I've spent a lot of years overseas, in third-world or developing countries, often torn by tribal or civil war, or other natural and man-made disasters. I have come to realize how foundational trust is in a functioning economy and self-governing society. We in G8 nations often don't see it, like fish not thinking about water. I've been extremely concerned with the efforts of sub-groups in our societies attacking the foundations of trust. It's like watching people, on a boat at sea, tear up the hull for firewood... The irony is that the basic nature of people (the world over) really hasn't changed: people are msotly good and want to live in a healthy community. But culture, context, and experience can overrule those tendencies.
The high price of mistrust
31–40 of 285 posts
Re: The high price of mistrust
#32I 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.
I'll agree, but also note that commodities are fungible.
Re: The high price of mistrust
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Other people not wearing a mask makes me less safe. I don't know why I would want to trust such people. If they can't even take a basic precaution during a deadly pandemic then their judgement seems dangerously impaired. I don't trust them because I don't think they're trustworthy. Even if masks didn't work, stubborn refusal to wear them is nearly as bad- people should wear the even if they are skeptical on the effec…
But where does it end? People not wearing gas masks makes you less safe. People leaving their homes at all makes you less safe. A certain amount of risk is necessary if you're going to get out of your bed in the morning.
What most people (including me) do is this: we follow the law (in almost all cases) and we use our own subjective judgements to determine how to act besides that. This gets tricky because even if none of us breaks the law, our subjective judgements often differ. Some examples:
1. The law where I live says I need to wear a mask inside public places/stores, which I do happily.
2. I wear a mask when I'm outside and there's lots of people around, because according to my subjective judgement, this makes sense (the law does not require this).
3. I don't wear a mask when I'm outside and there aren't a lot of people around.
4. I don't wear a mask when I'm running along a trail.
5. I don't eat-in at restaurants, even though the law allows maskless, indoor dining.
What I find wrong about your comment is that you seem to be holding people accountable for not sharing the same subjective judgements as you. If I see people dining, maskless, inside a restaurant, I think "well, I wouldn't do that, but other people disagree". I don't categorize them as untrustworthy, bad people.
Re: The high price of mistrust
#34My professor once talked about a Canadian small town he worked in for a while where people where people generally left their keys in the ignition when they went to the store.
I actually remember the weird feeling I got when I moved from my parents home (where we didn't lock our doors at night) to my first apartment (where I definitely did).
Re: The high price of mistrust
#35This 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.
At a much smaller scale, though. After living most of my life in Brazil, I still bristle at how stuff happens here in the US, with much less papertrail than I'm used to because people often trust the systems and people in place.
When I bought a home I just wired the down payment, didn't get anything other than the bank statement saying I had wired the money. In Brazil I'd get a paper proving they got it and stuff.
So while the fear of "bothering" is real, the fear of losing a considerable amount of money because the person on the other side is not trustworthy (and I'd say Brazilians in general assume no one is trustworthy) is worse in a much bigger scale. I'm not sure I'll ever be as carefree as americans but not having to care as much as I used to back in Brazil has been a huge boost for my mental health.
Re: The high price of mistrust
#36Part 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…
In 5 years you might not be able to tell who supported totalitarian lockdowns, forcing healthy people to sacrifice their physical and mental health, their jobs, etc in order to keep the wealthy retired and the weak from having to experience hardship.
You won't know who you can't trust to not be a fascist who would gladly see your life ruined for going outside alone, because it's "against the lockdown rules".
That is, you won't be able to tell who is someone like you.
Get it?
Your own words are taking what's left of trust, pissing all over it, covering it in petrol, and setting it on fire, then saying "shame that those other guys ruined everything".
Jesus wept.
Re: The high price of mistrust
#37This article made me think immediately about a lot of discussions regarding blockchain suitability for a given use case.
I realized solving for a « no trust » environment is extremely expensive (even purely computationally if you look at proof of work as a solution).
Most of the times, deciding to start putting a little trust in the design saves a lot of complexity...
Re: The high price of mistrust
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Other people not wearing a mask makes me less safe. I don't know why I would want to trust such people. If they can't even take a basic precaution during a deadly pandemic then their judgement seems dangerously impaired. I don't trust them because I don't think they're trustworthy. Even if masks didn't work, stubborn refusal to wear them is nearly as bad- people should wear the even if they are skeptical on the effec…
> Other people not wearing a mask makes me less safe
Yes, but that's been true for a long time, even before covid. I'm betting you didn't mistrust non-mask-wearers pre-covid even though I'm sure several millions have died in the US alone since early 1920s because people with the flu or other contagious diseases didn't wear a mask and went to work sick, etc. You just didn't notice because it happened at a rate that didn't overload hospitals.
> If they can't even take a basic precaution during a deadly pandemic then their judgement seems dangerously impaired.
Well imagine all of your news sources downplay covid and even when you get it yourself it's not as bad as the hysteria led you to believe - just some mild flulike symptoms and loss of smell and taste. You start to mistrust all of the zealots forcing you destroy the economy^, handicap an entire generation of students, destroy the mental wellbeing of many millions, in order to extend the lives of the elderly and immunocompromised by a few years. It's hard to put the blame 100% on the anti-masker. Plus, just because someone isn't wearing a mask doesn't automatically make them an anti-masker. I don't wear a mask when social distancing is possible, for example (like when going on runs).
^ Yes I know stock market is at all time high right now, but you can't just keep running an economy on printed money. If you aren't actually producing, soon all that paper you've printed will become a lot less valuable ("inflation") and the bubble will burst and you'll see what a real crisis looks like.
Re: The high price of mistrust
#39Part 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…
I think that having "searchable history" of every individual is precisely one of the negative contributions of social networks to social cohesion.
Everyone, or almost everyone, has some objectionable material or behavior in their past, and if you start judging people on the worst they ever did, you will come to distrust everyone.
Re: The high price of mistrust
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Ding Ding Ding.
You should win a prize for the only comment here to get it.
In the absence of both shared values and goals, trust is harmful.