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The high price of mistrust

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Re: The high price of mistrust

#161

Post by dragonwriter »

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?

> Seeing 1950's America is heartbreaking for me.

> https://www.radiogunk.com/forums/index.php?threads/1950s-ame...

Except for the clothes (which aren't very different), that could be a picture of downtown Placerville today (well, not today because of the weather, but…) Or a million other places in today's USA.

> Where’s the broken glass? The needles, the poop?

The same place as the non-white people, who are disproportionately also the people cleaning up the places where the white people live without it.

> The stumbling drunks harassing the young women?

Most everywhere, including indoors. That was normal, accepted, unremarkable behavior.

Re: The high price of mistrust

#162

Post by yamrzou »

khawkins wrote: post #113

The gig economy exploits the efficiencies of a trusting society masterfully. It would have been unthinkable 20 years ago that we'd let total strangers drive us home from bars and use our houses like hotels. But it turns out that with only a little oversight, we can trust our fellow citizens just as well as an employee of a professional company. Systems of maintaining trust are very important, but having a trustworthy…

> It would have been unthinkable 20 years ago that we'd let total strangers drive us home from bars and use our houses like hotels.

Well, unfortunately it's still unthinkable in a lot of third-world countries nowadays, and it's precisely because of lack of trust.

Re: The high price of mistrust

#163

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #85
jrexilius wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Glenn Greenwald's personal issues with (1) what he considers the appropriate relationship between journalism and "objectivity" and (2) his ability to maintain that relationship if he votes are not my problem.

There are dozens/hundreds/thousands of journalists around the world who are perfectly capable of reporting in a way that is useful, insightful, factual, while still voting in elections. I don't want journalists that I read to avoid the appearance of impropriety, I want them to tell me about the world in ways that I can't find out for myself. And I want them to vote.

I'm actually generally disgusted by meeting journalists who claim to not have opinions about the things they report on. I would hope that their opinions would be complex, because when you know enough about most things in the world, you realize that most things are pretty complicated and there generally aren't simple answers. But this BS of "I just try to report on what I find out, I don't really have an opinion" is, for me, a shorthand for "I'm too afraid of drawing conclusions about anything, which means I can't help my readers to do that either".

Re: The high price of mistrust

#164

Post by jnwatson »

wott wrote: post #123
roywiggins wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 vaccine…

What's this obsession of anti-anti-vax with measles? When I was on my national Reddit sub, it would come up 40 times a year. When I was a kid, everyone was catching it. That was just one of those diseases you catch once and then you are done with it. It is so low-risk that doctors didn't even declare the cases as they were supposed to be. They just observed them in case it would turn bad. Watching well and treating t…

In the decade immediately before the measles vaccine was distributed in the US, an average of 495 deaths per year and 1000 people severly disabled (1). In modern per-capita US terms, that would be like 866 deaths (mostly children) and 1750 disabled. While that's not much compared to COVID, it is about 1/6 as many deaths as polio in its worst year in the US, and that was a widely feared virus.

The Measles vaccine is also a proxy for other behavior. Minimally, in the US, folks that aren't innoculated for measles probably aren't innoculated for mumps or rubella (as MMR is one vaccine), or other important vaccines altogether.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20161023051702/https://www.cdc.g...

Re: The high price of mistrust

#165

Post by pnutjam »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #85
jrexilius wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When things are going well, you can stand by and observe. We're in a death spiral and need as many hands on the tiller as possible.

Re: The high price of mistrust

#166

Post by misterbwong »

iso1631 wrote: post #133
misterbwong wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds overly-simplistic but the solution is to build trust again. Unfortunately, the incentives that rule our society are pushing us away from this. We need to align incentives properly if we're going to have any hope of building trust again. ex: 1. The internet, as a technology, is amazing but functions as a possible bullhorn for everyone, without filter. It does not reward the best possible or most positive idea,…

> Possibly unpopular view: Encouraging religious participation would go a long way to help. Whether you believe or do not, religion helps align society away from purely individualistic pursuits and more towards a "corporate good". How does that work out in 3rd world countries where there's high levels of religious membership and high levels of angry young men https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Importance_of_religion_by_co…

Just as capitalism is an amazing "technology" to maximize monetary value creation, organized religion is quite possibly the best technology ever created for achieving things like person-to-person engagement, building trusted communities, and creating a shared value systems. There are others (community groups, bowling leagues, etc) but none have been as durable and successful.

Like other technologies, it can be used for both good and evil and will be very effective doing so.

Just throwing this out there: I'm a believer in Christianity and love to connect w/ people about this kinda stuff. If anyone wants to talk more, email is in profile.

Re: The high price of mistrust

#167

Post by dragonwriter »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #156
spamizbad wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're being downvoted, but you hit the nail on the head. I feel like for people of my vintage (born in the early 80s) the whole war on terror was extremely caustic to my generational cohort. It was a weird environment where every trusted institution in society lined-up in support of both wars, and then actively worked to sideline any debate and discussion. The Dixie Chicks got infamously cancelled for saying somethi…

>there's basically "meritocratic" caste system in this country: if you go to the right school, get into the right industry, and make enough money you are [ ... ] This is a description of the absolute opposite of what "meritocratic" means.

> This is a description of the absolute opposite of what “meritocratic” means.

Well, its actually exactly what the use that brought “meritocracy” into the common lexicon was referring to, though that use was satirical.

Re: The high price of mistrust

#168

Post by [deleted] »

dragonwriter wrote: post #152
yrimaxi wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chomsky has explained that the counter-culture of the 60’s was viewed as the “crisis of democracy” by the Trilateral Commission. An excess of democracy: special interests like women, the elderly, environmentalists, ethnic minorities, and so on were trying to enter the public arena. In short: the general population. (What is a non-special interest? Business interests.) It is completely illogical to immediately conclud…

> What is a non-special interest? Business interests. Ironically, business interests are the original special interests that Adam Smith warned about: “The interest of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers. To wi…

[deleted]

Re: The high price of mistrust

#169

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

aww_dang wrote: post #112
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…

This is what I've found incredibly healthy and liberating about less developed countries. Nobody believes politicians or assumes that government has their best interests in mind. That level of trust appears as a toxic mythology from my perspective. Instead they look for their own solutions.

So your assessment of the benefits of several hundred years of continuous political culture, along with a semi-continuous chain of protest movements, in "developed" countries is ... "meh" ??

Cynicism at this level does nothing but ensure that your worst take on government is what we actually get.

Re: The high price of mistrust

#170

Post by mcguire »

pjc50 wrote: post #7
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

Thinly veiled campaigning for the return of segregation? Because nothing increases trust like "whites only" signs?

Any kind of diversity that is seen as novel reduces trust, among other social consequences. (I note that the US has just elected it's second Papist president in 240ish years.)

Those consequences can be reduced; the question is, can they be reduced faster than forcing a new generation grow up under the diversity?

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