Universal Trustworthiness (1/2)

On the company shuttle into work this morning I read this tweet from bounties.network founder Mark Beylin:

"I get somewhat confused when people are working on “reputation systems” for blockchains without specifically targeting particular activities/verticals/websites.

Reputation is ALWAYS context specific, there is no such thing as universal “trustworthiness”!!!"

And it got me thinking.

My first thought was, "Wow, that's a lot of exclamation points."

But more than that, it got me thinking about whether or not a more or less universally trustworthy generalized reputation could possibly exist.

I think it can. But before I explain why, let's take a quick look at what reputation actually is.

Reputation is kind of a funny thing. Despite any individual's reputation being predicated on a myriad array of different objective historical inputs (e.g. grades, schools/classes attendes, experience doing something somewhere, tendency to act a certain way), those inputs aren't what we call reputation.

Rather, reputation is what we call the result of someone else's evaluation of (some or all of) those objective historical inputs that are unique to any one individual .

Logically then, someone doesn't just have a (single) reputation. Instead then, any one individual has multiple reputations equal to at least the total number of people who've evaluated them.

Since there is no way for anyone to keep track of all of their reputations (let alone anyone else's), all of those reputations end up getting averaged into a sort of general reputation that is either more positive than negative according to some standard or vice versa.

So in other words, we (i.e. humanity) already rely on generalized reputation. Hmm. That's interesting.