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The high price of mistrust

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Re: The high price of mistrust

#41

Post by nitrogen »

leetcrew wrote: post #26
umvi wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did we read the same article? Just because someone doesn't agree with your view of the world doesn't automatically make them untrustworthy. From your perspective, maybe lives are more important than freedoms and you are willing to limit some freedoms temporarily or permanently if it means saving more lives. From someone else's perspective, maybe freedom is more important than lives, and they are willing to let some p…

shared values is an important part of trust though. suppose I'm an executive and I'm trying to hire a more diverse group of employees. one of my hiring managers says they're happy to apply whatever criteria I ask for, but they fundamentally don't believe diversity is important. I'm going to have a hard time trusting this person to do what I want.

shared values is an important part of trust though

That's actually a pretty big mistake society has made. You emphatically don't need to share values with someone to get along with them or work with them or trust them.

Focusing on values instead of goals and behaviors creates the environment of mistrust, because you don't know when someone is going to decide you don't share their values strongly enough and try to purge you. It also creates an environment where the people you want least are most willing to lie to fit in, and it gives them a weapon to use to push out anyone they don't like by amping up the values rhetoric.

If you want to build a club of terrified pretenders, filter by and focus on values. If you want to get something done and build an environment of trust, focus on shared goals, behaviors, and outcomes, and learn how to disagree and move on where consensus can't be reached.

Re: The high price of mistrust

#42

Post by roywiggins »

AZRS wrote: post #36
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…

In 5 years you might not be able to tell who supported totalitarian lockdowns, forcing healthy people to sacrifice their physical and mental health, their jobs, etc in order to keep the wealthy retired and the weak from having to experience hardship. You won't know who you can't trust to not be a fascist who would gladly see your life ruined for going outside alone, because it's "against the lockdown rules". That is,…

I'm talking about people choosing not to wear masks, that's all. Wearing a mask hurts nobody, and it probably helps your neighbors.

(incidentally, social cohesion is what makes draconian lockdowns less justifiable. If everyone chooses to social distance and wear a mask when asked to by competent public health bodies, you can go a long way toward getting a handle on this thing. It's only when social cohesion is at a low ebb that the political drive for enforcing it with police powers kicks in)

Re: The high price of mistrust

#43

Post by clairity »

kyrieeschaton wrote: post #11
pjc50 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Data collected by eminent political scientist suggests ethnic diversity, amongst other things, massively lowers social trust > "Wow just wow what a 'racist campaign for the return of segregation'" I wonder why it is so difficult to do or publish research in this area?

for one, editorializing by using an emotionally-charged term like "massively", which indicates bias, and incidentally lowers trust.

in any case, it's not ethnic diversity that impacts social trust but (sub-)cultural friction, which can happen between subsets ('tribes") of the same ethnicity (which is mostly a superfluous distinction anyway). tabs vs spaces, for instance.

we like to imagine mountains out of molehills and then point to our mounded constructions to prove how we're so irreconcileably different, but it's often a thin veil over an insecure assertion of authority and superiority.

Re: The high price of mistrust

#44

Post by AndrewBissell »

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 set up a vast domestic mass spying infrastructure and then hounded the people who leaked it into hiding or prison, and the media apparatus which has run cover for all these sorts of things, right?

To me it often looks like a lot of what is described as "attacking trust" is actually just pointing out that it's already been worn down to a nub. We wouldn't have to deal with the emperor being naked if those darn troublemakers would just stop pointing out he's not wearing any clothes.

Re: The high price of mistrust

#45

Post by jrexilius »

minikites wrote: post #29

I think one (of many) factors propelling this trend is income inequality. Imagine you're in the grocery store checkout line with luxury foods and how uncomfortable it might be to make conversation with the clerk who may be working three jobs and trying to parent two children. So we invented apps. Now we don't have to look up to hail a cab, we can look down at our phone. We don't even THINK about riding the bus ( http…

Income inequality isn't quite the spring-of-all-evils that it's being touted as. Although I think you are touching on some pressures and problems. Yes, it can be one of the factors in "othering" and can discourage commitment to a shared, common system, but I've been in lots of countries with low "inequality" that were far less trusting. True, it's apples/oranges comparison, but I'm not convinced that inequality is the source of our woes, but very likely amplifies it.

Re: The high price of mistrust

#46

Post by roywiggins »

umvi wrote: post #38
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…

> Other people not wearing a mask makes me less safe Yes, but that's been true for a long time, even before covid. I'm betting you didn't mistrust non-mask-wearers pre-covid even though I'm sure several millions have died in the US alone since early 1920s because people with the flu or other contagious diseases didn't wear a mask and went to work sick, etc. You just didn't notice because it happened at a rate that di…

> You start to mistrust all of the zealots forcing you destroy the economy^, handicap an entire generation of students, destroy the mental wellbeing of many millions, in order to extend the lives of the elderly and immunocompromised by a few years

Wearing a mask doesn't destroy the economy or hurt students. It's the cheapest possible intervention. If wearing a mask helps, it actually sucks the wind out of the sails of people who want draconian lockdowns. People with a libertarian bent should be even more pro-masks, since it's very nearly the only thing that everyone can do in their personal lives to try stave off massive government interventions.

If people can't mentally separate masks from the other interventions then that seems like a problem in itself.

Re: The high price of mistrust

#47

Post by gumby »

i_am_proteus wrote: post #32
gumby wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems that as systems scale (in size) they tend to become inherently lower-trust. I think the commodity markets (grains, coal, oil, steel, etc) are a significant counterexample: they do use spot checks but by and large run pretty lean on mechanism and rely on trust. Another one is customs enforcement.

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't be worth it.

Perhaps it's a good counterexample because of its size: everybody purchasing directly in the commodities market (i.e. people who take delivery) can afford to have one bad batch because their volume is so high. But still, that depends on some degree of gatekeeping on the input side.

Re: The high price of mistrust

#48

Post by umvi »

nitrogen wrote: post #41
leetcrew wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

shared values is an important part of trust though. suppose I'm an executive and I'm trying to hire a more diverse group of employees. one of my hiring managers says they're happy to apply whatever criteria I ask for, but they fundamentally don't believe diversity is important. I'm going to have a hard time trusting this person to do what I want.

shared values is an important part of trust though That's actually a pretty big mistake society has made. You emphatically don't need to share values with someone to get along with them or work with them or trust them. Focusing on values instead of goals and behaviors creates the environment of mistrust, because you don't know when someone is going to decide you don't share their values strongly enough and try to pur…

Very insightful comment, reminds me 1984's Two Minutes Hate[0] where Winston is pretending to go along with the wailing and gnashing of teeth in order to not be discovered that he has different values. Your comment should be a top-level comment in some form, IMO.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Minutes_Hate

Re: The high price of mistrust

#49

Post by opwieurposiu »

roywiggins wrote: post #18
umvi wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did we read the same article? Just because someone doesn't agree with your view of the world doesn't automatically make them untrustworthy. From your perspective, maybe lives are more important than freedoms and you are willing to limit some freedoms temporarily or permanently if it means saving more lives. From someone else's perspective, maybe freedom is more important than lives, and they are willing to let some p…

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 told her no mask is fine we can just do our playdate outside somewheres. I am a conservative atheist hunter and think it is good for my kids to be able to play with spiritual hippie vegan kids.

Anyway I guess my point is life is better if you judge people on their individual merits rather than group membership.

Re: The high price of mistrust

#50

Post by cbetti »

irpapakons wrote: post #27
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.

I'm reading this article while waiting for one of the two people with write access to run my db migration, as developers don't get write access to the database in this company. Is this common?

Many companies do not provide read access to application databases either, without explicit consent via well-defined process. There are many compliance-related reasons why this is implemented, one of which may be the protection of your customers' financial performance data.
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