Episode 98 - Reputation
Transcript
David: 0:11
Welcome to Overthink.
Ellie: 0:13
The podcast reputed to be the best of all possible philosophy podcasts.
David: 0:17
I'm your cohost, Dr. David Peña Guzman.
Ellie: 0:20
And And I'm Dr. Ellie Anderson. We do indeed love a lot of other philosophy podcasts too. We're not saying that ours is the de facto best, but hopefully we do have a good reputation among them. David, I want to start today by talking about a song that I can't not think of when the word reputation comes up. In fact, it's been in my head a lot since we decided to do this episode. And that is the song Bad Reputation by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, which is I don't give a damn about my reputation.
David: 0:50
I don't know the rest of the lyrics. I just know the chorus.
Ellie: 0:56
I don't know them either, or I didn't until I Googled them. And I wanna talk a little bit about these lyrics, because I feel like they say something about how reputation is conceived in contemporary society, which is that it has a bad reputation. Let's say it's not cool to care about your reputation.
David: 1:13
Okay. let me look up the lyrics while you do this so that I'm looking at the same thing as you.
Ellie: 1:17
I'm gonna read you a little bit of them too. I don't give a damn about my reputation living in the past. It's a new generation. This is like exactly how they sing it too with the same kind of rhythm.
David: 1:28
Yeah.
Ellie: 1:28
girl can do what she wants to do, and that's what I'm gonna do. Okay. So I'm getting from this that Joan Jett is resisting the patriarchal expectation that girls, because she says a girl can do what she wants to do, that girls do things with a sort of internalized other in mind who is meant to guide their behavior, towards stimulating a good reputation or towards, stimulating is a weird word there. Towards, establishing!
David: 2:01
Establishing. Yes. Yes. and the lyrics that follow actually speak to me a little bit more: and I don't give a damn about my bad reputation. Oh, no, not me. And I don't give a damn about my reputation again. Never said I wanted to improve my station and I'm only doing good when I'm having fun and I don't have to please no one.
Ellie: 2:25
It's giving hedonism.
David: 2:27
Yeah. the hedonism of I'm only doing good when I'm having fun, but the thing that I actually want to underline about this is the reference to improving your station, which ties to the idea that in order for you to move up, I was gonna say up or down, but, really up. In society, having a good reputation is a precondition for achieving certain social stations. And it just reminds me of like Victorian social mores about, vying for social position and protecting your reputation by controlling your public facing image, which here would also tie into the question of patriarchy because of the gendering of these norms.
Ellie: 3:03
And I would also say aristocratic social norms, because the idea of needing to care about your reputation as being related to social mobility, I think has to do with this idea that you are seen as reputable by others in a sort of social credit system that values hierarchy, which is not necessarily aristocratic, but is very commonly aristocratic.
David: 3:28
and your point about this being aristocratic makes me think about The extent to which reputation itself seems really old fashioned in many ways. And I don't just mean nineteenth century Victorian old fashioned. I mean, early modern or just, more globally premodern. Because reputation, like many other neighboring concepts, think about honor, think about glory. Think about vanity. There are concepts that speak to an old valuation stem that existed, I would say, during the medieval period, the renaissance, and the early modern periods that is really rooted on, people's perception of prestige and how that translates into your own sense of self. And interestingly, I think there's actually been, a renaissance, I would say, of these concepts in social and political theory in recent years. Because many of us think that these concepts that appeal to your social station are outdated. That we no longer think in terms of honor. We I mean, who uses the concept of glory or vanity when thinking about their position in society. Right? It seems really arcane and anachronistic, but some theorists have begun doing the work of, let's say, salvaging these concepts from the history of ideas and showing that many of the ways in which we interact with 1 another are mediated by these concepts. So for example, Kwame Anthony Appiah Yeah. Published a few years ago, it was in 2010, a book called The Honor Code How Moral Revolutions Happen, where he talks about the importance of thinking about honor in the context of a racialized society, especially in the wake of the memory of slavery. And there have been a few other thinkers who tried to do similar things with, For instance, reputation.
Ellie: 5:14
Okay. In that case, maybe Joan Jett is a little bit outdated at this point because one of the other lyrics is I don't give a damn about my bad reputation. You're living in the past. It's a new generation. The implication being that reputations no longer matter, But you would counter and say, Appiah's recent book reveals a comeback of at least honor. And then certainly the main book that we're going to talk about today, a book by Gloria Origgi called Reputation, which just came out a few years ago, a work of philosophy, I think speaks to this new interest in reputation. I also took a peek at what Joan Jett has said about this song, and she says it's autobiographical."I'm being sarcastic. My reputation, if it's bad, is for being strong. And my parents told me when I was 5 that I could be whatever I wanted as a girl. I could be anything. I believed them." I guess that is the bad, being able to say I'm gonna do what I want and you can't tell me no. So there is very much like this reclamation of a woman's power in the face of norms that expect her to be submissive or subordinate. I wanna though, because this is Overthink, and we're just leaning into this textual analysis, I want to mention one final thing, which is from the lyric that you mentioned David, which is, and I don't give a damn about... the way that we're saying this, we're like, and I don't give a damn about my bad reputation. No. It's like professorizing, Okay. And I don't give a damn about my bad reputation. Okay. That part she says, oh, no, not me. And that's like a refrain in the song as well. Oh, no, not me. And I'm tempted to say, as we will discuss in the episode today, reputation has to do with an objectified conception of self, with you as a static object that is being perceived by others. And that self as static object is According to a number of thinkers, including Jean Paul Sartre, but also William James referred to as the me rather than the I. So she's resisting the bad reputation by saying, oh, no, not
David: 7:27
me. Me, not me!
Ellie: 7:30
And reclaiming her subjectivity.
David: 7:32
Yeah. Our hypertextual reading of, Bad Reputation by Joan Jett and the Blackearts. Today, we're talking about reputation.
Ellie: 7:47
What is the value of reputation, especially in an increasingly digital world?
David: 7:52
In what ways can reputations, good or bad, be dangerous?
Ellie: 7:56
And how does the formalization of reputation through metrics and other means of quantification have an impact on how we live today?
David: 8:06
I put the word reputation into Google Scholar when I was preparing for this episode and the vast majority of the hits that came back. I wanna say 90 percent, but I didn't really do the counting. They were articles in these very bizarre public relations and corporate management journals, and they were all about what corporations today should and should not do to protect their reputations in the eyes of possible consumers and investors and how to manage what they call reputational risk, especially in a global market and in a global society. And so I was really not excited to do the work where episode Origginally because I thought it was just gonna have to read a bunch of corporate propaganda about how to curate and essentially protect corporate image. But then you and I did our homework, and we did find some interesting, and I would say, legit philosophical takes on the subject, especially the work of the Italian philosopher, Gloria Origgi, whom you mentioned a couple of minutes ago, Who is the thinker of reputation. Ellie read her book, and I read this article, which is entitled Reputation in Moral Philosophy and Epistemology. And Origgi argues in this article that reputation is A really key aspect of social life today, even though it's not a very popular topic of analysis in philosophy today. And she says that philosophers have been thinking about reputation actually for a very long time, even though they did not use the word until somewhat recently. So for example, she says, if you look at a lot of the writers in Europe associated with the moralist tradition of the, seventeenth and eighteenth century, they're all thinking about reputation, about its reverberations, about its meanings, except that they're using a different term for it. Sometimes they use the term vanity, which doesn't sound like the same thing. But when you look at the content of the writing, there are very clear parallels between that and the concept that we use today.
Ellie: 10:09
you also mentioned glory and honor earlier, which are things she discusses in the book in relation to reputation. And there's also a lot in ancient philosophy, especially in stoicism about how reputation or what we would now call reputation shouldn't be valued that highly. We'll come back to that a bit later in the episode and in the book where she developed some of these ideas in greater detail, giving the example of the early modern period when people had a lot to say about our social status in the eyes of others, she suggests that we can think about these concepts in tandem in order to help us understand how reputation is used today. So a question is, what is reputation? The Classic what is question towards the beginning of an Overthink episode. And for her, it's basically a cloud of opinions that constitute somebody's social identity. So it's not material, right? It consists of these opinions. However, reputations are very real. She writes that they embody and communicate collectively gathered information and collectively shared evaluations. So we gather information, like I heard that David was really difficult to work with on this hiring committee. And then we make an evaluation on the basis of that being like David is a difficult person.
David: 11:24
Yeah. And in the article that I read, She uses a definition of reputation that I actually really maybe even more than this notion of a cloud of opinions that you just alluded to. She says that our reputations are informational traces of past actions. So all the actions that we do that are socially legible in the public square always leave a trace, not just about the actions themselves, but about the doer of the action. And so all those traces when combined by third parties and shared through various channels of communication like gossip, They become our reputation, but I like this notion of informational trace.
Ellie: 12:06
Yeah. And she actually does use that term in the book as well. 1 of the things that I found a bit frustrating about the book actually is that there's a number of different definitions that she offers of reputation. And to my mind, not all of them are consistent. So she says the way, the place that informational trace comes up in the book is actually a really fun sentence. I wrote it down in my notes where she writes, like snails leaving trails as they slither across the ground, our social interactions deposit in the minds of others, a telling informational trace that cannot be subsequently erased. So that definition makes it sound as though our reputations live in the minds of others. Whereas the definition of that you just gave is one that focuses on the informational traces of our past actions, but doesn't make explicit reference to how these past actions live in the minds of others. Is that correct?
David: 12:58
I think that's correct, although it's implied for her analysis that it is obviously in the minds of others that they exist because if it was just a an informational trace that didn't reach human minds, it really wouldn't have the social consequences of becoming a reputation. If it's just, data in a computer that nobody has read, it really wouldn't be relevant at all. So I think it's just built into it.
Ellie: 13:21
Yeah. Definitely. What I found frustrating though is that in addition to these more intersubjective or even objective ways of thinking about reputation. She also writes in the book about reputation in a way that makes it sound as though our reputation is constituted by how we think others perceive us, which I do think is quite different. And I'm not saying it can't be both. But I do think that there's a conflation of the different viewpoints in the book that I found troublesome, even though, there's a reason that we're going to be talking so much about the book today. I do think it's a really valuable analysis of reputation, But it's just this point where she, at one point says that a reputation is composed of the opinions of others. That's this cloud of opinions idea. But then she also says that a reputation is a reflection of ourselves that makes how we see ourselves seen integral to our self awareness. And that reputation is a public representation of what we believe to be the opinions of others. And that I'm just not so sure about.
David: 14:23
That sounds wrong, actually, to me.
Ellie: 14:25
Me too. I think a reputation is a public representation of the opinions of others. But it's not a public representation of what we believe to be the opinions of others. let's say I had a really overly high opinion of myself, no one has ever accused me of having this.
David: 14:42
Sorry. I'm I'm choking on my nonexistent cup of tea.
Ellie: 14:46
OG, Overthink listeners will remember our genius episode when I shared the story I wrote about myself called the brilliant girl when I was a child. Truly horrifying.
David: 14:57
Yeah. But apparently, I'm the one that's difficult to work
Ellie: 15:01
so yeah, when I was, a kid, I thought it was like really brilliant. I had a much higher opinion of myself than probably others did, which was most likely a response to the fact that I was extremely dorky and very insecure.
David: 15:13
You were a genius. You were reputed, a reputed genius.
Ellie: 15:16
it would be a public representation of like my belief that others think I'm brilliant. But actually my reputation at school was for being a weird nerd.
David: 15:29
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. that's exactly what I dislike about this definition that it gives too much power to the subject rather than to others. And when I think about reputation, of course, I do think that we have some agency in crafting or curating or establishing a reputation, But that reputation is most definitely not a reflection of our self image. And in fact, that's what makes reputation sometimes a little tricky and dangerous. So I really like the notion of informational traces because it has nothing to do with how I see myself. It really has to do with how others see me in light of past experience and in light of gossip of what people hear about one another because the whole thing about reputations is that they're not necessarily accurate representations of a subjectivity. Yeah. you You can have a good or a bad reputation and it need not be true.
Ellie: 16:19
and that also could point to a potential pitfall with the definition that you gave us from her article of informational traces of past actions, because there are reputations that are informational traces of what people believe to be past actions, but, but which actually are not past action. So that's a potential danger. I also think that when we're talking about the fact that we don't always have access to our own reputations, that, namely that
David: 16:46
You don't know what people think of you?
Ellie: 16:48
Exactly. Like reputations, I think don't have as much to do with what you believe others opinions of you are and more to do with what their opinions actually are, I think it can be really valuable for us to get feedback from others about what our reputations are either for good or for ill. If somebody tells me like, look, Ellie, you have a reputation for being late and it's causing problems for your friends. People are saying like, tell Ellie that the event starts a half hour before it does so she'll arrive on time. That's information that I would benefit from having. And then conversely, Especially for people who suffer from low self esteem to know you have a reputation for being an amazing communicator that can be really valuable
David: 17:28
A few times since graduating, since finishing the PhD, I was told by some of my friends, including you, Ellie, that in grad school, you thought that I had a really good work life balance, and I've been told that by, 3 or 4 different people. And so I had a reputation for being this person who, has a healthy social life outside of just academic philosophy. And I was always shocked. I've because it did not cohere with my interpretation of myself at the time. So I had a good reputation in connection to work life balance that I was completely oblivious to.
Ellie: 18:03
then I think the question becomes, did you just not realize how admirable your work life balance was, or were you inadvertently presenting to other people a conception of your work life balance that didn't cohere with reality, right? Were you, it doesn't sound like you were intentionally manipulating your reputation at all, but maybe you actually didn't have a good work life balance and people just Thought you did for whatever reason.
David: 18:28
Yeah. I was just, right and left lying about having friends who were not academics and, faking photos from social events on social media. So who knows? we'll leave that a little bit open ended.
Ellie: 18:42
Yeah. And definitional debates aside, one thing that I really like about Origgi's work is that she argues that caring about reputation is pretty central to being human. And I feel like it's really important to mention that there's something weird going on When humans get all moralistic about the evils of comparing ourselves to others, I think culturally it's seen as really negative to care about your and about your social standing relative to other people. And I always find that bizarre when people like don't compare yourselves to others because there's a kernel of truth in that. Comparison can be really damaging, but at the end of the day, comparing ourselves to other people is actually just what we do and also can be really valuable. And Origgi says the following. She says human beings are neither essentially competitive nor essentially cooperative. They are comparative, that is to say, born and bred to draw comparisons and contrast between themselves and others. And she actually goes so far as to say that morality itself depends on reputation.
David: 19:43
Insofar as you have to think about others and establish comparisons between you and them. And I think as humans, we have an Original drive to be liked by others. And, as Origgi says, to appear in a certain way to them. So she has this kind of theory of human nature where she says that we are naturally inclined to want to control the image that we project onto others. And this leads her to make the claim that humans are homo comparativus, that's like her scientific term for the kind of being that we are, because we have this comparative consciousness. And so what we could call reputational management or the management of reputational risk It's not just something that, corporations do according to my, Google Scholar search from a few weeks ago. It's actually something that we are all doing at all times just by virtue of being humans because it is what it means to be a social animal. And I think it's important to note that we do it not just because it is in our social interest to control our reputation and to try to guide it and canalize it in particular ways, but because it's inescapable, right? Like we cannot not be comparative creatures. And so when we think about it as a natural drive or as a natural impulse, we could say, and this is the language that Origgi uses in the article that I read that reputation is both a social interest because it's in our interest to care for what others think about us, but it is also a fundamental human passion.
Ellie: 21:20
Yeah. And some of the language she uses around this, might be a bit overstated. She says we're innately hardwired or something like that. She definitely uses the word hardwired to talk about this investment in reputation. And I'd probably be a bit more interested in thinking about reputation as a certain manifestation of biological human impulses that's like also shaped by culture and, there, I think it's maybe a bit more complex than that. However, I do take her point generally that reputation is really important to us. And there's this amazing quote that she gives from Hobbes on glory, one of the sort of related concepts to reputation that we mentioned a bit ago. For Hobbes, glory is one of the 3 fundamental passions that inflames human rivalry. And it's basically the feeling of triumphing over others. And Hobbes says the following, "glory or internal gloriation or triumph of the mind Is that passion which proceeds from the imagination or conception of our own power above the power of him that contends with us." So so very flowery language here, and the idea is that, yeah, we imagine ourselves or our power to be superior to the power of the person who is facing us.
David: 22:47
I did read another article by a scholar named Jordi Xifra, that is on Hobbes and recognition and reputation, where he says, look, there have been important philosophers who care about this kind of interpersonal image control in Hobbes' political philosophy and social theory Because we are all driven by this inner need to survive and to gain power over others, which is what Hobbes calls the conatus, this kind of, inner drive to assert yourself in the world. Because we have that, we try to gain power from our social surroundings. And when we succeed in doing that, we enhance our power and we experience that as glory. So glory is the feeling of that expansion of subjective capacity and power. And honor then is when other people recognize you as somebody who is succeeding in that regard, and they confer you this kind of recognition that, oh, damn. That guy over there or that gal over there is really doing it. And so glory is the subjective feeling of that expansion of my power, whereas honor is bestowed upon me by the opinion of others. And together, according to Xifra, those two concepts would be the early modern equivalents of what we today call reputation, which would have a subjective and also an inter subjective or objective component.
Ellie: 24:14
And I think that's precisely what Origgi is getting at as well because Origgi is interested in the dimension of reputation that has to do with that drive or that passion, But then also the aspect of reputation that is more intersubjective, if not objective and has to do with our social interests, how we think that others are perceiving us.
David: 24:38
Yeah. And I think her claim that reputation is both a social interest and a passion, that was really helpful for me to think about this concept because it is true that reputation is something that we have a reason to protect. But when you think about it as a passion, it's just something that we naturally do without thinking about it ahead of time. And she says that if you look at the writings of Adam Smith, that's where you really see the duality of reputation even at the level of his own work. Because as a political economist, Adam Smith writes a lot about reputation in connection to economics. if I find myself in a large social setting, like a marketplace where I'm trying to trade things, buy, and sell stuff in the market. In order for people to be willing to do business with me, they have to basically have some information about the kind of person that I am. And the only thing that's gonna give them that information is reputation. And Origgi says that the reason that reputation plays such an important role in economic transactions is because when you have a lot of people in the same place, you cannot rely on trust. Because people don't know each other personally. Right? I don't know the person who's gonna sell me the milk at the store, so I don't trust them. But if they have a good reputation, I'll buy the milk, in my case, oat milk, from them. And so on the one hand, in Adam Smith's writings on the economy, you see that kind of, strategic social interest view of reputation. But if you then travel to his writings on the passions, on the emotions, and on the sentiments, that's where he starts using reputation in a different sense, which is a sense of it being a passion, something that just comes natural to us by virtue of the kinds of beings that we are. But she really does not want us to forget that it is also a social interest that is subject to rational thinking and to, financial interest.
Ellie: 26:41
Yeah. And something that we pursue strategically in order to protect these interests. And there's a study that she cites from an economist showing that individual reputation is enhanced by belonging to a well respected group, which I don't think is gonna surprise anybody who has tried to get into an Ivy League Cool. But there's also a positive side to this, which is that reputation can be really useful In situations of informational asymmetry, the less we know in a given context, the more reputation matters. if I am trying to find the best doctor to go to in the region, but I am not myself a doctor, I won't really have much information to go off of besides reputational information. So I'm likely to ask a friend who's in my same healthcare network, Hey, do you have a doctor that you really like? If my friend says that they do, that is enough for me to just go to that doctor. If I don't have a friend, then I'm going to look online. Maybe I'm going to see not only what this person's specialization is, but also look at where they went to school or other sort of reputational factors like that. This is really different from situations where there's not so much informational asymmetry. If I'm trying to buy a new pair of shoes and I go into a shoe store, I'm going to look at the shoes that look nice and see what's comfortable. And I'm going to put the shoes on and then I can make a determination from there. Sure. Maybe I'll do a little Reddit search and see if these shoes are reputed to be long lasting. And if the company is like trustworthy, sustainable or, what their labor practices are. But essentially I don't have nearly as much informational asymmetry as I would in the case of the doctor. And so I don't need to rely on the reputation of the shoe company as much as I need to rely on the reputation of the doctor.
David: 28:26
Yeah. No. And I think it's really important to keep in mind that 1 of the philosophical questions that Origgi is interested in is the question of the justification of belief. She's asking essentially, can somebody's reputation justify beliefs we hold about them? Can it actually justify thinking that somebody is the way they are reputed to be? And she says, although there might be cases where they this can definitely go wrong, in general, yes, reputation does justify belief, especially in context where you cannot base judgments or beliefs on personal experience. if you've never been to that doctor, you just don't know. And so reputation is like a hack for simplifying what she calls cognitive complexity, which happens in informationally overloaded societies. If you just have so much information, then you become unable to make a decision or make a judgment if you don't have a way of cutting through that, and reputation is that knife or at least one of those knives.
Ellie: 29:25
So maybe you should care about your bad reputation. Or at least embrace the fact that your bad reputation is actually according to your lights, a good reputation because you want to be a strong independent woman. Enjoying Overthink? Please consider supporting the podcast by joining our Patreon. We are an independent self supporting show. As a subscriber, you can help us cover our key production costs, gain access to extended episodes and other bonus content, As well as joining our community of listeners on Discord. For more, check out Overthink on patreon.com. There are all the same many dangers to relying on reputation in spite of the fact that we might want to follow Origgi in recognizing that reputation is pretty central to human social life. Somebody who thought about this a lot was the philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau. There is a lot to say about Rousseau's life. He was a far from perfect human, But I want to focus on his account of his reputation, which is that Rousseau basically had a good reputation And for a long time, he was a philosopher based in Switzerland. And then he wrote something that was critical of revealed religion and was basically driven out of his hometown of Geneva. He took refuge in England, got to know David Hume there. Hume was not a fan. So then Rousseau leaves England cause he's okay, Hume, not my buddy. And then he spends the rest of his life, mostly in France, in exile, traveling around Europe, but settling mostly in France, which is a setting for this book, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, which David, you and I actually did a YouTube video.
David: 31:08
Yay. It was so fun.
Ellie: 31:10
it was really fun. Yeah. I liked it. And I want to talk a little bit about Rousseau's take on reputation here, because he's somebody who at this point has gone from having a good reputation to a very bad reputation. And he is seen as a heretic by the people in his homeland. He has this sense of persecution. And so it's both real persecution. And, also, as you mentioned, David, imagined persecution, and there are some suggestions in this book as well that he, thinks everyone is out to get him when they may or may not be. So definitely some paranoia going on, but also a sense that, people really, he really has fallen from grace. And so his reputation is bad, both in all of the senses that Origgi is using it as we discussed in the previous segment. So where he lands in this book is with an account of how taking joy in how other people perceived him ended up being really empty. He used to take joy in it. He used to appreciate that glory, but he's now found that true happiness comes only from within. Initially, when his reputation started to suffer, He had this impulse to defend himself. He wanted people to realize how wrong they'd been about him. And if he couldn't change the minds of his contemporaries, he thought, at least perhaps history will remember me better, but as time went on and his reputation still didn't change for the better, he realized that these were misguided hopes. And if anything, the powerful people who had destroyed his reputation would make sure that those in the future continued to have a bad opinion about him, Rousseau, that heretic, and he would remain hated or even become forgotten. So even more than this recognition that he shouldn't pin his hopes on his reputation, He came to conclude because it wasn't likely to change for the better, he came to conclude that the very desire for people to change his mind about him at all was just causing further suffering. And what he needed to do was stop caring about his reputation altogether.
David: 33:04
Actually the song, Bad Reputation, that we talked about also makes this point that it never gets better anyways. There's a part of the lyrics where it says, And everyone can say what they wanna say. It never gets better anyway, which speaks to the possible irreversibility of reputation, which is also a point that comes out of Origgi in one of the quotes that you mentioned like ten minutes ago, in which she says that our reputation is something that is never to be erased.
Ellie: 33:32
Look at you with the bad reputation lyrics on hand at all times.
David: 33:36
For me, this raises another question which maybe, we will talk about, maybe we won't, which is What does it take for us to change our reputation? and you see this in the case of Rousseau that once you have a reputation that follows you For long enough, it becomes a permanent shadow that you carry around wherever you go. And with Rousseau, you see the stoic influences. And indeed, reveries of a solitary walker is a text that is influenced by the ancient tradition of stoicism, which Emphasizes not investing in the fleeting fortunes of reputation, which will go away anyways.
Ellie: 34:11
And stoicism is really interesting on this point because some of the major stoic thinkers are people like Marcus Aurelius, who was a literal emperor and Epictetus who was enslaved. And so there's all kinds of different fortunes, I think that you see among the stoics, but the point is that for all of them, there's a disinvestment in their reputation, a lack of attachment to it. And There is certainly a kernel of truth to this because relying on reputation can be a very dangerous thing to do. I think this has received a lot of attention recently due to the rise of social networking sites and the ways that information or misinformation about people's reputation can really get carried away. Origgi talks about this in her book, using the term informational cascade. An informational cascade is when a group of people accepts an opinion or acts as though they do without proof of that opinion's truths. And then suddenly this either baseless opinion or opinion that might have a basis, but people actually don't know whether it does or not really end up having an impact on them. I'm thinking a little bit about our cancel culture episode. You might think too about the Me Too movement where there's like really important informational cascades, which are drawing attention to predatory behaviors, but also The fact that they're happening through informational cascades rather than through other means of verification, the fact that somebody is just trusting that so and so should be canceled rather than, reading some articles about what actually happened. That's really problematic. And, David, I'm wondering if you have any examples of people who have suffered from informational cascade.
David: 35:59
Yeah. From, a bad reputation that was not true. and, yeah, I don't know. Maybe somebody like Richard Gere, maybe. I don't know. It's like a really random example.
Ellie: 36:08
What happened to Richard Gere?
David: 36:10
people think he shoved a gerbil up his ass, in the 1990s. No? After Pretty Woman. This was, yeah. This was, like, his reputation when I was, like, in high school and college that, Did he? I don't know. Honestly, I doubt it. I don't think there was any evidence for it,
Ellie: 36:29
Why would he do
David: 36:30
that? But I can look? The theory was that it was a sexual kind of, fetish because the gerbil would get in and it would, scratch you inside with its little paws.
Ellie: 36:40
Oh my God.
David: 36:42
So I think it was an urban myth, though.
Ellie: 36:45
Yeah. Either way, whether or not it was an urban myth, You're speaking exactly to informational cascade, which is that you either held this opinion or acted as though you did without proof of that opinion's Truth. and I, I know Richard Gere of acting fame, but I've never heard this story. did his reputation really suffer?
David: 37:07
People thought he shoved a gerbil up his ass, so I think that would be, The stuff that's the harm to his reputation.
Ellie: 37:14
No. But I guess I this was like common knowledge. You said it was common knowledge for you in high school. I don't remember...
David: 37:21
Boys would talk about it. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that, if you are reputed for having a nonhuman animal inside your body that is not naturally there, then you do develop a certain kind of reputation.
Ellie: 37:34
Definitely.
David: 37:35
So there was a kind of harm, I would say.
Ellie: 37:37
Yeah. And, that sort of locker room talk or that memeification, cause really like that, if you're saying that was widespread information, That's technically a meme, even though it's not the way that we tend to use meme in the more specific context today. and so that memeification of his, of this gerbil Certainly, is an example of informational cascade.
David: 38:00
So here, let me give you a little story that happened to me, when I was in college and when I was in the competitive collegiate debate circuit. So debate is a lot like boxing in the sense that it not in the physical sense. Debates are nerds who would rather die than receive a punch to the face. But in the sense that judging who wins and who loses is a highly, subjective affair, and very reasonable people can come to very different interpretations about who won a debate in the same way that judges can come to a different decision about a boxing match. And because of this Public persona, public image, and win loss record history can play a very high role in determining the outcomes of a high profile debate, like a semifinals at nationals or, quarterfinals at regionals, something like that. And in the competitive collegiate circuit, there is a term for the circumstances or situations when a team's reputation ends up winning them the round even though the majority of people who watch the round agree that they lost, in fact. And that's called repping out. And I remember when I was a junior in college, we had a no, I was a senior actually at the time, my partner and I had a debate round where in, in retrospect, even immediately after the round, we were like, I think we actually lost that debate round to our opponents who were freshmen. But because we were a nationally ranked team that was already thought to be heading towards potentially a national championship, the judges just interpreted and experienced our arguments as more persuasive.
Ellie: 39:48
Wow.
David: 39:49
virtue of that reputation that they thought this team is better. Therefore, I give them not just the benefit of the doubt, but I actually give them the win. And so reputation can have these effects, I would say, in situations where perception plays a large role in determining an outcome.
Ellie: 40:06
luckily for you, you benefited from a good reputation in that case.
David: 40:10
Yeah. Yeah. They repped out for the good side.
Ellie: 40:14
Oh my God. Those poor, I hope, those freshmen are okay now. But I think that there's Something in your story that shows how reputation links up with other features of our social life that can be really damaging such as implicit bias. There are reasons that we use mental shortcuts in order to make sense of our world. We can never avoid doing that, But there are pernicious effects to that. And so also if we're thinking about reputation, say on the group level, like To be, I don't know. this is so silly, but I went into a hardware store the other day and it was very obvious that the guys there were not taking me seriously. I was asking for a basic part. Oh, I'm sorry. We don't have that. And then I showed it to them online and we're like, oh, okay. We do have that. And I feel like there's a default assumption that a young woman with long blonde who's coming into a hardware store doesn't know what she's doing in looking for a part. That's not a very pernicious example of implicit bias, but it is an example. And there are far more pernicious ones such as, the pernicious stereotype of black people being prone to theft like that. That has impacts for people who are going into stores. And that's a sense in which a group reputation that has suffered from informational cascade and that is not grounded in reality has these material impacts.
David: 41:34
Yes. I kind of agree with you. Although, I might want to keep apart implicit bias from reputation, even though I grant that they can overlap and intersect because in the case of implicit biases connected to race, There is no informational trace about the individuals in question. And so I maybe we could say that when reputations operate at group level, then those we potentially could name biases. But for me, reputation has to do with individual's image based on past actions that they have carried out independently of whether the public interpretation of those actions is technically correct or incorrect. So I would wanna tie it to the individual more.
Ellie: 42:18
think that's a fair point. I want to mention another pernicious effect of reputations that Origgi discusses in her book, and that's what's known as the Matthew effect, which from the gospel of Matthew. Did she talk about that in the article as well?
David: 42:31
Yeah. No. But I've taught it in my history of science class. Yeah. So I'm quite familiar with the Matthew effect, but I don't know how she talks about it.
Ellie: 42:39
Yeah. And for those who aren't, the Matthew effect is the phenomenon of advantages within a social network tending to accumulate. So for instance, the more citations a publication has, the more it will have in the future. It's oh, that's, we're doing this with Origgi, that's the book on reputation.
David: 42:57
Yeah.
Ellie: 42:57
Now we're going to cite that and so on and so forth. But an article that has never been cited has a very low chance of suddenly starting to be cited. And the Matthew effect takes its name from the gospel of Matthew, The book in the Bible where, there's a line about how for everyone who has stuff already, this is my translation of the biblical verse, For everyone who has stuff already, they're gonna get even more stuff. But for those who don't have a lot of stuff, what they have is going to be taken away.
David: 43:27
And in thinking about the dangers of reputation, I wanna add another one. This time by, walking back to the, early modern period
Ellie: 43:35
We're talking a lot about early modern today.
David: 43:37
I I I know I'm loving it actually! And I have to say this is also from the Origgi article that I read, but she has a passing reference to Machiavelli. And she says that in the works of Machiavelli, like his advice to the Prince on how to accrue power, Machiavelli makes some claims about the importance of reputation that I then started thinking about what they tell us about the danger of reputation itself. And the argument goes like this. According to Machiavelli, your reputation is really fixed by the actions that you do most regularly over a long period of time that other people are aware of. And so what matters is not, the intensity of the actions themselves, but just what is most regular and what is most visible from the standpoint of third parties. And so Machiavelli gives the advice to the prince that if they ever have to kill any of their subjects, which the prince may have to at various points, It's not that they shouldn't kill them indiscriminately, but rather that they should kill all of their enemies at once in a kind of gigantic massacre of political enemies. And then after they kill all those people, the prince should do benevolent little actions regularly over a protracted period of time because in people's minds, based on the way reputation works, they will remember what is most regular and not what is most atrocious. And so 1 of the dangers in thinking now about political philosophy is that you can curate a reputation as being benevolent as long as you hide all of your malevolent actions under one gigantic display of evil. And so we don't remember intensity. We just remember regularity for reputation. And that's a real danger, I think.
Ellie: 45:36
Wow. That's really interesting. Yeah, the building up of a reputation having to do with the frequency of visible actions regardless of their intensity.
David: 45:47
Yeah. Regardless of their intensity. And so it means that as a prince, I could kill a thousand people and in one day and then donate bread to the poor for, twenty days. Those two are not even comparable. But because the second 1 is more regular and repeated and Serial, it will actually determine my image in other people's eyes more than the former, sadly. We live in a world filled with what Origgi calls reputational devices, i.e., tools that are designed to track, measure, and quantify reputation. Think about Yelp. Think about Facebook likes. Think about the star rating system for Uber drivers. With the advent of all of these different metrics, which obviously are tied to the rise of the Internet and the emergence of social media, We have moved away from what we could call a qualitative way of thinking about reputation, the old word-of-mouth system, and toward a quantitative one that is rooted in algorithms and big data.
Ellie: 47:13
Absolutely. There's been a move towards formal or reputations. Whereas the world used to be characterized more by what Origgi calls informal reputations, Gossip systems, word-of-mouth, and so on. Now there's more and more aspects of our lives that are based on formal reputations that are codified in this quantitative way. And usually the rise of metrics, I think, is worrisome for us, David.
David: 47:41
Mhmm. Yeah. for everybody.
Ellie: 47:43
Yeah, but I think you and I are often like very
David: 47:45
critical of... oh, Yeah. Yeah.
Ellie: 47:47
metric systems, not the metric system that, the UK uses.
David: 47:51
I'm I'm worried about that system too.
Ellie: 47:53
Or that Europe uses. Yeah. Yeah. Down with kilometers and up with miles. No, just like the systems of metrics, we might say. But there are some positives. And one of the things I think is worth pointing out here is that people have more opportunities to shape their reputations because they can put themselves out there online. So You talked about the Machiavelli example, David, of killing a thousand people on 1 day and then giving bread over the course of 20 days. Obviously that is not a good thing to do, but let's say you are suffering from an unfair, bad reputation, And you decide to take incremental steps that are visible to other people to change that reputation.
David: 48:39
Like Gere and the gerbil?
Ellie: 48:41
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Posting on Twitter every day. I did not stick a gerbil up my butt. Social media gives you more power to shape your reputation by putting you in other people's lines of visibility than before.
David: 48:57
I'm gonna give you a different example of this, and that is ratemyprofessors. Now for those of you who are not familiar, This is a random website where students well, they rate their professors and, they grade us as faculty on various categories. And the idea is that this creates a public archive of information that students can then use to decide what classes to take, what classes not to take. And in that case, what I really dislike about ratemyprofessors is that as professors, we have no control over anything. We can't make comments. It's only students who make anonymous posts.
Ellie: 49:33
And usually, there's students who feel either really positively or really negatively.
David: 49:38
Yeah. Yeah. It's, very
Ellie: 49:39
So weird sample size.
David: 49:41
And so people develop reputations in academic settings in connection to their line of work in the eyes of students that may or may not have anything to do with the realities of their persona in the classroom. And so in that case, because there is no interactive or dynamic component where the party being interviewed actually has a say or can control the information being produced to some degree, that's where I find myself having, more reservations about the value of these systems.
Ellie: 50:11
I would actually take a different line of attack to something like ratemyprofessors, which is not that the problem is that we can't comment or have some sort of dynamic feedback loop that's not under the veil of anonymity. So so I think you're talking about the problem with anonymity and also the problem with not having the chance to respond again. But those are actually features of traditional student evaluations. I think the bigger problem, which is also a problem with traditional student evaluations and ratemyprofessors, is that implicit bias comes into effect all the time and you don't actually have fairness across the board. Students are, as we know from number of studies that have been done on this, not very good judges of how much they actually learned in a class and are much more likely in evaluations to focus on things like personality, which are really liable to being shaped by implicit bias. So I do think that's a big problem. Although I will say one of my favorite pieces of feedback ever has come from ratemyprofessors. This was like years ago. I don't think students really use it that much anymore, But somebody wrote that I was a very tough grader, but fair, and I was like,
David: 51:19
Oh my god. That totally, that's catnip for you. It's, tough, rigid, but fair. and just. Yeah. I just, have the image of, Lady Justice, in front of the classroom. I would say that there are still other problems in this website tied to the way in which reputations are built and undone, especially because in the case of ratemyprofessors, There is a mismatch, I would say, between the values that we professors have and the values according to which we are evaluated on this platform. So for example, like students are asked to give professors a rating in terms of difficulty. It's like 1 to 5 with 5 being really difficult and 1 being, not difficult at all. And although the website doesn't say this, the kind of open the open secret is that professors that are easier are better, that students prefer, low difficulty scale. And For starters, the concept of difficulty is not defined in the website. So we don't know if it was difficult for good reasons or if it was difficult for bad reasons. So there are questions about, for whom was it difficult and for what reasons. And so you end up receiving this score on a category that you don't care about but that students attribute a lot of significance to. And so there's a value mismatch. And I think that can be deeply problematic in the case of the formalization of reputation under these new, what we call them, reputational devices.
Ellie: 52:56
and following this, we would be remiss not to talk a bit about the Chinese social credit system, which I think we're approaching the end of our episode. So we can talk a little bit about it and then maybe we can save a more extended discussion for the Patreon bonus segment, David. But I think that is for many people, the most obvious form of formal or objectified reputations that we see at all in the world today. And this social credit system was first announced in 20 14, And it's similar to your economic credit, your credit score, but it's instead about your social credit. It started off as a voluntary program, but it's become more and more central to the way that the Chinese social system functions with the ultimate goal of it being mandatory. And I can't remember, David. Is it now mandatory?
David: 53:50
So no. There is, there's a lot of information around the Chinese social credit system that is difficult to tease apart because, of the language barrier and all of
Ellie: 54:01
And also because there's propaganda, like everywhere on the internet around it. And then there's also stuff that's like really anti-China. So I was having a hard time, to be honest, in looking at this, finding, neutral information.
David: 54:14
Yeah. So I found one article that I thought was quite helpful just because it targeted this confusion, and it was in, Wired magazine. And it talks about how for starters, there is no such thing as THE Chinese social credit system. For A while, actually, even before, that 2015 date that you mentioned, for a while, China has been trying to figure out 2014. Sorry. Even before that, China has been raising this question of how do they assess the reputation of citizens and their trustworthiness in order to extend lines of credit, financial and otherwise. And they've been playing with various models of social credit largely because they noticed that other countries, for example, the US have credit scoring systems. And so right now, what is on the ground in China is a combination of like city level initiatives that are not standardized. So different cities have been playing with different credit models and credit systems, and also some more centralized databases where information about citizens is gathered. And on the basis of this information, they create what are known as blacklists and redlists. And obviously being blacklisted means that if you have a bad reputation, you get some, kind of penalties or you're denied certain things like air travel or train travel. But if based on that kind of, administrative information from these agencies, you are a good citizen and a good consumer, then you get some perks, like loans at a slightly lower interest rate, some free health checkups. You might get, a discount on, your bike ride program or whatever. And so the whole point to be made here is that there is no such thing as a centralized system yet, But people are worried that this is going to lead to one. And some of the programs on the ground do raise significant worries about how that reputation is going to be measured. Are you just going to use financial information, or are you also going to use information from social media interactions, like how many likes they get, how many followers they have, and more importantly, what are you going to do with that information? how is it going to limit or enable people? But it is a really messy situation. And I did read that part of the issue is that it's very technical legal language in Chinese or in Mandarin that often Western scholars are not familiar with. And so what happens in the West is that people just read other Western articles about it and it creates a kind of echo chamber. And then people think it's just like that Black Mirror episode, and it's actually nothing of the
Ellie: 56:59
sort. David, when is that article from, though?
David: 57:02
Let me double check that. 2019.
Ellie: 57:05
Yeah. So that's really important because the system was supposed to become mandatory and universalized in 2020. yeah. And it is, weird to me how, if you look up the Chinese social credit system on Google, the results are actually not all of all that helpful or reliable. And so I did experience like a bit of a impasse in looking this up. and I have heard from Chinese students of mine that, it is actually something that really impacts their lives on a daily basis. So if you, as a listener, have more information on how this has been since 2020, we would love to hear from you. I wanna point out conceptually in the context of this, though, that the ostensible reason for implementing a social credit system in China was public trust. So China is a huge country. We have definitely noticed the world over that one of the features of globalization and the proliferation of giant communities through city life and so on means that there is dissolution of social trust because people don't have as rich contacts as they used to have. And so the ostensible reason for this is to try and bring back some semblance of social trust by saying, Hey, you might not know this person personally, but they have a strong social credit score. Of course, this, I think instantly goes into the Black Mirror, nightmare scenario, but that is the ostensible reason. It's trying to solve a problem with the fact that we don't have built in networks of cooperation the way we used to. We don't know so much about people And therefore, there is this vacuum that emerges with social trust.
David: 58:43
And in the Wired article that I mentioned, they point out that the term in Chinese is more accurately translated as public trust rather than social credit. And in English, when you hear social credit, it makes you think of social media. And that's where it starts going in this kind of like Orwellian dimension of controlling individuals based on their online personas. When in reality, we should be thinking about the way in which this is meant to increase trust in the commons and in the public.
Ellie: 59:12
And then the question becomes, even if there are positives to formalize reputations, at what cost are they coming today? We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Consider supporting us on Patreon for exclusive access to bonus content, live q and a's, and more. And thanks to those of you who already do. To reach out to us and find episode info, go to overthinkpodcast.com, and connect with us on Twitter and Instagram at overthink_pod. We'd like to thank our audio editor, Erin Morgan, our production assistant, Emilio Esquivel Marquez, and Samuel PK Smith for the Original music. And to our listeners, Thanks so much for overthinking with us.