The high price of mistrust • Hacker News Board

Re: The high price of mistrust

#81

Post by seneca » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 5:29 PM UTC

manux wrote: post #5

kyrieeschaton wrote: post #2

Unfortunately most research on social capital and mistrust has been desk-drawered or heavily self censored due to the political implications. https://www.chronicle.com/article/robert-putnam-and-the-ethi... https://www.city-journal.org/html/bowling-our-own-10265.html

Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. The first link seems to heavily imply so, but that's not obvious to me. > Academics aren’t supposed to withhold negative data until they can suggest antidotes to their findings. That seems incredibly naive. If an academic finds a way to create a potent poison, it would be unethical to disseminate that knowledge without an antidote. Why would this be different?

> If an academic finds a way to create a potent poison, it would be unethical to disseminate that knowledge without an antidote. Why would this be different?

Well, that metaphor doesn't apply here. The research shows that something we're already doing is potentially harmful. A more accurate metaphor would be discovering milk is actually poisonous as currently processed, and withholding the research for fear of disrupting the dairy industry (which the researcher happens to be a member of).

Your mistake is in presupposing the goodness of the thing the research is revealing to be potentially harmful. Hiding science that disagrees with your preconceived ideas is a dangerous path to take. You strengthen your position by whittling away the pieces that disagree with reality and updating your approach, not by denying reality and insisting you were right all along.

Re: The high price of mistrust

#82

Post by jancsika » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 5:30 PM UTC

jancsika wrote: post #75

umvi wrote: post #15

Earlier 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…

> From someone else's perspective, maybe freedom is more important than lives, and they are willing to let some people (including themselves) die in order to avoid temporary or permanent limits on existing freedoms. > (including themselves) Including others , which is against any serious code of ethics. > From your perspective, maybe lives are more important than freedoms and you are willing to limit some freedoms te…

Note-- in the time it took me to click reload in my browser, somebody had upvoted this post.

@dang-- what the hell? There's no way somebody read this whole comment in that amount of time.

Is it just a given that bots can freely upvote/downvote and attempt to screw with the flow of messages on here?

I honestly cannot understand how HN has convinced a coterie of tinkerers and reverse engineers not to discuss the system that sorts and rates their own expressions of ideas.

Re: The high price of mistrust

#83

Post by umvi » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 5:31 PM UTC

roywiggins wrote: post #69

umvi wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you'd rather believe Fox News than scientists who are telling you this is much worse than the flu... Scientists say it is much worse than the flu. For the vast majority who actually experience the disease, it is not much worse than the flu. Thus, people start to mistrust the science because there's a disparity between the statistics on paper and what people actually experience in reality. I think most people und…

I dunno. It's worse than flu for more than 1%, about 1% die from it. A much larger proportion need to be hospitalized than from flu in a normal flu season.

Yes, you are right, it would have to be higher than 1%, but I think it would still be a minority. I searched around a bit, but it was super hard to find hard numbers. The closest I found was this[0] which seems to suggest that hospitalization rate of covid positive whites (including asians) is around 1%, but closer to 3-4% for other groups like blacks and latinos. I could be reading the charts wrong though.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/covidvi...

Re: The high price of mistrust

#84

Post by klyrs » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 5:33 PM UTC

jrexilius wrote: post #51

AndrewBissell wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've been extremely concerned with the efforts of sub-groups in our societies attacking the foundations of trust. I assume you're referring to the neocons who lied us into the war in Iraq (and keep us there to this day), the Wall Street bankers & executives who created the 2008 financial crisis and the politicians who bailed them out at the people's expense, the military/intelligence and tech industry figures who s…

No, actually I'm referring to groups on the left _and_ right. While popularizing the attacking of shared society and our systems foundations did start with the counter-culture left in the 60s, it has certainly become a bipartisan effort in recent decades.

Not sure about your timeline; the 60s were predated by the McCarthy era.

Re: The high price of mistrust

#85

Post by AnthonyMouse » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 5:36 PM UTC

jrexilius wrote: post #51

AndrewBissell wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've been extremely concerned with the efforts of sub-groups in our societies attacking the foundations of trust. I assume you're referring to the neocons who lied us into the war in Iraq (and keep us there to this day), the Wall Street bankers & executives who created the 2008 financial crisis and the politicians who bailed them out at the people's expense, the military/intelligence and tech industry figures who s…

No, actually I'm referring to groups on the left _and_ right. While popularizing the attacking of shared society and our systems foundations did start with the counter-culture left in the 60s, it has certainly become a bipartisan effort in recent decades.

It would be a lot harder to attack them if they didn't provide such a basis for it.

There was a time when journalists at least attempted to be independent:

https://conversationswithslava.substack.com/p/coming-soon

Glenn Greenwald:

https://reason.com/2021/01/23/journalists-are-authoritarians...

> Did you vote for Donald Trump in the last election?

> I didn't vote. It's ironic: That's the one old journalism trope that I agree with, which is that if you vote, you psychologically become too connected to a politician. I prefer to just keep my distance.

They're a dying breed.

And it was never the case that journalists were 100% objective and unbiased. That's impossible. But there was a point in time when they at least made the attempt. Avoided the appearance of impropriety.

If you want people to trust you, try being trustworthy.

Re: The high price of mistrust

#86

Post by umvi » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 5:37 PM UTC

jancsika wrote: post #82

jancsika wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From someone else's perspective, maybe freedom is more important than lives, and they are willing to let some people (including themselves) die in order to avoid temporary or permanent limits on existing freedoms. > (including themselves) Including others , which is against any serious code of ethics. > From your perspective, maybe lives are more important than freedoms and you are willing to limit some freedoms te…

Note-- in the time it took me to click reload in my browser, somebody had upvoted this post. @dang-- what the hell? There's no way somebody read this whole comment in that amount of time. Is it just a given that bots can freely upvote/downvote and attempt to screw with the flow of messages on here? I honestly cannot understand how HN has convinced a coterie of tinkerers and reverse engineers not to discuss the system…

It could be that someone read just the first line of your comment, realized it jived with their view, and upvoted before continuing on and finishing reading the rest of your comment. If HN stores timestamps of upvotes in the backend we could confirm (i.e. upvoting within milliseconds of submission = bot)

Re: The high price of mistrust

#87

Post by PhilosAccnting » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 5:38 PM UTC

I'm sure most of you have observed this, but there's a game theory answer to the question of trust: https://ncase.me/trust/

In practice, distrusting is a matter of worrying about the minority. If you lock anything, you're worried about 1% or 0.1%, maybe less, who will legitimately do something bad. But, the consequences are so heavy that people apply that distrust to everyone.

Re: The high price of mistrust

#88

Post by yamrzou » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 5:38 PM UTC

The breakdown of trust in a society is a vicious cycle that seems hard to break.

When a mistrust dynamic sets in, how can it be reversed?

Re: The high price of mistrust

#89

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 5:41 PM UTC

I can't put the article better than it puts itself. I'd recommend everyone read it top to bottom. tl;dr If everyone's playing tug of war, everyone has to spend all this effort pulling just to stay where we are.

What I'll add is how this seems to show up in HN discussions. A frequent trope here is an article about someone or some company doing something that pisses people off, then the comments debating whether it's the incentive-maker's fault and it's not wrong for people to maximize according to the incentives provided. The whole thing is a microcosm of this lack of trust.

It's like the prisoner's dilemma. What's lost isn't the decision to trust, it's the whole framing. In a perfect trust society, taking the compete option in a prisoner's dilemma would be seen as immoral. In a zero trust society, the whole choice reduces to analyzing the payoff matrix. That's what's lost. It's the change from a framing around 'cooperation is the moral action' towards a framing around payoff matrices.

I'd argue that on HN, the general sentiment is on the payoff matrix end of the spectrum.

Re: The high price of mistrust

#90

Post by roywiggins » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 5:42 PM UTC

opwieurposiu wrote: post #49

roywiggins wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I finally met an anti-masker in person and it was not at all like I expected. I was at the playground and my kids started playing with this hippie mom's kids. We started talking about what a weird time it is to be a kid. We ended up making a playdate for the kids and she mentioned she does not wear masks because of some spiritual reasons. I was surprised because I thought that anti maskers were all right leaning. I t…

I'd worry that their kids wouldn't be up to date on their vaccines. You really don't want measles.

It's a low risk, obviously, especially if you are up to date. But as much as I like hippy vegans (not being sarcastic!) I would still worry they are walking around as potential measles incubators. If they have religious objections to wearing a piece of cloth over their face they probably aren't too excited about vaccines.

It's way down the list of things to worry about nowadays, obviously. But still.