has given you permission to impose those terms, perhaps for some immediate reward like food aid, other countries can reassure themselves they would simply not agree to freeze their nuclear program in exchange for food.
• Like failing to return a book at an upscale library or defaulting on a lazy creditor, sometimes the only consequence to breaking an agreement is people knowing you did so. Breaking even a toothless, obviously aspirational agreement too blatantly might ding your international credit rating in ways that hurt your ability to get the agreements you do want, like lower tariffs.
  • This assumes that people-who-matter can’t cleanly distinguish between for-real treaties and for-show.
  • My hometown library sent me to collections at age 8. 
• Working out definitions that might be used in future treaties/threats, while everyone is feeling chill. 

You can sum most of this up as “legibility”, which makes sense, since it’s a key comparative advantage language has over bombs. 

Me, before getting into Song of Ice and Fire: Only an absolute idiot would think George R. R. Martin would finish this. There is no chance. It's been 30 years. Let it go.

Me, after getting into SoIaF: we can't know he'll never finish.

Can you say more about what being agentic would have looked like?

If it weren't for this Futurama clip (1999) I would have completely forgotten how everyone considered it a huge problem that American political parties were so similar. 

 

I think that by far the most important thing in this space is for a Democrat to win the 2028 presidential election

how can we distinguish people who:

1. arrive at this statement through strong evidence and reasoning
2. sincerely believe it, but followed shitty practices to get to it such that their opinion carries no weight
3. are knowingly saying this to advance some other goal

why the change?

"[thing that clearly exists] doesn't exist" is established code for "is not the crisp category you think it is" (e.g. Why Fish Don't Exist). 

Additionally, the definition of murder might vary from place to place, but if there isn't a crisp definition for a given jurisdiction, we say that place lacks law and order.  And since treaties are definitionally between multiple parties, those parties need to share a definition of anything material, in a way they don't need to share a definition of murder that occurs on their own soil.