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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

#131

Post by philwelch »

ikeyany wrote: post #65
jjoonathan wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, I am arguing that. There is no way the US is the world power it was through the late 1800s and beyond, without centuries of coercion [0]. [0] https://www.history.com/news/slavery-profitable-southern-eco...

One of the key arguments against slavery was that it help the South back from being able to have a modern, industrial economy. If slavery was the key ingredient to being a world power, the slave states would not have had their asses thoroughly handed to them by the free states in the Civil War.

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#132

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#133

Post by quotemstr »

raxxorrax wrote: post #130
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…

I disagree profoundly with pretty much every claim made here. The analysis of the inception of liberal societies is very likely wrong.

A bare "wrong!" is a very weak reply that adds only noise to the discussion.

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#134

Post by buboard »

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…

Yeah , people forget that pre-facebook, posting your real name or address online was a real taboo.

And honestly, it was better that way. The internet was built to be public space.

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#135

Post by antepodius »

arugulum wrote: post #127
Nursie wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A good example of this is how a lot of people and media take 4chan posts at face value, without realizing that a lot of it is completely self-aware But a lot of it is not, and a fair number of people do become indoctrinated to alt-right ways of thinking through that sort of medium, some of them going as far as murder. I'm not saying "Ban this sick filth!" but I am increasingly of the opinion that such places should…

I agree that the issue is not quite as simple as "just let everyone do their own thing". I also don't know how I would ease my kids onto the Internet - I feel like it was a less dangerous place when I was growing up. My very subjective and still liable to change opinion is that it will come down to education, developing maturity Internet consumption over time, and the broad swathes of the Internet calling trash out w…

Well, the alt-right's a broad, unconcentrated counterculture. It's easy to see hypocrisy and dishonesty amongst the mainstream political culture, so there's an allure to aligning against it, secretly or not. I imagine if the mainstream political culture in e.g. america had been headed rightward for the last however long, we'd see a bigger alt-left... but who knows.

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#136

Post by dsfyu404ed »

yocheckit wrote: post #103
dsfyu404ed wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Certain English settlers were such hardliners and so terrible to everyone who didn't adhere perfectly to their doctrine that Rhode Island and parts of New Hampshire were settled be people expressly fleeing them. No, they didn't have the tribal politics but the hard-line religiousness and correspondingly harsh treatment of everyone else was the comparison I was going for any anyone who has studied the first hundred years of the Massachusetts Bay Colony knows that comparison is apt.

Nit picking over the particulars of how they ran their society does not make them any less a bunch of fundamentalist jerks.

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#137

Post by chongli »

didibus wrote: post #121
pixl97 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they actually purchased the product?

I don't think that's a great deterrent. Especially for a low cost item, I'm pretty sure it happens a lot that competitors would buy a few products of yours and then leave negative reviews as "Verified Purchase".

Amazon is not a neutral referee though. They have an incentive to block (both fraudulent and legitimate) one star reviews but keep (even fraudulent) five star reviews: better reviews lead to more sales.

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#138

Post by chongli »

buboard wrote: post #79

Can we trust the article that it is the internet that is becoming low trust, or is it reflecting society's trends? Trust has been fading in societies for decades [1] and apparently millenials are the most cynical [2] https://ourworldindata.org/exports/trust-attitudes-in-the-us... https://img.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/files/2014/... First, the internet has opened up, and its prominent platforms (which were…

Third, it's time platforms start paying specialists for crucial things like product reviews

Given that platforms earn a commission on every sale, why should they be trusted to procure specialists' reviews? Maybe they would prefer to hire professional charlatans to boost the reviews on everything, in order to drown out the legitimate opinions of aggrieved customers?

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