Effort Expenditure in the Proxy Model

The proxy model sumarized in this short paper suggests that we take a combination of related attributes and expended effort into account when gauging ourselves against others. There are interesting informational issues contained in such a model:

** Visible vs. invisible related attributes. Some aspects of others are readily available for us to "control" over when making comparisons. In the gym, i think i should curl at least as well as someone in visibly similar physical condition, and in the long run push as mush weight as anyone my same height and weight. In many other situations, we may look to appearance or SES to infer the related attributes we would use in weighting the other person as a proxy. The lack of robustness in such attributes, or our inablity to infer from them the underlying attributes we need to make a meaningful comparison may be a problem in some online communities. In MIXI, I personally have trouble relating my knowledge of a topic to others - they may be experts, be studying the topic in school, etc. and we have no "cues" besides their posts (and profile information)

** Guaging other's effort. Unlike certain related attributes, effort is not easily visible. Especially in the online world, my weighting of others' efforts is always heavily influenced by a distrust of other's announced effort. In the real world, we have evolved social conventions that lead us to distort effort expended up and down out of consideration of others. ("Hmm... really, it was mostly luck") Some of these conventions may transfer to the online world, some may not.