Networking on speed, Couchsurfing, and online reputations

A lot of the interaction between travelers is often very short. Consequently, trust is built up (or torn down) quickly. Intuitive judging of character is very important. You may, based on a few minutes' interaction with someone, decide to split a hotel room or spend the day adventuring with them. It's not the sort of thing that happens at home.

People do have intuitive systems to decide these sorts of things, but usually they let them work much longer and take into acoount other information before making big decisions about other people.

However, there are cases where you don't get to use *any* real-world intuition because your interaction is online. This is the world of Couchsurfing. People are deciding whether to host others in their home based on an online-only profile and online recommendations of others. One big problem that I find with online dating is that it's much harder to get an intuitive feel for the person or for what kind of chemistry you would have with them. It's possible that very experienced online daters develop an intuition for people based on their profiles, but I never got to that point. Real-world dating just seemed more effective to me.

In any case, due to the logistics of couchsurfing and the fact you have to book regular accommodations ahead of time, you do have to make a fast and important character judgment of someone without any of the intuitive data you'd get from a face-to-face interaction. This is where an online reputation system comes in, and couchsurfing seems to be one of the best at it. The system establishes various relatively-hard-to-change things about you (address, credit card number etc) to make it hard to create spurious or sockpuppet profiles. (You can create them, but they are tagged as unverified). Then, it clearly lists all the reviews of this person by other couchsurfers, good and bad, as well as any responses to those reviews. The trust level of the reviewers is also noted. Thus, a solid set of reviews can act as a proxy for the in-person intuitive evaluation because it's a documented and verified set of other peoples' in-person intuitive evaluations.

Basically, the whole system is akin to a human-evaluated version of Google's PageRank. The various attacks link spammers use against PageRank could be used against Couchsurfing networks of trust. However, it's very easy to create new webpages and add links, while it is harder to do so via Couchsurfing. I'm really impressed by the whole system.

It's too bad online dating sites can't make use of the same technique of building up a reputation as a trustworthy person. At least in the world of standard serial monogamous relationships, it's hard to collect a set of glowing reviews from people you're dated in the past. :-)

[travel] Belgium – College town, music museum, chocolate, chocolate, and giant iron atoms

I made a quick day-and-a-half visit to Belgium to visit with a friend from the US who had moved out there. Once again I got to see some less touristy things. The town of Leuven is a college town and has been for, oh, the last 400 years or so. It's home to some ridiculously ornate Gothic buildings including one in which peasants are clustered together holding up various noblemen on pedestals. “Hey, Take up the rich man's burden!” As it turns out, this building is the town hall. Nearby there's a fountain / statue of a college student reading a textbook while pouring a glass of beer directly into his own half-open head.

We also took a day trip out to nearby Brussels. The first highlight was the Museum of Musical Instruments. The museum was housed in an ornate Art Nouveau building with a lot of fine metalwork detail on the various staircases and balconies. Inside the museum you could basically see the entire phylogenetic tree of Western musical instruments (and a good number of Eastern ones). I felt like I was examining dinosaurs and other fossils – I could see common ancestors, evolutionary dead-ends, unusual offshoots, and other exciting consequences of centuries of musical evolution. Part of it felt like a freakshow, with Siamese guitars, deformed (to my modern eyes) violins, and twisted-up trumpets. There was also an interesting violin-like object in which the strings were shortened to chaange pitch using a set of keys instead of the violinist's fingers, but the overall instrument ws still played with a bow.

Another highlight was Atomium, It's a lovely chrome space-age relic of the 1958 World's Fair, back when nuclear power was going to give us a bright glowing future and our greatest threat came from a hopelessly disorganized and overcentralized ruthless fascist government “of the people”.

And then there was the chocolate. It turns out that my favorite “American” brand, New Tree, is actually Belgian. The average Belgian supermarket had a greater selection of fine chocolate bars than Whole Foods or Rainbow Grocery. There were little chocolate praline shops of varying quality all over Brussels, and I did plenty of sampling. So far the Belgian and Swiss pralines have both been quite good, though the Belgians have been more adventurous with their flavors, creating pralines embeded with the tastes of lemongrass, wasabi, and other exotics. However, when it comes to bars, Belgium completely dominates the field. My favorite brands available in America and Europe are both almost all Belgian.

I also got the chance to try the cheap and interesting Belgian beers, including Boon Kriek, a cherry beer that is not cloyingly sweet, even to my tastes.

[travel] How to experience all three Amsterdam cliches at the same time.

Tourist: "Hey, you'll do anything, right?"
Prostitute. "Yeah, whatever you want."
Tourist: Okay. I want you to take me through the canals on the pedal boat while I sit in back and smoke a joint."