[extropy-chat] Conquering the world with a POV wiki (was re: Time Magazine's Person of the Year)

[Keith Henson]

At 09:05 PM 12/27/2006 -0700, you wrote:

>Keith Henson said:
>
> >Of course the underlying motivation for virtually everything people do 
> is social status.  It's an extremely uncomfortable subject to discuss, on 
> a par with masturbation and for the same reason.  (Remember what Henry 
> Kissenger said.)
>
>Status and Money!  But mostly status right?  And all of this is what 
>“Canonizers” (people contributing to the Canonizer) will be getting a lot 
>of.  “Delegated Support” or votes is just the start of how people will 
>earn very powerfully influential “status” with the Canonizer.

>Imagine 2 years from know, Natasha has developed and earned a huge “tree” 
>of delegated support in the Canonizer (She has already earned my delegated 
>vote tree).  Now imagine she walks into a new restaurant where everyone 
>clearly knows how much delegated “status” she has.  Do you think these 
>restaurant people will be interested in getting her huge tree of delegated 
>support in the “camp” that believes that restaurant is a great restaurant 
>under the canonized topic of “What is the best restaurant” closest to my 
>current location?  Of course they will want to treat her as queen of the 
>world in hopes of that happening right?  And deservedly so.

I have my doubts.  Mapping what activates human stone age psychological 
traits in the modern world I have found to be extremely difficult.  In the 
last ten years I have managed (with a good deal of help) to figure out 
capture-bonding, the origin of cult and drug addiction (with Kennita 
Watson's help) and the origin of wars.

Others are homing in on understanding why people are so attracted to 
computer games but none of these were predictive of acceptance of some new 
technology such as a POV wiki.  There are (perhaps) related reputation 
systems out there, the church of the virus has one, cryonet has one.  The 
later case was installed as a defense when obnoxious people became too much 
of a problem.  I don't think a positive spontaneous reputation system has 
taken hold yet.  (Unless you count credit reporting.)  I don't know 
why.  Perhaps the perceived cost/benefit is too high.

>Is it written anywhere that people can’t get paid a lot of money and earn 
>lots of delegated influence and reputation
 saving the world?  This is 
>another small part of the “supper powerful turbo rocket sled” I was 
>talking about above.

My personal experience is that "saving the world" is more likely to lead to 
bankruptcy than getting "paid a lot of money."  YMMV

snip

Best wishes,

Keith