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”).
I can think of quite a few institutions that certify people as being “good” in some specific way, e.g.
Credit Reporting Agencies: This person will probably repay money that you lend to them
Background Check Companies: This person doesn’t have a criminal history
Professional Licensing Boards: This person is qualified and authorized to practice in their field
Academic Institutions: This person has completed a certain level of education or training
Driving Record Agencies: This person is a responsible driver with few or no traffic violations
Employee Reference Services: This individual has a positive work history and is reliable
Is your question “why isn’t there an institution which pulls all of this information about a single person, and condenses it down to a single General Factor of Goodness Score”?
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 uninteresting. Because we focus on avoiding negatives rather than on cultivating positives, most people who try really hard to become “good people” just become pathetic instead (for instance the Nice Guy stereotype). I’m reminded of the quote “If a tree is to grow into heaven, it’s roots must grow into hell”, and I think that’s a less naive take on goodness in man than what society is currently promoting
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.
I think that mutual reputation affirming services with a specific context could be a good thing for society. Like, we have weak forms of this with LinkedIn, and very narrow forms with the institutions that Faul Sname mentions. But I think we could have better, slightly more general forms, that were deliberately designed to be at least reasonably resistant to adversarial pressure (as Ben Pace highlights).
For example, I could see how it would be very useful to increasing the legibility of potential work candidates if their former supervisors and colleagues had some way to leave verified but anonymous reviews for them through the facilitation of some organization. This organization would accept payment and, with the permission of the target individual, would supply a report about the opinions of that individual collected from their former colleagues to a potential new job’s recruiters. The individual could select which of their former employments should be included.
There would certainly be adversarial pressure to rig this system in favor of candidates, but also the work-reputation-management company would have reason to want to maintain the accuracy and fairness of their reports. Their reputation for being accurate is what would make them valuable, after all!
I think a similar sort of thing could be done for dating, at least insofar as being a convenient way to be able to give a prospective romantic interest some third party verification that previous people you’ve dated assert that you weren’t threatening or abusive. I imagine this would work as a sort of improved dating service, where you met people through the service (old school OkCupid matching kinda stuff) and then went on dates, and then filled out a small questionnaire afterwards. It would give people incentive to be polite and friendly even if they decided they didn’t like the person they matched with. Everyone using the service would have a reputation to maintain.
In government, I think there’s a lot of value to being able to assign limited conditional representation approval to other citizens. Like, “Bob can vote for me on all issues categorized as environmental. Alice can vote for me on all judicial appointments. All other votes I will fill out myself until futher notice.”
Why aren’t there institutions that certify people as being “Good people”?
Seems like there’d be a lot of adversarial pressure on how that signal gets used. Have you heard of the Nobel Peace Prize?
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.
I can think of quite a few institutions that certify people as being “good” in some specific way, e.g.
Credit Reporting Agencies: This person will probably repay money that you lend to them
Background Check Companies: This person doesn’t have a criminal history
Professional Licensing Boards: This person is qualified and authorized to practice in their field
Academic Institutions: This person has completed a certain level of education or training
Driving Record Agencies: This person is a responsible driver with few or no traffic violations
Employee Reference Services: This individual has a positive work history and is reliable
Is your question “why isn’t there an institution which pulls all of this information about a single person, and condenses it down to a single General Factor of Goodness Score”?
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 uninteresting. Because we focus on avoiding negatives rather than on cultivating positives, most people who try really hard to become “good people” just become pathetic instead (for instance the Nice Guy stereotype).
I’m reminded of the quote “If a tree is to grow into heaven, it’s roots must grow into hell”, and I think that’s a less naive take on goodness in man than what society is currently promoting
There are. The prestigious universities are examples. (lc and I are Americans.)
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.
I think that mutual reputation affirming services with a specific context could be a good thing for society. Like, we have weak forms of this with LinkedIn, and very narrow forms with the institutions that Faul Sname mentions. But I think we could have better, slightly more general forms, that were deliberately designed to be at least reasonably resistant to adversarial pressure (as Ben Pace highlights).
For example, I could see how it would be very useful to increasing the legibility of potential work candidates if their former supervisors and colleagues had some way to leave verified but anonymous reviews for them through the facilitation of some organization. This organization would accept payment and, with the permission of the target individual, would supply a report about the opinions of that individual collected from their former colleagues to a potential new job’s recruiters. The individual could select which of their former employments should be included.
There would certainly be adversarial pressure to rig this system in favor of candidates, but also the work-reputation-management company would have reason to want to maintain the accuracy and fairness of their reports. Their reputation for being accurate is what would make them valuable, after all!
I think a similar sort of thing could be done for dating, at least insofar as being a convenient way to be able to give a prospective romantic interest some third party verification that previous people you’ve dated assert that you weren’t threatening or abusive. I imagine this would work as a sort of improved dating service, where you met people through the service (old school OkCupid matching kinda stuff) and then went on dates, and then filled out a small questionnaire afterwards. It would give people incentive to be polite and friendly even if they decided they didn’t like the person they matched with. Everyone using the service would have a reputation to maintain.
In government, I think there’s a lot of value to being able to assign limited conditional representation approval to other citizens. Like, “Bob can vote for me on all issues categorized as environmental. Alice can vote for me on all judicial appointments. All other votes I will fill out myself until futher notice.”
I’ve heard multiple different proposals for how such a governance system might work. For a relatively recent and well-developed take on this idea, see here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4KjiZeAWc7Yv9oyCb/tackling-moloch-how-youcongress-offers-a-novel-coordination