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The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

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Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#51

Post by jjoonathan »

ikeyany wrote: post #44
yborg wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't how the Unites States evolved. Arguably, the success of the experiment still hasn't been fully established, but the major institutions that govern the US system were more or less present right from the beginning.

There was never any coercion in the US. All those black people simply begged to be chained and beaten for centuries. The tribes? They just really wanted to travel to Oklahoma. Women were naturally granted the right to vote in 1776 without any strife or suffering. Whitewashing history to make it more palatable is dangerous.

We're talking about whether or not coercion is necessary to bootstrap a high-trust society. Are you arguing that those types of coercion were fundamentally necessary to establish the United States? Or are you forgetting this context in order to have something to be upset about?

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#52

Post by jmoss20 »

danShumway wrote: post #5

In my mind, focusing on bots is kind of barking up the wrong tree. A lot of fake reviews on Amazon are written by real humans -- my main concern is not figuring out whether a human or a bot wrote a comment, it's figuring out whether or not the comment/review is trustworthy. If we got rid of all of the bots, that wouldn't make Amazon easier for me to use. I feel like scammers have already figured out that humans thems…

Right -- it's ultimately a trust problem, and we're in an unfortunate negative feedback loop here.

Bots aside, what we post on the internet (and believe in general) is a function of the information we consume. That information is increasingly consumed through the internet, and the internet (as typically used) is feeding us increasingly poor quality information. (To be consumed, then shared. Recurse...)

We can (and I think do) cope by having different levels of trust for different sorts of internet information. I generally have higher trust in an HN post than an Amazon review, for example. This is useful, but has a dark side: some of the things I (and likely, you) take as a sign to "increase trust" happen to correlate with things that have nothing to do with trust. I trust Amazon reviews more if they have good grammar and spelling, largely because I trust general internet information more when it has good grammar and spelling. But perhaps I shouldn't when e.g. buying a screwdriver (what does writing ability -- and the things it correlates with -- have to do with evaluating a screwdriver?). Coming up with social/political-flavored-information examples is an interesting (and worrying) exercise.

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#53

Post by mtberatwork »

rosterface wrote: post #7

There's no mention of what I think is by far the biggest negative influence on trust: the media. Trust in media is at an all time low: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/trust... It's a totally self inflicted wound too. Clickbait, outrage bait, blatant political spin, stealthy retractions, journalists on social media starting mobs... Bots do not even register in most people's minds compared to tha…

> It's a totally self inflicted wound too. Clickbait, outrage bait, blatant political spin, stealthy retractions, journalists on social media starting mobs...

The media isn't one unified conglomerate. It's like equating the entire tech industry to just SV gig economy startups.

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#54

Post by DuskStar »

ikeyany wrote: post #44
yborg wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't how the Unites States evolved. Arguably, the success of the experiment still hasn't been fully established, but the major institutions that govern the US system were more or less present right from the beginning.

There was never any coercion in the US. All those black people simply begged to be chained and beaten for centuries. The tribes? They just really wanted to travel to Oklahoma. Women were naturally granted the right to vote in 1776 without any strife or suffering. Whitewashing history to make it more palatable is dangerous.

> Women were naturally granted the right to vote in 1776 without any strife or suffering.

Depends on the state, if I'm remembering correctly. New Jersey allowed certain women and african americans to vote until (I believe) 1806.

Dirtying history to make our advancements larger is also dangerous.

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#55

Post by abathur »

If I'm not mis-remembering, there's an interesting section in Dawkins' The Selfish Gene about cooperative grooming behavior (I think it was in some sort of water fowl) and how the birds deal with cheating behavior (individuals that accept grooming without reciprocating). My takeaway was roughly:

Any exchange of value based on trust is exploitable. The simplest cure is excluding the exploiter, but this doesn't scale well. The exploiter can skate on anonymity if the community is large enough to continually prey on someone new. Spreading news of an exploiter's behavior to others can greatly improve how well this scales, but this behavior also requires trust.

I think the more direct problem is with scale, and that the internet is at the nexus of many trust issues only because it has ramped up the scale and scope of many interactions.

I'm not super optimistic on solving this intrinsic problem of trust in social exchanges, but I do see this framing as a silver lining. It seems at least plausible to iterate offline at significantly smaller scales on mechanisms for building and maintaining trust--and rectifying its breaches--in ways that do actually scale.

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#56

Post by acid_burn »

jmoss20 wrote: post #52
danShumway wrote: post #5

In my mind, focusing on bots is kind of barking up the wrong tree. A lot of fake reviews on Amazon are written by real humans -- my main concern is not figuring out whether a human or a bot wrote a comment, it's figuring out whether or not the comment/review is trustworthy. If we got rid of all of the bots, that wouldn't make Amazon easier for me to use. I feel like scammers have already figured out that humans thems…

Right -- it's ultimately a trust problem, and we're in an unfortunate negative feedback loop here. Bots aside, what we post on the internet (and believe in general) is a function of the information we consume. That information is increasingly consumed through the internet, and the internet (as typically used) is feeding us increasingly poor quality information. (To be consumed, then shared. Recurse...) We can (and I…

I find it interesting that when something uses proper grammar and spelling, it may appear more trustworthy.

Consider this: a consumer that employs above average grammar and spelling skills to write product reviews may also be more skillful in forming and expressing valuable opinions and assessments of any product.

I think that people are naturally inclined to pick up on those signals, whether the correlation is real or not.

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#57

Post by TeMPOraL »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #17
iagovar wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe not, but it's still a problem. It's the same in Spain, most media is hard to trust on basically anything. They even adhere to stupid projects like "The Trust Project" and spin off factcheking brands, but none of that solved the problem. It's still the same people claiming that, oh no, this time you can trust us! I even experienced being the target of a report (well, the company I work for), and they did an awfu…

The purpose of my comment is to illustrate that the collective "we" as a society are to blame for the lack of good journalism in the market. "We" don't demand it (i.e. pay for it), and so we get what we (don't) pay for. The person I was responding to claimed the media self inflicted it upon itself (I presume based on the prose of their comment), my claim is society self inflicted it upon itself.

Ultimately, both views are true. We do not "demand" it with regular market means, but it's important to remember that free markets tend to structurally favor incrementally cutting corners. Even assuming we've demanded good journalism in the past (which is doubtful), we'd still end up where we are. As for media self-inflicting it upon itself, well, they shouldn't have started cutting corners. But since "media" is really a lot of competing actors, "not cutting corners for short-term gain" was an impossible outcome anyway - the whole thing has dynamics of a Prisoner's dilemma.

My conclusion is that it's less about demanding - the way we fund news, i.e. open and competitive market, is structurally unable to support good journalism. Usually problems like these are solved by governments setting standards and giving funding, but journalism is a special case (it's perceived by many as protection against government overreach), so with that option out, I have no idea how to even begin solving it.

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#58

Post by apoph3nia »

> In low-trust societies, you never know. You expect to be cheated, often without recourse. You expect things not to be what they seem and for promises to be broken, and you don’t expect a reasonable and transparent process for recourse. It’s harder for markets to function and economies to develop in low-trust societies. It’s harder to find or extend credit, and it’s risky to pay in advance.

'Bout sums it up.

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#59

Post by ehmish »

yborg wrote: post #40
jaspax wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People forget that institutions take time to develop. They also forget that high-trust institutions frequently begin with a dictator. The end-point is high-trust/low-coercion, but you can't get there from low-trust/low-coercion. First you have to go through a high-trust/high-coercion state, after which you can gradually taper off the coercive elements as institutions mature and the individual actors get used to the n…

This isn't how the Unites States evolved. Arguably, the success of the experiment still hasn't been fully established, but the major institutions that govern the US system were more or less present right from the beginning.

The ruling part of the early United States were English settlers, so they brought their high trust society with them.
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