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RobinHanson's avatar

But the app could give elites much more say over who is elite, and satisfy that elite desire to say in control of who is elite. And elites might see the app as doing this all more accurately, with less noise than in their usual informal processes.

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gwern's avatar

Yes, if you just do it as 'A yay or boo B', you will degenerate into popularity and discover that Kim Kardashian is the 'highest status person in the world' or something. You would need to make it contextual and start building up graphs of status: think more sophisticated proposals for ranking like PageRank or Scott Aaronson's eigen democracy or Avogadro, which try to propagate metrics. To take your Tor example, I was surprised to learn recently (not following literature matters much these days) that Jenna Bush has become a huge success in the book club world (https://archive.vn/DIPwd); if you asked a random person about "who is a high-status book editor?", they will have no idea about most of the suggestions, but they will say they trust Jenna Bush on 'books' (and not, say, rocket surgery), and Jenna Bush surely has many and well-informed opinions on the closely connected nodes to 'books' like the status ranking of 'book editors'.

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