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The high price of mistrust

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Re: The high price of mistrust

#101

Post by rytill »

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…

That part at the end in parenthesis is just completely wrong. The cost of a simple trustless transaction can be much lower. Bitcoin is extremely inefficient compared to the theoretical cost.

Re: The high price of mistrust

#103

Post by itsyaboi »

pbronez wrote: post #78
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?

yeah... the 50s only look good if you ignore the massive racial, gender and environmental problems. US economy was great with the post-war boom, but there's a reason why there are so many TV shows about the rotten foundations of 50s glam.

As opposed to the massive racial, gender and environmental problems we are currently facing, with a additional pyramidion of used needles and feces?

Re: The high price of mistrust

#104

Post by lainga »

yamrzou wrote: post #88

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?

IMO trust is associated with a certain social interaction. Once it's broken, one common way (the most? not sure) of re-establishing trust is to establish new social interactions, probably more personal and less complex. The example I'm thinking of is the emergence of organised crime in Sicily out of informal relationships between citizens who can't count on the state for protection or justice. Or the emergence of feudal contracts between a leader and his subordinates, where the old Roman system of tax collection and provincial administration had broken down (in some cases long after Rome had left the area - polities like Soissons ran the Roman administrative model into the ground until the high-personal-trust structure of early feudalism came along and overtook them).

Re: The high price of mistrust

#105

Post by Proziam »

roywiggins wrote: post #57
slibhb wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 non…

I'm not wearing a mask when I am not within breath distance of anyone either. That's not what I'm talking about. Sometimes I am as charitable as you toward people who make dumb choices. Sometimes I am much less so, because those choices are helping fuck this all up for the rest of us. People having terrible judgement is, unfortunately, a good reason not to trust them as much as you otherwise would.

I understand your point of view and I see similar sentiments everywhere. Let me just deposit one thought:

Basically all people hate being lied to, or to feel manipulated or controlled.

A lot of people on the anti-mask train were totally on board for the '2 week lockdown' to flatten the curve. Those same people then saw their government officials repeatedly lie to them ("masks don't work!" ~ "Herd Immunity @ X%", etc), the media painted the picture of airborne ebola, and then those same politicians went out and violated their own lockdown orders.

Meanwhile, their local economy is destroyed and they or people they care about are suffering/struggling. And for those that take a more global view of things, there is some [0,1]evidence that supply chain disruption is killing more people than Covid itself.

It's easy to feel like those people are complete idiots and ruining it for everyone else. It's much harder, but much more valuable, to focus on solutions to the underlying problem. Ultimately, we need to restore trust in our institutions before we can begin to repair the divide.

[0]https://time.com/5864803/oxfam-hunger-covid-19/ [1]https://www.un.org/press/en/2020/ga12294.doc.htm

Re: The high price of mistrust

#106

Post by i_am_proteus »

gumby wrote: post #47
i_am_proteus wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll agree, but also note that commodities are fungible.

Sorry, that was precisely my point. Commodities depend on their fungibility: that wheat is all durum and has an impurity level below X; the sulphur level of that crude oil is between Y and Z, and so on. Plus that the seller will deliver per the contract There's a game theory argument that the system is somewhat self-managing; though you could defect in any single transaction your reputation would suffer and it wouldn…

Indeed, and good food for thought. The fungibility is a feature both of these products being commodities in general, and of their quality being measurable. When measuring quality is cheap and easy, the risks for a defector are high.

When measuring quality is expensive and/or difficult, the risks for a defector are lower, and the defector's incentives may therefore be comparably greater.

Re: The high price of mistrust

#107

Post by DFHippie »

AndrewBissell wrote: post #44
jrexilius wrote: post #31

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 f…

> 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…

> 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...

Really? Why reach back, in the case of neocons, to the early aughts? We need somebody that many people trusted who abused that trust, or someone attacking the trustworthiness of trustworthy people. I'm pretty sure you can find examples just in the last year. These are probably the ones the OP had in mind.

Re: The high price of mistrust

#108

Post by wott »

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 was surprised because I thought that anti maskers were all right leaning.

It depends on places. In the area I live, it is also the neo-hippie/neo-rural/green/alternative-left who are anti-mask. But that's very localised, we happen to have a huge proportion of those various tendencies, that other people roughly group together and call with the word for 'hairy' in the local dialect :-), and less right and far-right people than elsewhere.

Re: The high price of mistrust

#109

Post by hezag »

> A society characterized by generalized reciprocity is more efficient than a distrustful society, for the same reason that money is more efficient than barter. If we don’t have to balance every exchange instantly, we can get a lot more accomplished. Trustworthiness lubricates social life.

I see bureaucracy as a technology we use to replace trust, but most times it just results in an unnecessary waste of resources.

Re: The high price of mistrust

#110

Post by logreybaby »

umvi wrote: post #95
aidenn0 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

1984?
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