The high price of mistrust • Hacker News Board

Re: The high price of mistrust

#91

Post by adolph » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 5:43 PM UTC

I offer this feedback with the utmost respect for Farnam Street and Shane Parrish:

1. Loss is mentioned a lot but not mentioned is linking the asymmetric movement of trust to the cognitive bias of loss aversion.

2. Aside from Putnam, another take worth mentioning is Steven M. R. Covey's The Speed of Trust which speaks to the link of trust to performance within organizations.

3. The interface, boundary or contract is a common method of encapsulating trust. For example, since ancient times people have used "silent trade" in which trade goods are placed in the open and left behind. This requires a significant but finite amount of trust, minimal amount of social cohesion and provides a great deal of communication.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion

2. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36076.The_Speed_of_Trust

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_trade

Re: The high price of mistrust

#92

Post by meheleventyone » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 5:44 PM UTC

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…

Large systems aren’t inherently low-trust though. For example dealing with the same point of contact. Like your local GP in the NHS. I definitely remember home visits from our GP as a kid. So within a generation. Or with our kids family nurse that did all the pre and post checkups for both children.

Re: The high price of mistrust

#93

Post by jrumbut » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 5:44 PM UTC

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…

This is why I've never much loved blockchain on a conceptual level.

Even if you can make existing transactions trustless, you need more and more new transactions to negotiate the boundary between the physical world and the data on the blockchain.

Re: The high price of mistrust

#94

Post by sinoue » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 5:45 PM UTC

The upside of mistrust is an increase in intelligence gathering and seeking. Evolution favors those that can figure out motivation. Gossip while hugely inefficient plays a huge part of everyday life and motivation.

Re: The high price of mistrust

#95

Post by umvi » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 5:46 PM UTC

aidenn0 wrote: post #23

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.

> those proxies are the sole source of truth, which makes gaming them more important than actually being productive.

Reminds me of a short story I read, which I can't find now. The gist of it was about this person reading a memo or something at work on their computer, and the person wasn't actually reading it, they were just scrolling down the page and occasionally scrolling back up to pretend to re-read paragraphs because they knew the monitoring software flags such behavior as a positive indicator that the reader has increased comprehension of the memo.

Re: The high price of mistrust

#96

Post by roywiggins » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 5:47 PM UTC

adolph wrote: post #79

roywiggins wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"wearing a mask during a deadly pandemic" is a really simple thing to do to demonstrate willingness to sign on to a social compact. Fortunately, almost everyone I see in my neighborhood does. I generally feel positively towards my actual neighbors. But based on conversations with friends elsewhere, this is not universally true. I don't know if I could ever move to an area that didn't have high mask compliance during…

The words could be changed from "sign on to a social compact" to "sign on to this particular social compact" to be more accurate because chances are good that folks who don't wear masks probably ascribe to any number of other social compacts. Living in a diverse, heterogenous society means living within a variety of social compacts formed from differing cultural perspectives and different individual risk evaluations.…

The problem is that we have to share the same air at the laundromat and the grocery.

I also wouldn't want to live somewhere with a high rate of drunk driving for similar reasons. Someone else's cultural comfort with getting behind the wheel while sloshed puts me at risk because we unavoidably share the same physical space.

Re: The high price of mistrust

#97

Post by elgfare » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 5:47 PM UTC

mlinhares wrote: post #35

elgfare wrote: post #28

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.

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…

I see what you mean, and when it comes to institutions and government, we are also very trusting.

Re: The high price of mistrust

#98

Post by vaduz » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 5:48 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.

Excluding sole traders and cooperatives (and sometimes even including those, as the easiest way to lose friends is said to be to go into business together), it is entirely natural for the company and coworkers not to trust each other, not fully, as the goals and incentives of the company are not the same as goals and incentives of the employees. Your goal isn't likely to be to subordinate your life entirely to what the company wants, in a cult-like manner, with no regard for any other priorities like family, friends or personal growth - thus at the very least the kernel of mistrust always remains.

Some companies just manage to mask it better or tone it down to a level that if felt to be acceptable.

Re: The high price of mistrust

#99

Post by watt » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 5:48 PM UTC

ndiscussion wrote: post #70

Seeing 1950's America is heartbreaking for me. I grew up in the 90s, and I never saw a trusted society. https://www.radiogunk.com/forums/index.php?threads/1950s-ame... Where's the broken glass? The needles, the poop? The stumbling drunks harassing the young women? The masses of tents where children used to play? What the fuck has happened to us?

"In the six decades from 1950 to 2010, the U.S. population had increased from 157.8 million to 312.2 million"

And it was 132.1 million in 1940.

Re: The high price of mistrust

#100

Post by kyrieeschaton » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 5:48 PM UTC

throwaway2245 wrote: post #54

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

These links cover one person's research, the same person as the parent article, via press releases seeking controversy and attention for his commercial work. His work doesn't appear to have been desk-drawered or self-censored.

He delayed publication for years (in the proverbial desk drawer) while he attempted to develop a positive and politically acceptable spin on the results (self censorship). He is also probably one of the top ten most prestiguous living social scientists. Consider the incentives of researchers with less accumulated social capital who are far easier to attack for their findings.