The high price of mistrust • Hacker News Board

Re: The high price of mistrust

#181

Post by PaulDavisThe1st » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 7:13 PM UTC

jdbernard wrote: post #175

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

It's weird. You're right, but those are still seen as "meritocratic", and one could argue were meritocratic historically, at least in some degree, because in theory you get into the right school by scholastic merit, you get into the right industry by merit of your learned and demonstrated skillset and willingness to work in that industry, and you have money by merit of having created value from your hard work in indu…

When meritocracy was being pushed as a social goal in the 1960s, it related more to the question of who end up in positions of power, positions where they could make decisions that would affect society.

It was not necessarily about who was going to get rich. It was about no longer picking decision makers from the children of the existing decision makers.

It ran into two problems. The first was that we didn't really think through how we were going to establish merit in the first place. What's happened there is that we've adopted a bunch of stupid shorthand ("they graduated Harvard") that essentially is undifferentiated from what we were doing before we tried to build a meritocracy. We never found (maybe never tried to find) any way of establishing that a kid with a degree from a public university in Kansas was actually going to be better at national infrastructure planning than the one from Harvard (or not, for that matter).

The second problem is that the people who benefited from the meritocratic goal (I am one of them) have worked quite hard to pull up the ladders behind them (us). We've erected all sorts of barriers (but mostly cost) to ensure that only our descendants and direct beneficiaries get access to the social institutions that are now used to define "merit".

Re: The high price of mistrust

#182

Post by koonsolo » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 7:14 PM UTC

medium_burrito wrote: post #116

When the poors see their standard of living decline (exporting jobs, expensive real estate, shitty schools, ineffective government) all while the rich get richer, yeah, the basic social contract between the classes evaporates. You may trust your neighbor, but that has zero bearing on society at large. Society only works if the different classes trust each other not to screw each other out of existence. We're seeing t…

Do you have any evidence to back up your claims?

I don't believe we have more inequality now than 100 years ago, or anything before that.

Re: The high price of mistrust

#183

Post by LocalH » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 7:23 PM UTC

misterbwong wrote: post #117

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?

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,…

Whatever the answer, I'm convinced it will take nearly constant vigilance to prevent it from eventually being corrupted to serve the very evil it was meant to eradicate. This seems to be one of the few constants throughout human history.

Re: The high price of mistrust

#184

Post by bregma » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 7:24 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?

Less censorship in the media. All that stuff was there in the 1950s as much as it is now, but you didn't see it anywhere in the media because it was not allowed by fiat of central authorities (from the Hayes office to the boardrooms of various publisher and broadcast networks). Heroin was not introduced in the 21st century and needles are not new but there are far fewer cigarette butts everywhere today. Cities stank of stale cigarettes and urine and car exhaust and if you were anywhere near water, dead fish.

A few photos that do not show the winos or the dog crap on every sidewalk do not prove there wasn't any. It just proves the existence of a few photos. Nobody, for example, picked up someone else's poop off the streets and brought it home in a little bag like they do today, and there were just as many dog owners in Manhattan in the 1950s as there are now. The signs required you to 'curb your dog' which meant leave it in the gutter, but it usually ended up on the sidewalk with all the gum, spit, old newspapers, and pigeon droppings. People went to jail for being homosexual or using birth control. Credit cards and consumer loans were illegal in the US until the 1960s so everything was cash-only and muggings were a real and present threat. Racism was overt, explicit, widespread, and rampant.

I think what you see of the 1950s is selection bias. Times are good now. Better than the 1950s because we stopped hiding stuff and lying to ourselves and have tried to make things better instead.

Re: The high price of mistrust

#185

Post by yehaaa » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 7:27 PM UTC

yrimaxi wrote: post #129

medium_burrito wrote: post #116

When the poors see their standard of living decline (exporting jobs, expensive real estate, shitty schools, ineffective government) all while the rich get richer, yeah, the basic social contract between the classes evaporates. You may trust your neighbor, but that has zero bearing on society at large. Society only works if the different classes trust each other not to screw each other out of existence. We're seeing t…

> EDIT: I think the guy who started Huawei said something to the effect of when you are a millionaire, you only care about yourself, but when you are a billionaire, you are all the sudden responsible for a lot of people. I wish that attitude permeated our business schools and boardrooms. That’s what the poors need; noblesse oblige oligarchy.

So taxes basically. Or should this group be trusted to act out of the goodness of their hearts?

Re: The high price of mistrust

#186

Post by peterthehacker » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 7:37 PM UTC

Reading this article reminds me of an econ classes I took in college, developmental economics, where we studied what metrics are correlated with long-term economic growth. Of course we looked at things like education rates and technological advances, but surprisingly we looked at trust as well. Interestingly sociological measures of trust had a tighter correlation with long-term economic growth than anything else we looked at. If contracts are not trusted to be honored or enforced then business activity breaks down.

Re: The high price of mistrust

#187

Post by adolph » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 7:40 PM UTC

roywiggins wrote: post #96

adolph wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What are you and other people doing going to the laundromat, grocery and drink driving? That's nuts in the middle of a pandemic--how are those places even available for walk-in business? Since I don't commonly leave my house I had no idea people were out there "unavoidably" sharing physical space. No wonder the pandemic isn't contained, its full of people with unavoidabilities.

Re: The high price of mistrust

#188

Post by Nasrudith » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 7:52 PM UTC

sinoue wrote: post #94

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.

Mistrust is getting an undeserved bad rap. It is unpopular but it is an adaptation to widespread lack of trustworthiness. The lack of popularity has some motivated reasoning elements - it isn't reassuring to believe that mistrust is the right option, it isn't conceived of as "how it should be". It feels better to say "You should be able to trust the people around you." even if they really aren't. As an idea it is "uncuddley". Not all mistrust is correct nor rational of course.

Re: The high price of mistrust

#189

Post by Nasrudith » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 8:01 PM UTC

inglor_cz wrote: post #39

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…

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.

Devil's advocate - couldn't it have the opposite effect as well for cohesion? In absense of facts speculation can run rampant and the worst assumed. There is a difference between knowing someone is an asshole and thinking they might be a pedophile. Paranoia aside human heurestics can get it very wrong - the teens with the new dark music are evil criminals while the pastor is trustworthy except the teens are lawful and open minded towards things which don't harm others but have morbid tastes. Meanwhile the pastor is a serial sex offender.

Re: The high price of mistrust

#190

Post by Nasrudith » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 8:05 PM UTC

jnwatson wrote: post #164

wott wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

There is also the sick irony (no pun intended). The anti-vaxers are preventing a phase out of a vaccine by their actions. If measles got nationally eradicated or better yet internationally (a slow laborious process sadly) - it would mean fewer vaccines because it did its job perfectly.