FWIW, here is my take on this from an article I published in 2005:
"Look for success
There is an increasing trend towards feigning offence at trivial issues in order to look like a moral hero. I'm sure only half a dozen people through the United States were actually upset about Janet Jackson showing her breasts on television, but politicians around the country reacted with outrage. Fortunately this trend will be short lived.
In Scott Adams' book The Dilbert Future there is an anecdote about why all politicians seem to be crooks. The possible reasons he gives are
1. Crooks are the only ones who run for office
2. Politics turns people into criminals
3. All politicians are being framed
4. Every person on Earth is a crook, but only the only people we check out carefully are politicians
There is no reason to believe the first three are correct, so probably the best explanation for this phenomenon is reason four. Now clearly not everyone is really a crook, but it is true that we have all done both good and bad. The problem is that a scatter shot of everything that each person in the translucent generation has ever done is available online through a quick Google search. This is a great tool to find out if a potential employee has committed a felony. The problem is how should one react when reading logs of that person's online chats from when they were ten?
No matter how stupid, racist, offensive, or pathetic ones comments were as a ten year old it is unlikely that they would have a statistical correlation with job performance at age thirty. When everyone has dirt on everyone else, it won't be about the number of failures, it will be about—within reason—the number of successes. Instead of being judged on your gravitas, you will be judged on your ability to act appropriately in any given context."
If I were to rewrite it today, I think I would add that reputation is more important today than in any other point in history, but that what constitutes good and bad karma is rapidly changing.
Scott Adam's syllogistic analysis is only true if his items form an exhaustive set of possibilities. One thing time does tell us about human nature is that it is easy to overlook causes for other's behavior.
In this case, as an advocate of Objectivism, I would like to point out two things. First, the definition of "crook" seems to vary widely: some people would like to call former Pres. Clinton a crook because he had an affair. In my book, an affair may be immoral, but it should not be illegal. Second, if the 'game' in politics, as it seems to be today, is not protection of rights but allocation of loot, who do you attract? People who like to dictate allocations, not people who like to create more pie.
The post seems mistitled. It is not a set of instructions on how to defend your reputation. Rather, it is a single example of someone actively defending their reputation online. That is, the only real content in the post is an example of someone attacking the author (their are no details about the attacker other than as "someone with an axe to grind"), and someone else coming to the defense of the author, implying that his reputation is so solid only people with poorly defined axes to grind would attack it.
Which is not to say anything bad about the author. I would probably try to defend my reputation if someone were attacking it, as well, but I would not have the wherewithal to be nearly so effective at it.
It's certainly not the clearest post the man has ever made but I think there are some lessons to be learned from the meta-content of it all.
To my eyes there are two lessons here...
1. If you treat people fairly and truly have a good reputation in a community that will do more to defend your reputation than anything else. Because people will stand up for you.
2. If you are a person who has been treated fairly by someone else you should start thinking of it as your duty to defend them against attacks. Because in a world where an anonymous person can ruin someone's reputation it's up to all of us to protect each other against such attacks.
Again he wasn't very clear and I have no inside information but those seemed to be the clear lessons (at least IMHO)
Maybe it's just because I haven't had any coffee today, but I failed to pick up on this to the depth you have, so thank you for bringing it to the surface. I think the original post should point to or incorporate this.
Disqus should pull in the reactions. Unfortunately I don't think they give the blog author tools to highlight select favorites, or to weight them by community votes
> This person fnid2 has an axe to grind about me and has been doing it frequently at Hacker News.
I don't think it's you specifically. He grinds the same axe about most people who make money, are involved with finance, and capitalism in general. Tends to think building significant amounts of wealth is "irrationally selfish", and that we could collaborate instead of compete because there's enough to go around. Smart guy in most ways, but a bit of an idealist and not up to date on the historical record of ownership-by-everyone vs. individual, private ownership.
A lot of people think there is a fixed amount of wealth, so if your slice of the pie is larger than theirs you are being greedy and taking from the them. I don't know why incorrect ideas like this one persist, but it seems to keep coming back again and again.
"Look for success
There is an increasing trend towards feigning offence at trivial issues in order to look like a moral hero. I'm sure only half a dozen people through the United States were actually upset about Janet Jackson showing her breasts on television, but politicians around the country reacted with outrage. Fortunately this trend will be short lived.
In Scott Adams' book The Dilbert Future there is an anecdote about why all politicians seem to be crooks. The possible reasons he gives are
1. Crooks are the only ones who run for office
2. Politics turns people into criminals
3. All politicians are being framed
4. Every person on Earth is a crook, but only the only people we check out carefully are politicians
There is no reason to believe the first three are correct, so probably the best explanation for this phenomenon is reason four. Now clearly not everyone is really a crook, but it is true that we have all done both good and bad. The problem is that a scatter shot of everything that each person in the translucent generation has ever done is available online through a quick Google search. This is a great tool to find out if a potential employee has committed a felony. The problem is how should one react when reading logs of that person's online chats from when they were ten?
No matter how stupid, racist, offensive, or pathetic ones comments were as a ten year old it is unlikely that they would have a statistical correlation with job performance at age thirty. When everyone has dirt on everyone else, it won't be about the number of failures, it will be about—within reason—the number of successes. Instead of being judged on your gravitas, you will be judged on your ability to act appropriately in any given context."
If I were to rewrite it today, I think I would add that reputation is more important today than in any other point in history, but that what constitutes good and bad karma is rapidly changing.