mattbell

The legendary "no brown M&Ms" contract clause was indeed real, but the purported motivation for it was not. The M&Ms provision was included in Van Halen's contracts not as an act of caprice, but because it served a practical purpose: to provide an easy way of determining whether the technical specifications of the contract had been thoroughly read (and complied with).

Read more at http://www.snopes.com/music/artists/vanhalen.asp

It's a useful tool for all kinds of contracts. If you want to spot-check compliance, sprinkle in a few random bits.

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. :-)