Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

Presumably as the internet identity problem get’s solved services will emerge that can cough up tiny nuggets of information about those identities. Did zippy_133_a go to Harvard? Is sweet_thing_341 over 18 years of age? What percentage of wild_boy_12’s comments to blogs were flagged as spam, offensive, angry? Ebay, for example could provide a service that provides information about an identities’ feedback at there, i.e. “bought 10 items for a value 312$ with 100% positive feedback, sold 3 items for 17$ 33% positive feedback, 66% no feedback recieved.”

I was pleased to discover there is another trading reputation server: Heatware. Heatwave is used by folks that buy, sell and trade in internet venues other than eBay. Since you can click around in their user database it’s easy to find the high volume traders, for example this quy. Since traders here post their persona’s in various trading sites this also provides a directory of trading venues other than eBay. I’ll note in passing that forces accounting linking across the persona, which I consider to be unfortunate.

I can’t believe I didn’t know about this.

Now Heatware should not be confused with Heatwave, who makes giant vacum+microwave chambers used to dry your lumber so you can sell it immediately.

Back for a moment on the left/right (aka little/big-economic entity) distinction. Consider a treaty who’s name is something along the lines of ‘Treaty to protect the rights of X.” Now, imagine the X that that is furthest to the right. ‘Treaty to protect the rights of Bill Gates?” ‘Treaty to protect the rights of the G7?’ How about: ‘Treaty to protect the rights of Broadcast Organizations‘?!?

Which brings us to a related question; how does the Plutocracy feel about the demotion of Pluto? Heavens, if they can organize to eliminate the death tax you’d think they could get it together to for this!

Statement from Billy Campbell, President, Discovery Networks, U.S. Discovery Communications, Inc

Our entire company is deeply saddened by the tragic and sudden loss of Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter. Steve was beloved by millions of fans and animal lovers around the world and was one of our planet’s most passionate conservationists. He has graced our air since October 1996 and was essential in building Animal Planet into a global brand.

What a legacy! “Building a global brand!”

Here’s a fun variant of the repeated prisoner’s dilemma game.

Picture a lecture audience. I announce that I’ll go along every row, starting at the front, and give each member a chance to say “cooperate” or “defect.” Each time someone says “cooperate” I’ll award ten cents to her and to everyone else in the audience. Each time someone says “defect” I’ll award a dollar only to her. And I ask that they play this game solely to maximize their individual total income, without worrying about friendship, politeness, the common good, etc. I say that I will stop at an unpredictable point after at least twenty players have played, at which time each member can collect her earnings.

You gotta love the instruction not to be “worrying about friendship, politeness, the common good, etc.” The game creates a group out of the audience with all the group dynamics in play particularly because there is no privacy. In the original prisoner’s dilemma that players are part of a gang, here we make the audience into a gang; while instructing them not to act like one.

That framing is from an interesting synopsis of a set of some ideas that apparently were first formalized by George Ainslie, e.g. that we all prefer short term pleasures and we tend to severely discount long term benefits as we make our choices in life. Given the choice between a chocolate bar right now and a chocolate cake tomorrow we tend to take the chocolate bar. This behavioral default is apparently well documented in man and other animals.

Formally we ought to discount future rewards by some reasonably uniform rate. So if we are offered a $100 tomorrow and $10 in an hour we ought to just compute the option value of each discounting by some interest rate based on the risk we percieve the future payoff to have. This kind of discounting is expediential; and it isn’t biased about things that are closer vs. farther away. It will cough up the same answer for 5 today vs. 10 tomorrow no matter what units (days, weeks, years) you use when you ask.

We animals don’t do that. Another way of saying that we like short-term benefits is that we discount things in small time units very sharply. A cookie in 30 seconds vs. a nice lunch in an hour? The cookie wins. It’s not rational but it’s how we are wired.

This leads to all kinds of common but irrational behaviors. Breaking the diet, staying up to late, having a few too many beers, failing to hold our tongue, etc. etc.

But most interestingly it puts us into a game just like the one above with ourselves. We are the audience. At each step in the game we have a choice to defect and take the dollar; but if we can manage not to defect then we can capture the long-term gains. We are caught in a gang of one our loyalty to our future selves continually tested against a hardwired setting that tempts us into short term defections.