Talk:Whuffie
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In a cash-based economic system, nobody can gain money without someone else parting with an equal amount of money. Hmmm... that seems to be a fallacy. If that were the case, then the GDP would have to remain constant.
- I've always wondered about that too... if economics is zero-sum - as it seems to be on small scales - then how is the GDP meaningful?
- It isn't a falacy since the total amount of money, M, is usually constant (unless the government practices seignorage which usually causes inflation of the degree of seignorage). Thus for me to gain $10 someone necessarily lost $10.
- As for GDP growing despite the money supply remaining constant - wealth is created independent of money, otherwise the only way to create wealth would be to print money. Someone can create something of worth - that is create something people will pay money for. Since the worth is created without someone having to pay for it (the very act of creation creates the wealth, not paying for it) then worth is independent of money supply. I hope this makes sense, perhaps someone can explain it better. --ShaunMacPherson 20:45, 18 August 2005 (UTC)
- It's essential to have positive and negative scores identified. A zero rating could be due to being a nonentity or through having 10,000 people divided down the middle.
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[edit] Etymology
I agree that Whuffie is a made-up word and not a pronunciation of an acronym, but didn't Doctorow say that it came from the "Whuf! Whuf!" audience cheer from the Arsenio Hall show? I hesitate to edit the article to add this (and I haven't checked the history to see if had been added and discarded), but I was just wondering...--Cmpalmer 19:32, 27 August 2007 (UTC)
- I think I remember him saying it's a made-up word that he and his friends in high-school used to use. Other than that, I don't remember if he and his friends picked it up from the Arsenio Hall show or not. Regardless, we shouldn't add that to the article if we don't have reliable sources.. --Kjoonlee 19:35, 27 August 2007 (UTC)
[edit] WhuffieTracker
You can now check your Whuffie on the web. Whuffie Tracker under development. --Migs 05:15, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Auto judgment
Hi, I added back the bit about automatic judgments based on Whuffie. I learned about it from an interview of Cory Doctorow. (Krotty seems to agree with me.) However, I can't find the interview again. If one of you can find it again, please add a link. Thanks. :) --Kjoonlee 04:39, 22 September 2006 (UTC)
- I also don't have to explain the working of the neural interface, which in addition to allowing them to do this suck-your-brains-out-and-drop-it-onto-a-hard-drive thing, also is capable of figuring out how you feel about any given thing anywhere in the world that you have any opinion about--without asking you. And as a consequence of this, you can first of all make some guesses about how you're going to feel about something. You don't have to remember whether you've been to this restaurant because the system remembers and tells you what other good restaurants are nearby. But the second-order effect is it will figure out who you hold in high esteem, who has an opinion about some restaurant you've never been to. And this opinion, and this esteem is called Whuffie.
From [the interview] --Krotty 18:59, 22 September 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Whuffie inflation
Has the problem of inflation ever been applied to a Whuffie currency based economy? Whuffie is a measurement of one's reputation relative to others. A good reputation leads to increased social status. Social status and reputation are positional goods, [1]. Positional goods are naturally scarce, there's only so much lakeside and ocean view real estate to go around. Thus, when the supply of whuffies in the economy grows each individual whuffie represents smaller amounts of reputation/social status/whatever. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Weaklygodlike (talk • contribs) 04:23, 20 September 2007 (UTC)
