# Reputation is a tensor while status is a vector Reputation can be broken down into discrete parts: someone “has a reputation as [x]” someone can have multiple reputations within the same community: an excellent theorist, kind of an asshole, great to ask about high level questions but terrible at tactics, good at marketing, bad at detail, etc. Status on the other hand is just a place in the pecking order — there’s no room for nuance. People often conflate the two — you can gain status via a good reputation and people assume that because you have high status you have a good reputation in many areas where you haven’t earned it. Someone’s reputation and status can be different in different communities, hence a tensor and vector instead of a vector and a scalar. Originally I thought that reputation is a vector and status is a scalar but that isn’t quite right because the same person can have different status in different communities. So we need to bump everything up one level. Reputation is a tensor and status is a vector? That sounds more right. This framing raises the question: What is the relationship between [[Trust]], status, and reputation. Perhaps, trust as I’ve been using it is the instance of status and reputation in a ‘community’ that contains just two people. The framing as trust as something that by definition is between two individuals would be a step towards explaining why [[Trust is hard to scale]]. People often bootstrap their trust for someone based on their status or reputation, which makes sense because [[Trust is transitive]]. Like reputation, trust can have multiple aspects — you can trust someone to do one thing but not another. But at the same time, trust also has a status component — there are people you just generally trust more than others regardless of the domain. (See [[Oleg K rant about trust]]). ### Related * [[Trust takes time]] * [[Loyalty thresholds depend on your trust in a person and the size of the breach]] * [[People consider perceived relative trust before giving information]] * [[There are secretly three kinds of experts]] * [[When should we defer to experts?]] * [[There are many trust dynamics around introductions — Introduction readiness levels]] * [[There are many trust dynamics around introductions — Introduction readiness levels]] * [[Trust cannot be quantified but it can be taxonimized]]