The high price of mistrust • Hacker News Board

Re: The high price of mistrust

#21

Post by AnHonestComment » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 4:24 PM UTC

gumby wrote: post #14

i_am_proteus wrote: post #3

I appreciate the author's framing of "transaction costs." These costs are often hidden. It seems that as systems scale (in size) they tend to become inherently lower-trust. Consider a physician who makes house calls (not uncommon as recently as a few generations ago, and certainly not incompatible with modern medicine) and a large medical system such as Kaiser Permanente or NHS. The economic benefits of the larger-sc…

> It seems that as systems scale (in size) they tend to become inherently lower-trust. I think the commodity markets (grains, coal, oil, steel, etc) are a significant counterexample: they do use spot checks but by and large run pretty lean on mechanism and rely on trust. Another one is customs enforcement.

Isn’t broken trust due to low quality Chinese steel and Chinese counterfeits eroding the international order?

Those seem like a weird example to hold up as a success — that high trust spot checking system is failing in the face of trying to integrate with a low trust actor and is tearing down international trade with it.

Re: The high price of mistrust

#22

Post by elgfare » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 4:26 PM UTC

yrimaxi wrote: post #6

Cost to whom? Imagine all the lost revenue if people would have a rational basis to trust each other more. Less transactions due to more informal exchanges must mean lost revenue to someone.

I guess it means less work for lawyers. The sarcastic reply is that lawyers don't need more money. The more serious reply is that the work a lawyer does doesn't increase the "value output" (I don't know the formal term) the same way that an engineer or researcher or teacher does. A lawyer, like an economist, helps grease the transactions of a society, but if society is already greased, the lawyer could be doing something directly "useful".

Re: The high price of mistrust

#23

Post by aidenn0 » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 4:26 PM UTC

Ozzie_osman wrote: post #12

This applies to the workplace too, not just society at large. That's why if I'm ever at a company where I feel like I am mistrusted, or I mistrust the people I work with, I do what I can to leave. Not only is it an unpleasant environment to work in, but it feels predictive of failure.

Right, you can't directly measure productivity in many jobs, so proxies for productivity are used, and in low trust environments, those proxies are the sole source of truth, which makes gaming them more important than actually being productive.

Re: The high price of mistrust

#24

Post by cholmon » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 4:27 PM UTC

overton wrote: post #17

The framing of this piece itself is a symptom of the problem. Everything, including our social relationships apparently have to be "capital" that make us "productive." This amoral, economistic view of human life is what got us into this mess in the first place. Why would people trust each other in a system that essentially rewards sociopathy, avarice, greed, and deception? It's telling that they can't provide a bette…

> This amoral, economistic view of human life is what got us into this mess in the first place.

Which mess are you referring to?

Re: The high price of mistrust

#25

Post by tomjen3 » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 4:28 PM UTC

> Even if we’re not engaged with other people on a social or civic level, we still have to transact with them on an economic one. We still have to walk along the same streets, send our children to the same schools, and spend afternoons in the same parks.

No we don't. Kids are driven everywhere, meaning that there is a (locked) door between them and The Others, the richer the neighborhood the richer the schools and the less you have to put them together with poor kids.

With distance learning you don't even have to worry about the other kids in the class, or the commute.

Re: The high price of mistrust

#26

Post by leetcrew » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 4:29 PM UTC

umvi wrote: post #15

roywiggins wrote: post #8

Part of the problem is that in, say, 5 years, you won't know who you meet was a weirdo anti-masker who you don't trust not to endanger the people around them. Nowadays it's quite easy to avoid these people, but once the current crisis abates they will go back to being visually indistinguishable. (unrelated, but the cost of zero-trust can be measured quite directly by looking at the cost of making a Bitcoin transactio…

Did we read the same article? Just because someone doesn't agree with your view of the world doesn't automatically make them untrustworthy. From your perspective, maybe lives are more important than freedoms and you are willing to limit some freedoms temporarily or permanently if it means saving more lives. From someone else's perspective, maybe freedom is more important than lives, and they are willing to let some p…

shared values is an important part of trust though. suppose I'm an executive and I'm trying to hire a more diverse group of employees. one of my hiring managers says they're happy to apply whatever criteria I ask for, but they fundamentally don't believe diversity is important. I'm going to have a hard time trusting this person to do what I want.

Re: The high price of mistrust

#27

Post by irpapakons » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 4:30 PM UTC

Ozzie_osman wrote: post #12

This applies to the workplace too, not just society at large. That's why if I'm ever at a company where I feel like I am mistrusted, or I mistrust the people I work with, I do what I can to leave. Not only is it an unpleasant environment to work in, but it feels predictive of failure.

I'm reading this article while waiting for one of the two people with write access to run my db migration, as developers don't get write access to the database in this company. Is this common?

Re: The high price of mistrust

#28

Post by elgfare » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 4:30 PM UTC

This rings extremely true for me. I live in Norway, which in my experience is significantly more trusting than most other places, and it's wonderful. We do have other transaction costs though, like a fear of "bothering" each other. Different problem, similar effect.

Re: The high price of mistrust

#29

Post by minikites » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 4:31 PM UTC

I think one (of many) factors propelling this trend is income inequality. Imagine you're in the grocery store checkout line with luxury foods and how uncomfortable it might be to make conversation with the clerk who may be working three jobs and trying to parent two children.

So we invented apps. Now we don't have to look up to hail a cab, we can look down at our phone. We don't even THINK about riding the bus (https://usa.streetsblog.org/2017/12/14/surprise-elon-musk-is...). We don't have to go into the store, we can have an Instacart employee leave them at our house without a trace that someone existed at all. We're stratifying into the Eloi and the Morlocks, but separated by the glass screen of a phone instead of layers of earth.

Re: The high price of mistrust

#30

Post by aidenn0 » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 4:31 PM UTC

yrimaxi wrote: post #6

Cost to whom? Imagine all the lost revenue if people would have a rational basis to trust each other more. Less transactions due to more informal exchanges must mean lost revenue to someone.

Inefficiencies present a net cost to society. In low trust environments, you see more generalism (fewer people to trust) and more nepotism (there's a social cost to cheating family members, so family members can be more trusted).