If there is any punishment at all, or even absence of a reward (perhaps an indirect game theoretic reward), that is the same as there being no incentive to provide information, and you end up ignorant, that is the situation you are experiencing becomes unlikely.
on the other hand you do want to be able to react to the information
The point is that you are actually unable to usefully react to such information in a way that disincentivizes its delivery. If you have the tendency to try, then the information won’t be delivered, and your reaction will happen in a low-probability outcome, won’t have significant weight in the expected utility across outcomes. For your reaction to actually matter, it should ensure the incentive for the present situation to manifest is in place.
Note that one thing you can do is punish people for failing to provide information. It’s not necessarily easy to get that right, but it’s an option that’s available.
Your strategy is only valid if you assume that the community will have adequate knowledge of what’s happened before wrt people who have provided information that should damage their reputation (i.e. confessed). The optimum situation would be one where we can negatively react to negative information, which will disincentivize similar bad actions in the future, but not disincentivize future actors from confessing.
From another line of thinking, what’s the upside to not disincentivizing future potential confessors from confessing if the community can’t take any action to punish revealed misbehavior? The end result in your preferred scenario seems to be that confessions only lead to the community learning of more negative behavior without any way to disincentivize this behavior from occurring again in the future. That seems to be net negative. What’s the point in learning something if you can’t react appropriately to the new knowledge?
If all future potential confessors have adequate knowledge of how the community has reacted to past confessors and can extrapolate how the community will react to their own confession maybe it is best to disincentivize these potential confessors from confessing.
If there is any punishment at all, or even absence of a reward (perhaps an indirect game theoretic reward), that is the same as there being no incentive to provide information, and you end up ignorant, that is the situation you are experiencing becomes unlikely.
The point is that you are actually unable to usefully react to such information in a way that disincentivizes its delivery. If you have the tendency to try, then the information won’t be delivered, and your reaction will happen in a low-probability outcome, won’t have significant weight in the expected utility across outcomes. For your reaction to actually matter, it should ensure the incentive for the present situation to manifest is in place.
Note that one thing you can do is punish people for failing to provide information. It’s not necessarily easy to get that right, but it’s an option that’s available.
Your strategy is only valid if you assume that the community will have adequate knowledge of what’s happened before wrt people who have provided information that should damage their reputation (i.e. confessed). The optimum situation would be one where we can negatively react to negative information, which will disincentivize similar bad actions in the future, but not disincentivize future actors from confessing.
From another line of thinking, what’s the upside to not disincentivizing future potential confessors from confessing if the community can’t take any action to punish revealed misbehavior? The end result in your preferred scenario seems to be that confessions only lead to the community learning of more negative behavior without any way to disincentivize this behavior from occurring again in the future. That seems to be net negative. What’s the point in learning something if you can’t react appropriately to the new knowledge?
If all future potential confessors have adequate knowledge of how the community has reacted to past confessors and can extrapolate how the community will react to their own confession maybe it is best to disincentivize these potential confessors from confessing.