I’m writing up a spec for a “Trust” system to power the Beeb’s message board system. It occurs to me that Reputation is now very 2003, which is why it seems to now be all the rage here among BBC management. The BBC is never with the state of play in any of it’s media, it’s always a few years off… sometimes way ahead of their time, sometimes woefully behind.
Anyway, Reputation and Faith. Or more accurately I’ve just had a bit of a epiphany about this whole rating/recommendation/reputation thing, that it’s not about creating reputation systems it’s about creating epistemological systems, simple ones mind you, but at their heart they are epistemological. All the debate feels very similar to old school philosophy of knowledge.
I was writing my usual stuff about trust living on top of reputation and suddenly thought about faith in the philosophical sense. I got to thinking about the relationships here. Knowledge being a justified true belief and faith being a belief that is not justified, and it’s truth is unknowable.
This lead me back to thinking about what reputation is in the sense that we are trying to use it in social software at the BBC. And it is a simple epistemological system. I don�t think in that the above definition of knowledge is right in a practical world. It occurs to me that knowledge is a probability function around repeated experience, and belief is where the probability approaches 1.
I’m going to have to think/discuss this one more I think. Back to work for me.
