https://www.oliverklingefjord.com/pagerank-anthropology/
How are sources, actions and expertise legitimized?
In our extremely technical world, our ability to exercise good judgment about a specific topic vastly differs between us.
Reputation can be thought of as the collective judgment about a certain person or organization’s ability or trustworthiness on a certain topic within a certain context. Thus, reputation systems could aid legitimation processes by offering a supplement to voting-based mechanisms. Indeed, the legitimation process underpinning peer-review is to a large extent reputation-based. Papers with lots of citations become reputable, and that paper’s successive citings are thus granted further legitimacy. One could imagine what the world of science would look like if the legitimacy of papers was entirely the subject of a permissionless vote.
However, our existing reputation systems are almost exclusively built on scalars. Much is lost when our multifaceted skills, abilities and relationships are collapsed into uni-dimensional social credit scores.
Multi-dimensional reputation systems offer an alternative. With language models, we have the ability to create such systems from textual interactions that capture the nuance lost in scalars, and thus help us determine trustworthiness and legitimacy contextually within a social group.