Steve Roth, empiricist of repugnancy, is underblogged about

The link below is an old post by someone summarizing some of Roth's work, what's striking to me is that it was the most recent result from google blog searching about him and its early 2008.

http://www.portigal.com/blog/teasing-apart-meaning/

There's of course an Erving Goffman connection with Roth's work. Ideas that are repugnant tend to be covered in socially competitive environments (to maximize status, Hanson might speculate), which ends up deforming the larger social epistemology. I early linked to a Hebrew University in Jerusalem researcher looking at how subcomponent organizations may compete within a larger organization: here I think the organization benefits from internal transparency, but the subcomponent organizations have more complex motivations, just like the individuals within the organizations do. This is in principle at least a 3 layered system (in practice a 3 + N layered system). I'll work at making these thoughts more coherent -I'm looking at how "rational deception" skews epistemology in these 3 + N layered systems.

I see three epistemic approaches: self-deception, self-transparency with external deception, and external tranpsarency. All three exist at the level of self, subcomponent organization (this is multi-layered), complete organization, and then the various shells of external reality until you have all of known reality. Separate is the issue of epistemic motivation vs. rent-seeking, ability, efficiency, and other factors I haven't thought about or researched comprehensively yet.

Comments

[Douglas Knight]

Alvin Roth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_E._Roth

http://marketdesigner.blogspot.com/

[Hopefully Anonymous]

Ah, thanks Douglas Knight.
P.S. You should start a blog under your posting name. Comments in other blogs alone would make great content for your own blog.

[anon]

Alvin Roth's paper on repugnance is here: http://kuznets.harvard.edu/~aroth/papers/Repugnance.pdf

his blogs on repugnance are at http://marketdesigner.blogspot.com/search/label/repugnance

[TGGP]

I remember you highlighting a youtube a while back on repugnance, organ donation and transplant chains. Can't find it now though.

Off-topic: A while back you suggested that Madoff resorted to fraud because he wasn't smart enough to compete with the super-finance-geniuses. This provides some support for that view.

[Hopefully Anonymous]

It was Al Roth, I'm pretty certain. you can try my youtube channel or just search it. Also, i think it was a google tech talk.