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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

#101

Post by rlucas »

abathur wrote: post #67
Sushi-san wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, should we just try to ignore the larger-scale exploitation of trust?

No, we shouldn't ignore it. But I think there's a risk of sending a lot of bright, productive people off to tilt at technological/interface/regulatory windmills in a way that leaves fundamental trust issues out of scope. Even if Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, etc. could wave a magic wand and remove every fake review, counterfeit product, scam, personal threat, or piece of false/fraudulent media, there would still be a tr…

One of the things the internet has been really great at is allowing those small (n~50) networks with high trust for e.g. identifying trusted vendors, but for really niche things where it’s hard to get an organic local network. Think new programming languages, or to crib from a recent HN topic, building tube headphone amps.

These kind of emergent niche communities can only exist when the broader network gets sufficient scale to have a critical mass in the niche.

So in limiting scale overall let’s take care not to throw out the baby etc.

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#102

Post by flukus »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #85
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. No, it's really not. In a nutshell, the root cause is the currently pervasive idea that good writing should be available completely for free.

The rot had set in long before they were giving away free content on the web. Before then people were paying for the distribution and not the content, the web destroyed the ability to profit off the distribution.

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#103

Post by yocheckit »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #89
ehmish wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Eh. Reality is more complicated. Some of the English settlers were decent people with functional societies. Some of them were basically the christian Taliban.

No, they were not.

The heavily religious communities in the early US didn't display any of the tribal behaviour commonly seen amongst the Taliban (which are the cause of most of the governance issues in Afghanistan), just the extremely strict adherence to religion which is in some ways a superficial similarity as the average person in those times was as fanatically religious as only the most hardcore Christian today.

For instance Cousin marriage wasn't a thing at all (which is one of the main ways of maintaining tribal cohesion) while it is still extremely common in Afghanistan and the Middle East today.

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#104

Post by schaefer »

abathur wrote: post #55

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 w…

It's true that "The Selfish Gene" has been a science-based classic of evolutionary biology for over 40 years. But it's also true that in those 40 years a lot of studies have taken aim at the central arguments of the book and in my opinion cast serious doubt on the accuracy of the books conclusions (Or perhaps limit the scope of those views as being a projection of western culture - but not of all cultures on earth, particularly not eastern philosophy, and not the animal kingdom at large)

If you have never read any of these counterpoints, but find that the conclusions of Selfish Gene have shaped your world view, please consider reading some of these counterpoints and seeing if they persuade you to consider new perspectives.

A particularly thorough book detailing these counterpoints is Matthieu Ricard's book:

Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#105

Post by didibus »

wincy wrote: post #94
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…

Amazon is weird, I bought a product in the mail the other day and they offered me a $20 coupon (the product only cost $25) if I wrote a five star review. So I wrote a one star review talking about how I don’t want to be bribed and they can’t make me be dishonest and to warn people. But amazon didn’t allow my review. So that sucks, and makes me not trust any reviews on Amazon.

I mean, how could they trust you weren't a fraudster from a competing product?

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#107

Post by AnthonyMouse »

felipemnoa wrote: post #100
petermcneeley wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These networks would be scalable by using derived trust values. In simple terms you trust others to provide you with the trust value of people you have never met. I'm sure one could mathematically prove certain implementations to be unexploitable.

>>In simple terms you trust others to provide you with the trust value of people you have never met. References? Credit Score?

> References? Credit Score?

Both of those are easily gamed in the absence of trust. For references the mechanism is obvious. They list co-conspirators as references who then lie about their titles.

For credit reporting it seems like you could do the same thing over time. Create fictitious entities to make positive filings with credit reporting agencies. I assume the reason that isn't more popular is that it's even faster to do it the other way and steal the identity of somebody with good credit.

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#108

Post by pixl97 »

didibus wrote: post #105
wincy wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon is weird, I bought a product in the mail the other day and they offered me a $20 coupon (the product only cost $25) if I wrote a five star review. So I wrote a one star review talking about how I don’t want to be bribed and they can’t make me be dishonest and to warn people. But amazon didn’t allow my review. So that sucks, and makes me not trust any reviews on Amazon.

I mean, how could they trust you weren't a fraudster from a competing product?

Because they actually purchased the product?

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#109

Post by clhodapp »

arugulum wrote: post #93
chmod775 wrote: post #77

This looks more like people new to the internet discovering what everyone else already knew: You can't trust strangers on the internet. You never could. If anything the internet nowadays is a more regulated, safer place than it used to be. The "wild west" internet of old now only endures in certain corners. It's no longer synonymous with the thing itself. Posting with your full name instead of anonymously or pseudony…

This goes beyond trust, I think. The social structures of Internet communities are very different from those those in real life, and I'm highly disturbed when people try to transplant IRL social norms to the Internet thoughtlessly. This is where we get bone-headed ideas like the real-names policy for "the Internet". Now, I am not discounting that there is actually toxic, horrific harassment that goes on the Internet.…

A serious problem with the "let the people live in their own worlds" attitude is that many communities do not stay in their realms. You allude to this a little but, in my opinion, it's not a minor problem to be glossed over, it's the core of the trust issue: any online community that doesn't keep itself small and insular (and enforce this with sufficient opsec) is at risk of being invaded and exploited (for lulz, for cash, or for political manipulation).

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#110

Post by orpep90nxkfo »

m463 wrote: post #96
abathur wrote: post #55

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 w…

> Any exchange of value based on trust is exploitable I was thinking "money screws things up" and its corollary "free screws things up", then read your comment. It gets to the root of things. With trust, trade is unlimited, so I wonder how to architect things to stand up to the problems we have.

The obvious is a robust welfare state. I mean it seems pretty clear to now that inequality goes up, social stability decreases, major overhaul, a generation of babysitting it... like just stop pandering to the meme we can’t afford universal healthcare and college education. Cause we also cannot afford leashing the next generation to soon to dead men’s gambling debts.

But that effectively ends the point in aristocracy, the meme that we must cater to all these rugged individuals living off grandpas old money. So that’ll never fly.

Violent revolt it is! Front row to the apocalypse! /s

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