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The high price of mistrust

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Re: The high price of mistrust

#211

Post by InitialLastName »

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.

I've seen an argument made that people fundamentally need to be able to trust that their government officials are honest (read: acting in good faith) and fundamentally competent. For a certain generation of people, Watergate eliminated any notion of the first, and the Iran-Contra affair blew away the second.

The real problem is that both of those needs are self-fulfilling: if people expect their politicians to be tacitly dishonest and incompetent, they're fine with electing openly dishonest and incompetent politicians because "at least they're open about it".

Re: The high price of mistrust

#212

Post by xyzzyz »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #200
xyzzyz wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Blatantly illegal business practices and general sociopathy of the former, Trust, morality and legality are not the same thing. Sure, Uber was operating illegally in many places, but millions of people used these illegal services and saw nothing wrong with it. They didn’t see using an unlicensed cab company as anything bad. Just because something is illegal doesn’t make it morally wrong, or socially destructive. Th…

> Trust, morality and legality are not the same thing. Sure, Uber was operating illegally in many places, but millions of people used these illegal services and saw nothing wrong with it. They didn’t see using an unlicensed cab company as anything bad. People baited into purchasing new cars and screwed over car insurance sure did. But more importantly, everyone saw that the legal system in cities around the world isn…

> But more importantly, everyone saw that the legal system in cities around the world isn't powerful enough to deal with direct offense. We saw you can build a multi-billion dollar megacorp not on just regulatory arbitrage, but plainly illegal business - and nobody got hold accountable (except for an off driver caught without proper insurance). All of this fundamentally erodes the trust in the rule of law - the trust on which modern society stands.

It's not that it wasn't powerful enough. The governments could fight Uber just fine, and they in fact did in many places. What actually happened was instead the government in most places have figured that the customers liked the illegal service so much, that if they do fight it, they will actually reduce, instead of increasing their legitimacy. Imagine the government tomorrow decides to ban shaking hands. Would prosecuting the hand-shakers increase the trust in government and its legitimacy? No: people would rightly conclude that it's the government that's wrong, and it doesn't deserve trust or charity here. This is the case with many aspects of the regulatory state: its legitimacy depends on people being unaware of how crippling and authoritarian it is in many situations. Making stupid laws and keeping people unaware of their stupidity is no way to build trust.

> It doesn't, but it was illegal and greedy and exploitative, and dragged people into gig economy which arguably is itself morally questionable.

Taxis have always been "gig economy". Even before Uber, few taxi drivers were salaried employees. Most of them were independent operators, or working on commission.

> Taxi laws differ by the city. "Taxi mafia" was mostly a phenomenon of some places in the US; in many cities, taxis worked just well.

Which cities were these? In every city I am aware off, on both sides of the pond, traditional taxis have not been able to compete very well with Uber. Sure, in some places the taxis were less bad than in others, but almost everywhere they were overpriced and untrustworthy. Have you tried paying with card in a taxi in Poland before Uber came up? Somehow, despite MasterCard sticker on the window, the payment terminal always happened to be broken... Also, try taking a non-Uber cab from the airport in Warsaw or Krakow.

Re: The high price of mistrust

#213

Post by b0rsuk »

randompwd wrote: post #197
b0rsuk wrote: post #172

Generally the farther east you go in the countries of the former Soviet block, the less trust there is. Poland has low trust, but it's a lot lower in Russia and if you smile to strangers you may get sullen glances or insults. When I had a sprained ankle and was walking to the doctor with walking sticks, a car stopped by and I was asked if I want a ride. The question was in English. It's a moment like that when you re…

> One youtube talk I watched listed that as a sure sign democracy is under attack in a country. How does that have any legitimacy? There's no bar as to who can post on youtube.

I trust the investigative journalist Tomasz Piątek, educated at Milan University, with awards and boks more than a rando in a HN comment.

Re: The high price of mistrust

#214

Post by ndiscussion »

PhilosAccnting wrote: post #87

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 .

This is right, there's now a certain % of people that just can't be trusted in the US, it's easier to trust no one.

Re: The high price of mistrust

#215

Post by throwaway0a5e »

meheleventyone wrote: post #92
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.

AKA the "Algerian Resistance" model.

Everyone works with the same or slowly changing set of subordinates below them (patients in the case of an NHS physician) and same handler above them so despite the organization being big and faceless everyone has a long term high trust relationship with the people directly above and below them.

Re: The high price of mistrust

#216

Post by AnthonyMouse »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #205
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's helpful to distinguish between journalists and historians. Historians have the time and context to make judgments and draw conclusions. Journalists are reporting on things that happened today , and the deadline is in an hour. The story may still be happening by the time the piece is published. You don't have all the information, so any opinion will inherently be misinformed. Report the facts and leave the opinio…

There are many, many journalists who work on stories that do not have "hour from now" deadlines. People reporting on, for example: the move towards renewable energy supplies, the redistricting/closure of Chicago public schools over the last decade, gerrymandering processes in a half-dozen states ... in fact, I'd wager than the majority of things that journalists write about are not "hot news" at all. You cannot "repo…

> There are many, many journalists who work on stories that do not have "hour from now" deadlines.

But now it sounds like you're agreeing with me. So the ones who are reporting on stories that are still actively happening should hold off on the opinion, right?

> You cannot "report the facts and leave the opinion to someone else". Even the order in which you report facts is implicitly an opinion.

"100% is impossible so 90% is no different than 3%" is the perfect as the enemy of the good.

Re: The high price of mistrust

#217

Post by wahern »

yrimaxi wrote: post #141
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.

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…

> 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.

The problem is with the rhetoric. You don't need to daemonize the system to reform it. For example, AFAIU the Women's Suffrage movement didn't take that course. Nor did the early mid-century Civil Rights movement. Later in the century (e.g. with the Vietnam War protests) radical Leftist academic discourse went mainstream. Conservative academics and pundits started adopting similar rhetoric not long after (consider Reagan's anti-government slogan), which really went mainstream in the 1980s and, especially, the 1990s with Gingrich's Republican Revolution campaigning strategies.

The rhetoric has essentially become nihilistic. People like Chomsky are as much to blame as anyone else. But you don't become someone as famous as Chomsky without radical, absolutist rhetoric. In that sense academia in general is to blame. Though, there were other dynamics, e.g. opinion journalism, that brought the academic discourse into the popular discourse.

Re: The high price of mistrust

#218

Post by foolinaround »

Proziam wrote: post #105
roywiggins wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)…

and to add to this point, the folks advocating for usage of masks for all were not advocating to compensate the loss of income for the lockdowns.

this immediately created 2 classes -- folks who will get their salaries from their professions inspite of the lockdowns and those who won't and would be left to suffer

Re: The high price of mistrust

#219

Post by Proziam »

foolinaround wrote: post #218
Proziam wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)…

and to add to this point, the folks advocating for usage of masks for all were not advocating to compensate the loss of income for the lockdowns. this immediately created 2 classes -- folks who will get their salaries from their professions inspite of the lockdowns and those who won't and would be left to suffer

Related to this, one of my major concerns for 2021 and beyond is how much money we're [0]printing and the effect that will have on people's purchasing power. Couple that with the fact that a huge portion of small businesses in the US are [1]closed forever, many with severe financial repercussions for the owners (who are totally average people, not the upper class many think of when 'business owner' gets used as a term).

In short, I think we're going to be in for massive long-term unemployment (and underemployment) coupled with inflation beyond what anyone living today in the US has experienced. I'm not too confident about the state of this nation's finances

[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/16/yelp-data-shows-60percent-of...

Re: The high price of mistrust

#220

Post by etherio »

Although mistrust can sometimes be warranted, as a way to prevent others from poisoning your life, I agree that it's also something to be careful about.

This reminds me of a quote from EM Forster's novel Howard's End:

> “You remember ‘rent’? It was one of father’s words— Rent to the ideal, to his own faith in human nature. You remember how he would trust strangers, and if they fooled him he would say, ‘It’s better to befooled than to be suspicious’—that the confidence trick is the work of man, but the want-of-confidence trick is the work of the devil.”

This quote links back to this article and mentions the cost of closing yourself off and growing distrustful, which is really losing faith in human nature and kindness.

Interesting read!

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