Prestige/reputation is supposed to work like the pagerank algorithm: every person has a little bit of prestige to distribute, it flows to a few major sinks, and those sinks can themselves distribute it to the people they respect.
Real prestige isn’t like this, of course. You can improve people’s perception of your prestige, and thus your actual prestige, with the right clothes or website design. But you can also hack the pagerank algorithm. For example, let’s say we have 3 low status entities: a website, a blogger, and a small meeting of subject matter experts. We can improve their status by calling them an online magazine, a science writer, and a colloquium, but that’s not yet prestige hacking. The real magic comes when the colloquium introduces the writer and the magazine as if they are important, because then their presence makes the colloquium more impressive. Then the magazine can write up the colloquium as if it was important, because that makes their exclusive access more impressive. Via tricks like this, one can manufacture pagerank weight out of thin air.
The ethics of this are complicated. I will say as a practical matter that failures of prestige hacking are punished harshly and if you are learning about the concept just now you should assume you are bad at it. The goal of this post is teaching self-defense through recognition.
Credit allocation: I learned the term from people at Leverage, but when I asked around I found the idea originated elsewhere and no one was sure who deserved credit for the name.
I think many artists are already using a similar trick—they become part-time artists and part-time art critics. As critics, they praise their friends, who similarly reciprocate. (Praising directly yourself would be a little too obvious.)
Prestige/reputation is supposed to work like the pagerank algorithm: every person has a little bit of prestige to distribute, it flows to a few major sinks, and those sinks can themselves distribute it to the people they respect.
Real prestige isn’t like this, of course. You can improve people’s perception of your prestige, and thus your actual prestige, with the right clothes or website design. But you can also hack the pagerank algorithm. For example, let’s say we have 3 low status entities: a website, a blogger, and a small meeting of subject matter experts. We can improve their status by calling them an online magazine, a science writer, and a colloquium, but that’s not yet prestige hacking. The real magic comes when the colloquium introduces the writer and the magazine as if they are important, because then their presence makes the colloquium more impressive. Then the magazine can write up the colloquium as if it was important, because that makes their exclusive access more impressive. Via tricks like this, one can manufacture pagerank weight out of thin air.
The ethics of this are complicated. I will say as a practical matter that failures of prestige hacking are punished harshly and if you are learning about the concept just now you should assume you are bad at it. The goal of this post is teaching self-defense through recognition.
Credit allocation: I learned the term from people at Leverage, but when I asked around I found the idea originated elsewhere and no one was sure who deserved credit for the name.
I think many artists are already using a similar trick—they become part-time artists and part-time art critics. As critics, they praise their friends, who similarly reciprocate. (Praising directly yourself would be a little too obvious.)