[HN Gopher] The high price of mistrust
___________________________________________________________________
The high price of mistrust
Author : galfarragem
Score : 215 points
Date : 2021-01-25 14:39 UTC (8 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (fs.blog)
| luxuryballs wrote:
| Just like the election integrity debate that was almost entirely
| erased from social media, Romney said "an audit won't satisfy
| them, only telling them the truth will", which is terrifying
| because he doesn't know the truth either, because nobody looked.
|
| When it comes to a democracy we shouldn't be required to just
| trust the officials, we should be allowed to question them, but
| we shouldn't have to trust them. What I mean is the system needs
| to work in such a way that trust isn't required.
|
| They are still stonewalling the audits in places like Arizona,
| last I heard the Senate is recalling the election board for
| ignoring their orders to provide access for inspections.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| >nobody looked
|
| Numerous lawsuits were filed, all failed. Or are you suggesting
| the courts are corrupt as well?
| adolph wrote:
| I offer this feedback with the utmost respect for Farnam Street
| and Shane Parrish:
|
| 1. Loss is mentioned a lot but not mentioned is linking the
| asymmetric movement of trust to the cognitive bias of loss
| aversion.
|
| 2. Aside from Putnam, another take worth mentioning is Steven M.
| R. Covey's _The Speed of Trust_ which speaks to the link of trust
| to performance within organizations.
|
| 3. The interface, boundary or contract is a common method of
| encapsulating trust. For example, since ancient times people have
| used "silent trade" in which trade goods are placed in the open
| and left behind. This requires a significant but finite amount of
| trust, minimal amount of social cohesion and provides a great
| deal of communication.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion
|
| 2. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36076.The_Speed_of_Trust
|
| 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_trade
| mcguire wrote:
| Silent trade: " _Group A would leave trade goods in a prominent
| position and signal, by gong, fire, or drum for example, that
| they had left goods. Group B would then arrive at the spot,
| examine the goods and deposit their trade goods or money that
| they wanted to exchange and withdraw. Group A would then return
| and either accept the trade by taking the goods from Group B or
| withdraw again leaving Group B to add to or change out items to
| create an equal value. The trade ends when Group A accepts
| Group B 's offer and removes the offered goods leaving Group B
| to remove the original goods._"
| khawkins wrote:
| 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 culture and populace is just as important. In the
| words of William Easterly, these systems can either be virtuous
| cycles or vicious cycles. Either trust flourishes or mistrust
| flourishes and going from one to the other is challenging because
| of its game-theoretical properties.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| Contrary to what might be the common understanding in SV, we've
| actually had cabs before we had Uber. They also involved total
| strangers driving us home from bars. We've also had people rent
| their private homes as lodging: that's how I vacationed with my
| parents in Eastern Europe in early 1990s. Even today, if you go
| to any town on Baltic Sea, you'll find plenty of "Rooms" signs
| (in local language) on private homes; many of them have been up
| for decades.
|
| All of what Uber and Airbnb do, had most definitely existed
| before. What Uber and Airbnb brought was making it much more
| efficient, convenient and safe. Uber and Airbnb use some level
| of social trust, but they also _provide_ extra trust on their
| own, which comes from the rating function they provide. Before
| Uber and Airbnb, if you had bad experience in a cab or a rented
| lodging, there was little recourse, and the service provides
| had little incentive to behave well. Now, they can easily get
| kicked off the platform after too many complaints.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Uber and AirBnB actually burned extreme amounts of trust.
| Blatantly illegal business practices and general sociopathy
| of the former, facilitating destruction of local
| neighbourhoods in case of the latter - adding an app on top
| of existing practices doesn't pay back for what it cost to
| get there.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| > 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. There have been plenty of
| cases where it's the laws that are morally wrong and
| socially destructive. If you want to argue that Uber
| destroyed trust, you can't simply say it broke the law and
| call it a day, you need also to argue that the law they
| broke was good and desirable.
|
| So, what was the evil and socially destructive thing that
| Uber actually did?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _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'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.
|
| > _Just because something is illegal doesn't make it
| morally wrong_
|
| It doesn't, but it was illegal _and_ greedy _and_
| exploitative, and dragged people into gig economy which
| arguably is itself morally questionable.
|
| > _If you want to argue that Uber destroyed trust, you
| can't simply say it broke the law and call it a day, you
| need also to argue that the law they broke was good and
| desirable._
|
| 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. Uber violated law almost
| everywhere they got, without any care for whether the law
| was useful or justifiable. It wasn't some act of civil
| disobedience - they did it for pure profit, to undercut
| competition and dominate the local markets they entered.
|
| > _So, what was the evil and socially destructive thing
| that Uber actually did?_
|
| Now, that's actually a topic much bigger than what I
| outlined above. The mischief of Uber's sociopathic
| management has been well publicized and well documented
| over the past 5+ years. It was a recurring topic on HN
| for a long time, too. I suggest starting with these two
| links:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uber#Criticism
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uber#Controversies
|
| (Though they do seem to downplay the insurance issues and
| threats against journalists.)
| xyzzyz wrote:
| > 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.
| yamrzou wrote:
| > 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.
| foobiekr wrote:
| A lot of things were unthinkable 20Y ago that were perfectly
| normal for the century leading up to the mid-1960s.
|
| Pretty much everything you list was, at one time, somewhere
| between commonplace and not-infrequent. It was the
| commercialization that brought with it the divide.
| overton wrote:
| The framing of this piece itself is a symptom of the problem.
| Everything, including our social relationships apparently have to
| be "capital" that make us "productive." This amoral, economistic
| view of human life is what got us into this mess in the first
| place. Why would people trust each other in a system that
| essentially rewards sociopathy, avarice, greed, and deception?
| It's telling that they can't provide a better prescription than
| "we should just trust each other more."
| cholmon wrote:
| > This amoral, economistic view of human life is what got us
| into this mess in the first place.
|
| Which mess are you referring to?
| overton wrote:
| The lack of trust and community participation described in
| the article.
| sinoue wrote:
| 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.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| 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.
| alexis2b wrote:
| This article made me think immediately about a lot of discussions
| regarding blockchain suitability for a given use case.
|
| I realized solving for a << no trust >> environment is extremely
| expensive (even purely computationally if you look at proof of
| work as a solution).
|
| Most of the times, deciding to start putting a little trust in
| the design saves a lot of complexity...
| RhodoGSA wrote:
| Check out Polkadot! All the 'Powerhouse' Players came together
| to start a semi-trustless system of governance that's pretty
| interesting.
| brianvli wrote:
| Not sure if you've read up on recent developments in Ethereum,
| but in case you haven't, check out proof of stake [1].
| Basically, POS lets people put their money on the line for
| consensus rather than let people only participate in consensus
| by solving hard computation problems.
|
| [1] https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/staking/
| scythe wrote:
| The importance of social trust has had a major impact on my
| belief in the importance of government-guaranteed tax-funded
| universal healthcare. Before about 2015, I thought it was nice,
| but not a pressing crisis, but around then, I started to notice
| things like signs saying "why does my insulin cost more than
| methadone?" and "why is medical marijuana cheaper than my heart
| disease medication?". These situations might have simple economic
| explanations in terms of supply-side dynamics, but they are
| morally infuriating to the same chunk of the electorate who
| _self-identify as conservative capitalists_. Not long after,
| Martin Shkreli appeared.
|
| There seems to be a powerful, possibly instinctive, connection
| between A: being able to turn to someone for help when you're in
| need and B: considering that someone to be trustworthy. In 2020,
| we saw this writ large, when the United States became the global
| epicenter of conspiracy theories about SARS-CoV-2. The general
| population's trust in the medical system and the government is a
| huge unaccounted-for externality that can have serious effects on
| our economic and political stability.
|
| Furthermore, one of the most lamented, supposedly idiosyncratic,
| problems with the US medical system is the sheer amount of
| _paperwork_ required to do _almost anything_. It seems like an
| excellent example of this:
|
| >We need to trust the people around us in order to live happy,
| productive lives. If we don't trust them, we end up having to
| find costly ways to formalize our relationships.
|
| (Opponents of guaranteed universal healthcare in the United
| States will generally agree that we do not have a _" free"_
| market in healthcare, but it is usually harder to convince them
| it will _never_ be politically possible in light of the above.)
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Czech doctors tend to complain about tons of paperwork, too. We
| have a public healthcare system with almost universal coverage.
|
| There must be an element of "cover your ass" in there. Usually,
| excess of papers indicates someone's wariness of possible
| averse consequences down the line.
| offtop5 wrote:
| Meetup is a pretty good alternative to bowling now in days.
|
| That and alumni groups, back in 2019 this was a part of my
| strictly offline dating strategy. Worked ridiculously well, I
| never encountered even any rudeness from anyone and I had a few
| great partners. Aside from that I really do enjoy going to tech
| talks and stuff, talking about array functions and all that good
| stuff.
|
| What I have noticed, and I completely blame the social media age
| for this is how rare it is for spontaneous conversations to
| happen. I was elated when a young man saw me writing python on my
| computer and asked what I was working on, a few years back. And I
| gave him some career advice he was a recent graduate.
|
| A chance encounter like that can give him his first job. I hope
| when Corona ends we become disinterested in these supercomputers
| we carry around all day, and start living in the now.
|
| >Our connections to other people require and encourage us to
| behave in ways that maintain those connections.
|
| I think the sums up why the internet is so absurdly mean. if I go
| and say something horribly racist or misogynistic in the real
| world, I can expect consequences. I can expect no longer be
| welcomed in certain spaces, or get kicked out of my favorite bar
| or whatever. Online I can say whatever horrible things I can come
| up with, often just a mess of people and get a new username the
| next day.
| medium_burrito wrote:
| 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 this in all the rich countries now- a generation of
| youngsters are realizing that a middle class existence may not
| exist for them. Even in Europe, which is more egalitarian, things
| aren't looking as rosy as they used to be. And of course in
| poorer countries with high birth rates, we already see turmoil as
| young angry men realize they are destined for a life of poverty
| while their government enriches itself.
|
| 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. The amount of people from
| top business schools who parrot "Always do the right thing" and
| then proceed to sell their own grandmother down the street blows
| my mind.
| mcguire wrote:
| " _You may trust your neighbor, but that has zero bearing on
| society at large._ "
|
| On the contrary, if you don't trust your neighbor, you have no
| basis for trusting anyone. It's the foundation for any other
| trust relationships. As for the relationships between classes,
| that also relies on trust in things larger than classes: trust
| in the legal and social framework.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Measuring trust requires a threat model of sorts.
|
| I trust my neighbors not to steal my stuff. I don't trust
| them not to narc on me. If they do narc on my I trust the
| city to realize that's a dumb use of resources. But I don't
| trust the state to be so smart.
|
| How often have you heard something along the lines of "I'm
| not worried my kids will be kidnapped, I'm worried some jerk
| will call the cops if I let them walk to the park on their
| own"?
| [deleted]
| koonsolo wrote:
| 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.
| medium_burrito wrote:
| Look back 50 years, not 100 years. We're facing a situation
| where the standard of living is dropping for the young
| generation.
|
| - huge increase in labor supply: outsourcing, women entering
| workforce in large numbers
|
| - productivity wage-gap:
| http://www.oecd.org/economy/decoupling-of-wages-from-
| product...
|
| - savings gap between millenials and previous generations:
| https://www.businessinsider.com/millennials-saving-habits-
| le...
|
| - white american men's life expectancy dropping, for first
| time ever: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/life-expectancy-for-
| american-me...
|
| - cost of housing in major cities increasing dramatically
|
| - opioid epidemic
|
| - obesity epidemic
|
| - unemployment among the young in Europe is stubbornly high.
|
| Qualitatively, you can see nihilism on the rise among the
| young: https://jeromysonne.com/the-nihilism-of-r-
| wallstreetbets/
| yrimaxi wrote:
| > 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.
| medium_burrito wrote:
| We already have an oligarchy. They control the government,
| and can get laws passed the poors cannot.
|
| What purpose should they serve, ideally? - focus just on
| investment and profit - improve society ie noblesse oblige -
| compete for public honor, ie holding high office
|
| I'm not suggesting their is one answer, but given the rich
| hold such sway over government, I definitely don't think they
| can sit back and enjoy their high tariff burgundy while we
| have riots in the streets, first from the left and now the
| right.
| yrimaxi wrote:
| You went from Eugene Debbs to fairytale-spinning court
| jester in the span of four paragraphs. That's impressive.
| yehaaa wrote:
| So taxes basically. Or should this group be trusted to act
| out of the goodness of their hearts?
| mcguire wrote:
| " _One key lesson we can derive from Bowling Alone is that the
| less we trust each other--something which is both a cause and
| consequence of declining community engagement--the more it costs
| us. Mistrust is expensive._ "
| kyrieeschaton wrote:
| 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
| pjc50 wrote:
| Thinly veiled campaigning for the return of segregation?
| Because nothing increases trust like "whites only" signs?
| hinkley wrote:
| To be fair, the author of the findings was trying to avoid
| such things happening, which were obvious to him. From the
| first link, it appears those efforts did not pay off.
| mjburgess wrote:
| Where in any of that was "the return of segregation"?
|
| Research seems to show social cost to cultural diversity.
| Research not published for fear of appearing to oppose
| diversity.
|
| And you go ahead and do precisely what he was afraid of...
|
| Social research isn't published precisely for this reason...
| kyrieeschaton wrote:
| > 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?
| hinkley wrote:
| Well, I mean of course an Old Boy's Network has more trust.
|
| An echo chamber is trusting yourself and the other members
| - even when that trust is misplaced.
|
| [ETA: does someone think I'm implying that's a good thing?
| It's not. It's bad for everyone, even the perpetrators.]
| clairity wrote:
| 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.
| mcguire wrote:
| _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?
| throwaway2245 wrote:
| These links cover one person's research, the same person as the
| parent article, via press releases seeking controversy and
| attention for his commercial work.
|
| His work doesn't appear to have been desk-drawered or self-
| censored.
| kyrieeschaton wrote:
| He delayed publication for years (in the proverbial desk
| drawer) while he attempted to develop a positive and
| politically acceptable spin on the results (self censorship).
| He is also probably one of the top ten most prestiguous
| living social scientists. Consider the incentives of
| researchers with less accumulated social capital who are far
| easier to attack for their findings.
| dudeman13 wrote:
| Holding on to publishing the results because you don't like
| the political consequences sounds like self-censorship to me
| throwaway2245 wrote:
| It's "self-censorship" no more than I am self-censoring
| myself right now, in this comment.
|
| Reinvigorating your old work for publication, once you have
| a commercially viable avenue to promote it, is pretty
| average capitalism.
|
| Plenty of work that is politically awkward is published
| under a strict pseudonym. This wasn't - and the author's
| position is that it was their choice not to publish.
| manux wrote:
| Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. The first link seems to
| heavily imply so, but that's not obvious to me.
|
| > Academics aren't supposed to withhold negative data until
| they can suggest antidotes to their findings.
|
| That seems incredibly naive. If an academic finds a way to
| create a potent poison, it would be unethical to disseminate
| that knowledge without an antidote. Why would this be
| different?
| seneca wrote:
| > If an academic finds a way to create a potent poison, it
| would be unethical to disseminate that knowledge without an
| antidote. Why would this be different?
|
| Well, that metaphor doesn't apply here. The research shows
| that something we're already doing is potentially harmful. A
| more accurate metaphor would be discovering milk is actually
| poisonous as currently processed, and withholding the
| research for fear of disrupting the dairy industry (which the
| researcher happens to be a member of).
|
| Your mistake is in presupposing the goodness of the thing the
| research is revealing to be potentially harmful. Hiding
| science that disagrees with your preconceived ideas is a
| dangerous path to take. You strengthen your position by
| whittling away the pieces that disagree with reality and
| updating your approach, not by denying reality and insisting
| you were right all along.
| mjburgess wrote:
| Well, academics routinely do disseminate such knowledge. Not
| least, to appeal to the community to find such a solution.
|
| It is highly unlikely a researcher in "finding X" is an
| expert in "solving X" or otherwise has the capacity to do so.
|
| The "head in the sand" approach here doesn't "ease community
| tensions" it does precisely the opposite: prolong them for
| fear open investigation "goes against the consensus".
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Self-censorship is not a bad response, given that the immediate
| and obvious problem is that conservatives will latch onto this
| and see "See? That's why we need to close the borders and
| deport all brown people!" That's a preposterous conclusion not
| supported by the actual evidence, but you'll wind up giving
| people like them ammunition. Remember: they won't listen to you
| a week later when you publish follow-up studies, or suggest
| possible remedies for the problem. Because they're not
| interested in the actual scientific truth, they just want to
| have an excuse to engage in the exact kinds of social distrust
| the study is trying to measure.
| yrimaxi wrote:
| Cost to whom? Imagine all the lost revenue if people would have a
| rational basis to trust each other more. Less transactions due to
| more informal exchanges must mean lost revenue to someone.
| elgfare wrote:
| I guess it means less work for lawyers. The sarcastic reply is
| that lawyers don't need more money. The more serious reply is
| that the work a lawyer does doesn't increase the "value output"
| (I don't know the formal term) the same way that an engineer or
| researcher or teacher does. A lawyer, like an economist, helps
| grease the transactions of a society, but if society is already
| greased, the lawyer could be doing something directly "useful".
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Inefficiencies present a net cost to society. In low trust
| environments, you see more generalism (fewer people to trust)
| and more nepotism (there's a social cost to cheating family
| members, so family members can be more trusted).
| Majestic121 wrote:
| That's an interesting question, which is similar to the broken
| window fallacy :
| https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/08/broken-window-fa...
|
| To make it short : Money and time lost due this lack of trust
| could be allocated to more valuable endeavor, such as pretty
| much anything.
|
| Therefore it is better for society to solve this issue, even if
| it means some specific people that were making money out of it
| beforehand will not be able to anymore.
| roywiggins wrote:
| 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 transaction
| vs almost any other kind)
| ameminator wrote:
| I have been wrong about other issues in the past and it's with
| this frame of mind that think of these people. While I
| vehemently disagree with these anti-maskers, I also don't want
| to label them as "unter-menschen" forever. Maybe it's a good
| thing that living with people you disagree with, is a part of
| the social contract.
| roywiggins wrote:
| "wearing a mask during a deadly pandemic" is a really simple
| thing to do to demonstrate willingness to sign on to a social
| compact. Fortunately, almost everyone I see in my
| neighborhood does. I generally feel positively towards my
| actual neighbors. But based on conversations with friends
| elsewhere, this is not universally true.
|
| I don't know if I could ever move to an area that didn't have
| high mask compliance during all this.
|
| It's like living with someone who doesn't think playing with
| matches is a stupid risk to take. One day the house might
| burn down. It would be safer to live alone, or with people
| with similar attitudes to not playing with fire.
| adolph wrote:
| 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.
|
| If one would not live in a place without high mask
| compliance, why would one live in a place without 100% mask
| compliance? If not 100%, what is the number? Why stop at
| mask compliance?
| roywiggins wrote:
| 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.
| adolph wrote:
| 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.
| 1996 wrote:
| > "wearing a mask during a deadly pandemic" is a really
| simple thing to do to demonstrate willingness to sign on to
| a social compact.
|
| Interestingly, I wear none, and use that for signaling: I
| find that I associate more easily with people who also
| refuse the masquerade!
|
| So you may have a point: mask offer the possibility to
| signal, which we can both use to refuse to associate given
| our difference in values.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| 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.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| 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.
| rytill wrote:
| 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.
| umvi wrote:
| 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 people (including themselves) die
| in order to avoid temporary or permanent limits on existing
| freedoms.
|
| I think the point of the article is that if you suppress your
| instinct to mistrust people who think differently than you,
| your community will avoid incurring the social and economic
| costs that would otherwise accumulate.
| jancsika wrote:
| > From someone else's perspective, maybe freedom is more
| important than lives, and they are willing to let some people
| (including themselves) die in order to avoid temporary or
| permanent limits on existing freedoms.
|
| > (including themselves)
|
| Including _others_ , which is against any serious code of
| ethics.
|
| > 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.
|
| It's extremely difficult for me to imagine a more fallacious
| argument than this.
|
| The closest I can come is imagining a mass movement against
| DUI checkpoints by people who refuse to show their license,
| _but who purposely get drunk before speeding through the
| checkpoint_.
|
| It is not only philosophically consistent to protest mask
| laws while at the same time wearing a mask during this
| pandemic-- it's ethically required. The fact that you don't
| seem to realize you've hard-coupled a defense of freedom with
| wanton irresponsibility is legitimately worrisome. It reeks
| of the success of online filter bubbles dividing consumers
| into the most destructive two poles of potential
| behavior/opinion.
|
| Luckily, in my own community, talking _in person_ to other
| humans, I don 't witness anything like these two poles.
| Rather, I see a lot of pandemic fatigue, results of shit
| messaging from the government, some disinformation, and the
| occasional asshole who must be addicted to a political feed
| like a degenerate gambler in Vegas.
|
| Honestly, for most people it's not going to matter what side
| of the political spectrum they were on. Nearly everyone has
| made at least one critical safety mistake, failing to protect
| themselves or their loved ones. At least in the U.S., noses
| peeking out from masks is a bi-partisan issue. High ground is
| a luxury of social media self-delusion.
| jancsika wrote:
| Note-- in the time it took me to click reload in my
| browser, somebody had upvoted this post.
|
| @dang-- what the hell? There's no way somebody read this
| whole comment in that amount of time.
|
| Is it just a given that bots can freely upvote/downvote and
| attempt to screw with the flow of messages on here?
|
| I honestly cannot understand how HN has convinced a coterie
| of tinkerers and reverse engineers _not_ to discuss the
| system that sorts and rates their own expressions of ideas.
| umvi wrote:
| It could be that someone read just the first line of your
| comment, realized it jived with their view, and upvoted
| before continuing on and finishing reading the rest of
| your comment. If HN stores timestamps of upvotes in the
| backend we could confirm (i.e. upvoting within
| milliseconds of submission = bot)
| roywiggins wrote:
| 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 effectiveness _just in case they do work_ ,
| because doing small things to possibly help your neighbors is
| part of the social contract.
|
| I'm not talking about forcing people to wear masks, I'm
| talking about not trusting the people who don't voluntarily
| wear masks.
| [deleted]
| umvi wrote:
| > 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 didn't overload hospitals.
|
| > If they can't even take a basic precaution during a
| deadly pandemic then their judgement seems dangerously
| impaired.
|
| Well imagine all of your news sources downplay covid and
| even when you get it yourself it's not as bad as the
| hysteria led you to believe - just some mild flulike
| symptoms and loss of smell and taste. 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.
| It's hard to put the blame 100% on the anti-masker. Plus,
| just because someone isn't wearing a mask doesn't
| automatically make them an anti-masker. I don't wear a mask
| when social distancing is possible, for example (like when
| going on runs).
|
| ^ Yes I know stock market is at all time high right now,
| but you can't just keep running an economy on printed
| money. If you aren't actually producing, soon all that
| paper you've printed will become a lot less valuable
| ("inflation") and the bubble will burst and you'll see what
| a _real_ crisis looks like.
| ripe wrote:
| > Well imagine all of your news sources downplay covid
| and even when you get it yourself it's not as bad as the
| hysteria led you to believe - just some mild flulike
| symptoms and loss of smell and taste. You start to
| mistrust all of the zealots...
|
| If you'd rather believe Fox News than scientists who are
| telling you this is much worse than the flu, then while
| you might not be a bad person, you've earned my mistrust.
|
| You can drop your mask if you want, but you can't really
| blame the OP for not trusting you.
| umvi wrote:
| > If you'd rather believe Fox News than scientists who
| are telling you this is much worse than the flu...
|
| Scientists say it is much worse than the flu. For the
| vast majority who actually _experience_ the disease, it
| is not much worse than the flu. Thus, people start to
| mistrust the science because there 's a disparity between
| the statistics on paper and what people actually
| experience in reality. I think most people understand now
| that covid is basically like the flu 99% of the time, and
| much worse than the flu for a tiny subset (and for the
| most part, the tiny subset can self-identify).
| ripe wrote:
| > Scientists say it is much worse than the flu. For the
| vast majority who actually experience the disease, it is
| not much worse than the flu. Thus, people start to
| mistrust the science ...
|
| You're probably right: it's hard to understand the
| difference between statistical evidence and anecdotes. On
| the other hand, a lot of other people who don't
| experience COVID still seem to be able to separate their
| own lack of statistical knowledge from the ability to
| trust scientists. I think these mask deniers are
| mistrusting scientists for some other reason.
| roywiggins wrote:
| I dunno. It's worse than flu for more than 1%, about 1%
| die from it. A much larger proportion need to be
| hospitalized than from flu in a normal flu season.
| umvi wrote:
| Yes, you are right, it would have to be higher than 1%,
| but I think it would still be a minority. I searched
| around a bit, but it was super hard to find hard numbers.
| The closest I found was this[0] which seems to suggest
| that hospitalization rate of covid positive whites
| (including asians) is around 1%, but closer to 3-4% for
| other groups like blacks and latinos. I could be reading
| the charts wrong though.
|
| [0] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-
| data/covidvi...
| roywiggins wrote:
| > 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.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| I feel like I am taking crazy pills whenever people bring
| up the economy with COVID responses. The virus doesn't
| and cannot care about the economy or holidays, or any
| other irrelvancy brought up for arguments. Not to mention
| the obvious - sick people and people trying to avoid
| being sick aren't good for the economy.
|
| It is just such blatant illogic you would expect from
| primary schoolers and not adults with college degrees and
| sought after positions to use. Like declaring "but there
| is a picnic scheduled today!" and proceeding to go and
| hold a picnic in the middle of a record breaking forest
| fire.
| umvi wrote:
| > The virus doesn't and cannot care about the economy or
| holidays, or any other irrelevancy brought up for
| arguments
|
| This is an overly simplistic view. The virus doesn't
| care, but policy makers _should_ care, because if you
| optimize too much for saving lives from the virus at the
| cost of everything else, you might find the cure is worse
| than the disease.
|
| Say you are a policymaker and a new disease emerges that
| will kill 1% of the population if left unchecked over
| time, mainly in the elderly. Also say that draconian
| control measures will cause suicide rate, unemployment,
| and mental health cases to go up 1% for every day they
| are in effect, mainly in young people.
|
| What's your policy? Are you going to do everything you
| can to save the elderly at the expense of the youth? Or
| are you going to make sure the youth are good at the
| expense of the elderly? Something else entirely? As far
| as I can tell in the US, we are optimizing for saving the
| elderly and throwing everyone else under the bus in
| pursuit of that goal. We can expect to see a very large
| increase in suicides, unemployment, and mental health
| issues above and beyond what we saw in 2020 (including
| substance abuse) in coming months if we stay the course.
| opwieurposiu wrote:
| 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.
| roywiggins wrote:
| 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 vaccines.
|
| It's way down the list of things to worry about nowadays,
| obviously. But still.
| wott wrote:
| 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 the few difficult case well made it so that
| there was just around 5 deaths a year, amongst cohorts of
| 800.000 who almost all caught it. At the scale of my
| department, that would be one letal case every 80
| years... Outdoor leisure kill more in half a week here,
| as it was noticeable after lockdown (as we were very
| lucky with Covid, there were more outdoor leisure related
| death in 4 days of reopening than Covid related death
| from 9 months of first wave. NB: it was unfortunately
| different with second wave)
| jnwatson wrote:
| 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://ww
| w.cdc.g...
| Nasrudith wrote:
| 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.
| wott wrote:
| > 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.
| sfink wrote:
| I suggest looking outside of your filter bubble.
|
| I agree with your conclusions on when one should wear a
| mask. I disagree with your conclusions about the
| intelligence, reasoning ability, or basic humanity of anti-
| maskers.
|
| If you're someone who is flooded with reports of scientists
| waffling, of problematic reasons why people want you to
| wear masks, of health officials adjusting the rules du jour
| independent of defensible rationalizations, of higher-ups
| enforcing rules that they do not themselves follow, etc.,
| and are NOT exposed to the (imho correct) arguments as to
| why mask-wearing is necessary and important... why _wouldn
| 't_ you conclude that it's a scam?
|
| None of the conclusions about mask wearing can be made with
| 100% certainty. There really _is_ a lot of bullshit going
| around on all sides. Even a fairly weak selection filter is
| enough to make _perfectly rational actors_ come to opposite
| conclusions.
|
| Our society is based on the implicit assumption that we all
| see more or less the same thing, so we can depend on
| (trust) that our sense of "normal" is shared, at least to
| some degree.
|
| That assumption no longer holds. (Or rather, it holds for
| far fewer topics than it used to.)
| slibhb wrote:
| 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 none of us breaks the law, our
| subjective judgements often differ. Some examples:
|
| 1. The law where I live says I need to wear a mask inside
| public places/stores, which I do happily.
|
| 2. I wear a mask when I'm outside and there's lots of
| people around, because according to my subjective
| judgement, this makes sense (the law does not require
| this).
|
| 3. I don't wear a mask when I'm outside and there aren't a
| lot of people around.
|
| 4. I don't wear a mask when I'm running along a trail.
|
| 5. I don't eat-in at restaurants, even though the law
| allows maskless, indoor dining.
|
| What I find wrong about your comment is that you seem to be
| holding people accountable for not sharing the same
| subjective judgements as you. If I see people dining,
| maskless, inside a restaurant, I think "well, I wouldn't do
| that, but other people disagree". I don't categorize them
| as untrustworthy, bad people.
| roywiggins wrote:
| 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.
| Proziam wrote:
| 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
| foolinaround wrote:
| 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
| Proziam wrote:
| 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...
| [deleted]
| Nasrudith wrote:
| What views are the real question. If they have by my
| standards horrible tastes certainly. If they deny that
| hugging you while they are on fire will burn you, that
| juggling loaded guns is dangerous, or view you as subhumans
| to be exploited not distrusting them is frankly dangerously
| stupid.
|
| Looking at costs alone without context is a bad idea here as
| it is for beancounters.
| leetcrew wrote:
| 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.
| AZRS wrote:
| Ding Ding Ding.
|
| You should win a prize for the only comment here to get it.
|
| In the absence of both shared values and goals, trust is
| harmful.
| nitrogen wrote:
| _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.
| umvi wrote:
| 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
| leetcrew wrote:
| > You emphatically don't need to share values with
| someone to get along with them or work with them or trust
| them.
|
| I guess it depends what "trust" means to you. to me it
| often means something like "I can expect this person to
| make the same (or similar) decision I would in situation
| X, therefore I do not need to watch them as closely".
| some values can be irrelevant in certain contexts. if I'm
| a communist and my coworker is an ancap, it probably
| doesn't affect our ability to work together on a software
| project. but if I'm very risk averse (in an engineering
| sense) and my coworker has a "move fast and break things"
| mindset, I am going to have to pay a lot more attention
| to their code reviews.
| nitrogen wrote:
| I think that's a fair point. In the case of a risk
| tolerance mismatch, you can work out shared criteria,
| scoped to the initial disagreement, for how to
| collaborate.
|
| I'd also suggest that one of the reasons we are
| encouraged to seek diversity is because we benefit from
| having people around us who _wouldn 't_ make the same
| decisions we would make in every situation.
|
| If I am reading between the lines correctly, it sounds
| like predictability is what you expect shared values to
| provide. I think a shared vision is more important than
| shared values in this case. You can still predict that
| with which you disagree, if you communicate mutual
| expectations for how to scope disagreement within
| collaboration.
| AZRS wrote:
| 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, you won't be able to tell who is someone like you.
|
| Get it?
|
| Your own words are taking what's left of trust, pissing all
| over it, covering it in petrol, and setting it on fire, then
| saying "shame that those other guys ruined everything".
|
| Jesus wept.
| roywiggins wrote:
| 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)
| punnerud wrote:
| I feel Clubhouse is the first app that is reversing this trend.
| Only talk and connecting strangers.
| fullshark wrote:
| It seems like every social media platform / message board had
| high levels of trust initially, when the user base was smallish
| and naive. Maybe it's because they all grew on the backs of
| teenagers/college kids who are more trusting, or it's just the
| early days of the platform are more exciting and that seems to
| naturally build trust among users.
| artur_makly wrote:
| this reminds me about a civic trust study that was done globally:
| https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6448/70
| i_am_proteus wrote:
| 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-scale system are obvious, and
| are directly measured, but the economic detriment due to
| increased transaction costs (derived from decreased trust) are
| neither obvious nor readily measurable.
|
| Upsides of systems at scale can still outweigh downsides, and
| often do, but I suspect many industrial systems have a maximum
| scale above which efficiency gains lose out to, in this author's
| framing, transaction costs.
|
| This abuts certain natural "borders" for system growth, such as
| national (or in the case of EU, common market) boundaries.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| 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.
| jrumbut wrote:
| This is why I've never much loved blockchain on a conceptual
| level.
|
| Even if you can make existing transactions trustless, you need
| more and more new transactions to negotiate the boundary
| between the physical world and the data on the blockchain.
| gumby wrote:
| > 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.
| AnHonestComment wrote:
| Isn't broken trust due to low quality Chinese steel and
| Chinese counterfeits eroding the international order?
|
| Those seem like a weird example to hold up as a success --
| that high trust spot checking system is failing in the face
| of trying to integrate with a low trust actor and is tearing
| down international trade with it.
| i_am_proteus wrote:
| I'll agree, but also note that commodities are fungible.
| gumby wrote:
| 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.
| i_am_proteus wrote:
| 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.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| > Even if we're not engaged with other people on a social or
| civic level, we still have to transact with them on an economic
| one. We still have to walk along the same streets, send our
| children to the same schools, and spend afternoons in the same
| parks.
|
| No we don't. Kids are driven everywhere, meaning that there is a
| (locked) door between them and The Others, the richer the
| neighborhood the richer the schools and the less you have to put
| them together with poor kids.
|
| With distance learning you don't even have to worry about the
| other kids in the class, or the commute.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| I say this is mostly the automobile and suburbanization catching
| up with with the US. You can physically disaggregate society and
| then not expect social disaggregation.
| elgfare wrote:
| This rings extremely true for me. I live in Norway, which in my
| experience is significantly more trusting than most other places,
| and it's wonderful. We do have other transaction costs though,
| like a fear of "bothering" each other. Different problem, similar
| effect.
| mlinhares wrote:
| At a much smaller scale, though. After living most of my life
| in Brazil, I still bristle at how stuff happens here in the US,
| with much less papertrail than I'm used to because people often
| trust the systems and people in place.
|
| When I bought a home I just wired the down payment, didn't get
| anything other than the bank statement saying I had wired the
| money. In Brazil I'd get a paper proving they got it and stuff.
|
| So while the fear of "bothering" is real, the fear of losing a
| considerable amount of money because the person on the other
| side is not trustworthy (and I'd say Brazilians in general
| assume no one is trustworthy) is worse in a much bigger scale.
| I'm not sure I'll ever be as carefree as americans but not
| having to care as much as I used to back in Brazil has been a
| huge boost for my mental health.
| harlanji wrote:
| I'm feeling it in the other direction. I've been lucky to
| live a relatively carefree and unproblematic life in the US
| middle-class, until the last few years where I've attracted a
| well funded legal team to stalk everything I do and find
| faults. Now, I think living in a low trust society sounds
| great because the Boomers and other optimists in my life are
| starting to leave me alone. They don't doubt my story, but
| it's also beyond what they can process as real--former
| inmates and first generation Latin and Afro folk who I work
| with can fully comprehend the situation of being terrorized
| by lawyers and their "investigators." Suddenly I am forced to
| be a low-trust person, and it's not natural or pleasant...
| I'm mostly Scandinavian by blood, with a little of everything
| mixed in.
| elgfare wrote:
| I see what you mean, and when it comes to institutions and
| government, we are also very trusting.
| ilaksh wrote:
| I really hope that people who appreciate this article will take a
| look at the work of Jonathan Haidt such as The Righteous Mind.
| minikites wrote:
| 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 (https://usa.streetsblog.org/2017/12/14/surprise-elon-
| musk-is...). We don't have to go into the store, we can have an
| Instacart employee leave them at our house without a trace that
| someone existed at all. We're stratifying into the Eloi and the
| Morlocks, but separated by the glass screen of a phone instead of
| layers of earth.
| jrexilius wrote:
| 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.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > True, it's apples/oranges comparison, but I'm not convinced
| that inequality is the source of our woes, but very likely
| amplifies it.
|
| It's not income inequality, it's opportunity inequality.
| Which manifests itself as income (/wealth) inequality, so
| that's the proxy most people use.
|
| Once you lose the feeling of others being in your tribe and
| that they might also be interested in looking out for you,
| it's very, very difficult to regain that. Even worse is once
| members of the tribe start assuming others are part of an
| enemy tribe.
| iguy wrote:
| There's also room for causality the other way, here. If feel
| you have a lot in common with your compatriots, and generally
| trust them, then you are (I claim) more likely to support
| paying taxes to support those who are having a rough time.
| High trust can lead to lower inequality.
|
| Conversely, if you already feel you have nothing in common
| with others, then why not vote (if you have everything) to
| give them nothing, or (if you have nothing) why not vote to
| seize their property and distribute it?
| rememberlenny wrote:
| Putnam also recently published "The Upswing: How America Came
| Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again" which takes
| the ideas of "Bowling Alone" and applies them to the Progress
| Studies related history/analysis.
| PhilosAccnting wrote:
| 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_.
| ndiscussion wrote:
| 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.
| ndiscussion wrote:
| 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?
| pbronez wrote:
| 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.
| Melchizedek wrote:
| No, there are TV shows about that because those who control
| the media want to make us think the 50's, which by all
| accounts were comparatively really good, _really_ weren 't
| good at all due to some hidden darkness below the surface.
| Because otherwise we might start to think double-plus bad
| thoughts about why so many things have turned to shit.
|
| And I mean good for all races - in terms of real-world
| material and communal circumstances - as opposed to abstract
| "rights" (other peoples obligations) that mostly benefit a
| small upper middle class.
| itsyaboi wrote:
| As opposed to the massive racial, gender and environmental
| problems we are currently facing, with a additional
| pyramidion of used needles and feces?
| finiteseries wrote:
| In 1954, the Arkansas National Guard occupied a high school
| in Little Rock to prevent black children from entering it.
|
| The President, and elements of the 101st Airborne Division
| had to be involved.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Bro, America was legally segregated then. Give me a break.
| mcguire wrote:
| Those massive problems are significantly less massive than
| they were then.
| bregma wrote:
| 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.
| watt wrote:
| "In the six decades from 1950 to 2010, the U.S. population had
| increased from 157.8 million to 312.2 million"
|
| And it was 132.1 million in 1940.
| ndiscussion wrote:
| Yeah, that was a hypothetical question, but thanks... there's
| no going back it seems :D
|
| I'm sure they still have this environment in some countries
| where no one wants to visit.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > 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.
| jrexilius wrote:
| 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 foundations of trust. It's
| like watching people, on a boat at sea, tear up the hull for
| firewood... The irony is that the basic nature of people (the
| world over) really hasn't changed: people are msotly good and
| want to live in a healthy community. But culture, context, and
| experience can overrule those tendencies.
| AndrewBissell wrote:
| > _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.
| aww_dang wrote:
| 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.
| DFHippie wrote:
| Yet they are still developing countries. Maybe being a low
| trust environment isn't actually working in their favor and
| having a government you can trust to solve problems is
| good. A corollary: maybe working to sow distrust in the
| government doesn't promote the general welfare.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| 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.
| lainga wrote:
| > I assume you're referring to the neocons who ...
|
| Could you expand upon why? You mentioned your own perceptions
| on "attacking trust", but I didn't find much of that (or any
| assignment of blame to anyone) expressed in the parent
| comment.
| AndrewBissell wrote:
| The parent mentions "the efforts of sub-groups in our
| societies attacking the foundations of trust" so it seems
| pretty clear to me there's an assignment of blame to
| _someone_ there. There 's a bit of sarcasm in my reply in
| that, usually, when I see people doing that in regards to
| this topic, they're _not_ referring to the sort ruinous,
| trust-eviscerating projects I cited, but rather to things
| like "misinformation" or "divisive rhetoric" which, when
| properly viewed in context, are more symptoms than causes.
| jrexilius wrote:
| 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.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| 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".
| yrimaxi wrote:
| 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 conclude that
| people who are complaining and pointing out that things are
| not right are necessarily _themselves_ the cause of all
| that strife. Maybe they were responding to antecedent
| causes?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > 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 widen the market may
| frequently be agreeable enough to the interest of the
| public; but to narrow the competition must always be
| against it, and can serve only to enable the dealers, by
| raising their profits above what they naturally would be,
| to levy, for their own benefit, an absurd tax upon the
| rest of their fellow-citizens. The proposal of any new
| law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order
| ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and
| ought never to be adopted till after having been long and
| carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous,
| but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an
| order of men whose interest is never exactly the same
| with that of the public, who have generally an interest
| to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who
| accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and
| oppressed it." ( _Wealth of Nations_ , Book I, Chapter 9)
| [deleted]
| wahern wrote:
| > 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.
| AndrewBissell wrote:
| All the things I mentioned were entirely bipartisan
| affairs. In fact, we just witnessed the president who
| initiated the Iraq War feted and lauded by the press for
| his appearance at the inauguration of a new president from
| the "opposing" party who enthusiastically endorsed that war
| as a Senator.
|
| The counterculture left is a very broad category, with some
| legitimate and organic elements mixed up with some very
| confused, self-indulgent, or aimlessly subversive ones. But
| it didn't fire the first shots in the attack on trust, not
| by a long shot.
| dgb23 wrote:
| Sustainable trust is earned, not blindly given.
|
| It is the responsibility of each participant to criticize
| the status quo and those who have taken up responsibility
| and power, or else they keep building on brittle,
| hierarchical foundations until everything crashes down.
|
| Yes, there are populists who spread political lies,
| insecure managers who default to micro-management,
| bureaucratic systems that slow everything down and
| disillusioned workers. Their common trait is mistrust: They
| often have been _hurt_ by those that they should be
| trusting, they are not being heard and sometimes they see
| through the bullshit. The _best_ case is that there is
| simply a lack of real communication, education and direct
| involvement, because that problem is solvable.
|
| It is very simple: for trust to grow and stabilize, both
| parties need to care and invest in each other. There is no
| shortcut, no trick and no amount of marketing, propaganda
| or talk will get either side out of this. That means both
| sides need to admit their mistakes, be vulnerable, caring,
| hopeful and most importantly honest and transparent.
| klyrs wrote:
| Not sure about your timeline; the 60s were predated by the
| McCarthy era.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| 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 I agree with, which is that if you
| vote, you psychologically become too connected to a
| politician. I prefer to just keep my distance._
|
| They're a dying breed.
|
| And it was never the case that journalists were 100%
| objective and unbiased. That's impossible. But there was a
| point in time when they at least made the attempt. Avoided
| the appearance of impropriety.
|
| If you want people to trust you, try being trustworthy.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| 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".
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| 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 opinion to someone else.
|
| It's possible that what we really need is a separate
| class of people in between the two. Reporters who provide
| facts on things that are actively happening, and
| commentators who provide opinion on things that have
| finished happening, e.g. a month later once the facts are
| better established and there has been time to do a
| thorough investigation, but not years or decades after
| the fact.
|
| The problem is how to prevent the two from merging
| together and creating what we have now.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| 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 "report the facts and leave the opinion to
| someone else". Even the order in which you report facts
| is implicitly an opinion.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > 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.
| pnutjam wrote:
| 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.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| The death spiral is _caused_ by journalists putting their
| hands on the tiller.
|
| If people are running around lying with partisan
| motivations, the most important thing you can have is a
| source of information trusted to be at least mostly
| objective. Someone to take the time to do the
| investigation and tell you what really happened in any
| given case, and carry good faith arguments from each
| side, _not_ institutions that pick a side and defend them
| no matter what.
|
| Because people lose trust in institutions with an obvious
| bias. And then what do you have? Twitter?
| rayiner wrote:
| Journalists lying to viewers faces about peaceful
| protests while streets burned in the background has
| helped the death spiral more than you can imagine.
| rayiner wrote:
| Spying is something nearly every single person I know can get
| behind, on the left or right. I've never seen it bleed into
| real life lack of trust.
|
| Everything else on the other hand: https://news.yahoo.com/ex-
| gop-pollster-frank-luntz-172755768...
|
| > "Bret, I couldn't control them. They just started yelling
| at each other, and it would take me two minutes to say to
| them, 'stop' - to put my hand up to the camera like I did
| right there for them to get control of themselves," Luntz
| said
| AndrewBissell wrote:
| Heh, thanks for the link, there's a certain dark enjoyment
| in seeing Luntz reap what he has sown.
| spamizbad wrote:
| 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 something completely milquetoast against the Bush and
| the war.
|
| And just as we thought we were turning a corner on the War on
| Terror the financial crash of 2008 hit. Here, it was another
| highly regarded institution: finance. Young people might not
| remember this, but finance used to be _the_ industry you
| would track into if you were a high achieving member of the
| intelligentsia. The industry was viewed as being staffed to
| the gills with the best-and-brightest and was afforded
| anodyne coverage from the establishment media. So naturally,
| when they imploded the country and then went on TV and blamed
| it on losers with mortgages[1], and proceeded to face zero
| real consequences because the justice system never bothered
| putting laws in place to protect regular people and felt such
| actions would "punish people for taking risks" (which as an
| aside: if you are just externalizing risk to 3rd parties you
| aren't actually "encouraging people to take risks")
|
| It's a trope, but social trust has been eroded because people
| feel like 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 granted a
| measure of impunity when you externalize harm that you quite
| frankly shouldn't have.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zp-Jw-5Kx8k
| mcguire wrote:
| " _Young people might not remember this, but finance used
| to be the industry you would track into if you were a high
| achieving member of the intelligentsia. The industry was
| viewed as being staffed to the gills with the best-and-
| brightest and was afforded anodyne coverage from the
| establishment media._ "
|
| Speaking as someone who was born before the 80s, my
| perception is that you have misread this situation. The
| rise of finance was a consequence of the "greed is good"
| 80s, which meant that disproportionate rewards went to
| financial industries, which was both a cause and a
| consequence of the collapse of every other career open to
| the intelligentsia.
|
| You see a similar situation on a smaller scale in the rise
| of Silicon Valley's start up culture, where that is seen as
| the most valid or only career choice in spite of
| asymptotically levelling benefits.
|
| The demonstration that "the best and brightest" operating
| open loop without regulation leads to spectacular busts is
| left as an exercise to the reader.
| pnutjam wrote:
| You are correct, grab any of the excellent financial
| history books written by Frederick Lewis Allen. People
| assume things that have not existed very long have always
| existed.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| >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.
| jdbernard wrote:
| 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 industry.
|
| In practice you get into the right schools because you
| belong to the right social circles, you get into the
| right industry because you come from the right schools,
| or are in the right social circles, and you make enough
| money because you got into the right schools and industry
| or inherited by virtue of being born into the right
| social circles...
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| 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".
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > 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.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| No, "meritocracy" was brought into the common lexicon in
| the 1960s, specifically as an alternative to existing
| forms of social structure. A system where it did _not_
| matter which school you went to, in particular.
|
| I do not read the GP as being satirical in their use,
| although the use of quotes makes it somewhat unclear.
| pnutjam wrote:
| War on Drugs started it, but the War on Terror accelerated
| it. The GOP misinformation campaign is finishing it off...
|
| Realistically, this is just a reversion to things in the
| early 20th century. The system of trust we've built up is
| only about 50 or 60 years old, and it's decayed as people
| took it for granted. Hopefully we're noticing it now.
| DFHippie wrote:
| > 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.
| yamrzou wrote:
| 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?
| misterbwong wrote:
| 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, only the one
| that grabs the most attention.
|
| 2. Shock and outrage drive the clicks/views/attention and
| everyone gets paid on these metrics.
|
| 3. Social media companies thrive on and optimize for attention
| metrics. The longer you use them, at the expense of things like
| participating in your community and building relationships, the
| more "successful" they are and the more $$$ they get
|
| 4. Society has moved towards more specialized play and
| communities. We participate in fewer and fewer activities where
| we just randomly encounter strangers.
|
| 5. Our current election system rewards divisiveness because it
| drives turnout. The candidate that can do the best job doesn't
| win-the candidate that can get the most votes does.
|
| 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".
| iso1631 wrote:
| > 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_coun.
| ..
|
| "Is religion important in your daily life"
|
| There seems to be a correlation between countries with
| corrupt/untrusted governments and high religious importance.
|
| Compare the Corruption Perceptions Index 2019
| [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index]
| with importance of religion [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Im
| portance_of_religion_by_coun...]
|
| And you don't get an exact line, but there's certainly a
| trend there.
|
| Those with high corruption and relatively low religion are ex
| Soviet/Commumist (Azerbajan, Ukraine, Russia, Vietnam,
| Bulgaria, Hungary, Belarus, Cuba have <50% religion and >50
| corrupt)
|
| There's always outliers, like Singapore (70% religious but
| only 15 corrupt / 85 notcorrupt), but there's a trend
|
| https://i.imgur.com/oFiAbAN.png
| mgh2 wrote:
| Not all religions are created equal, but yes, the trend is
| prominent.
|
| There is some insight here if you dig deeper into the data.
|
| 1. https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-07-17/these-are-most-
| religi...
|
| 2.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index
|
| 3. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/03/12/how-do-
| amer...
| xyzzyz wrote:
| > There seems to be a correlation between countries with
| corrupt untrusted governments and high religious
| importance.
|
| Yes, when the system is very corrupt, you need to have some
| alternative way to build community, cohesion, and
| stability.
|
| In communist Poland, the Church has been the center of the
| opposition to the communist system. The system has been
| very corrupt, but people found solace, community and the
| support in the Church. When John Paul II was elected the
| Pope, the Polish people were reinvigorated, and rallied
| around him, creating Solidarity movement etc. The communist
| system has recognized the power of Church, and fought it
| viciously: for example, it murdered Jerzy Popieluszko, a
| priest famous for his association with Solidarity. This
| made Polish people rally around the Church even more.
|
| After the fall of communism, the Church no longer needed to
| provide this form of support, and over time, as the civil
| society has improved, the Church has used the legitimacy
| and respect it has built during communism to push its own
| agenda, which in past years has been rather divisive
| instead of uniting. Religion is not universal social good:
| its value depends on both the historical circumstance, and
| the actual content of practice and attitudes of leadership.
| It can be extremely beneficial, uniting society in ways
| impossible otherwise, but it can also be extremely
| damaging, to a deadly degree.
| misterbwong wrote:
| 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.
| cle wrote:
| It's not hard to imagine confounding variables that could
| be influencing both, instead of a direct causal
| relationship.
| [deleted]
| LocalH wrote:
| 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.
| triceratops wrote:
| I'm not sure religious participation is the answer. Organized
| religion is responsible for plenty of misinformation. In the
| recent pandemic, there have been multiple superspreader
| events at unauthorized religious gatherings.
|
| Maybe sports leagues or mandatory national (or state)
| service?
| hairofadog wrote:
| I think you're spot on about a lot of these points. On your
| last "unpopular view" about religion, religious groups can be
| like any other group of people in that each group falls
| somewhere on a spectrum between warm and welcoming vs.
| aggressively tribal. I think the sentiment is right, though -
| maybe "civic engagement" is what we're after here.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| Putting in extra effort to actively demonstrate
| trustworthiness.
|
| That means when leaders are speaking, they need to monitor how
| their words are perceived, and resolve misunderstandings
| quickly.
|
| Also, overcommunicate and share evidence, and be honest and
| direct.
| bsenftner wrote:
| A method to address mistrust is to initiate "virtue circles":
| do people unrequested favors, without expectation of any
| return. Just do it; it actually feels good. And it is
| _infectious_. Others start doing it too, and double so when you
| subtly exhibit the joy of helping others without any
| expectations. Once more than 3 people in any social circle
| start this type of positive interaction, a positive culture
| shift occurs in the social group. It is quite amazing how fast
| this transition happens, as if people are waiting for an excuse
| to be better with others.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| And make sure there is space for people to do this, and
| reward it where possible.
|
| Companies are moving more and more towards metrics, which
| means the nice guy that helps everyone out but isn't as great
| with his metrics gets screwed, vs. the asshole who optimizes
| only for the metrics while screwing everyone over gets ahead.
| Once the nice guy has seen this happen over and over, even
| the nicest person breaks, gives in, and starts playing by the
| rules of the system, which by design incentivize working
| towards the measurable goals.
| bsenftner wrote:
| "It's all about the incentives" - Steven D. Levitt
| jrexilius wrote:
| Very much this. I would amplify it a bit and say talk to real
| humans in real life (not through a screen). Be a good
| neighbor, smile and greet people, help strangers. It sounds
| trite, but I think its the best path. A persons physical
| community is more important that twitter (or HN for that
| matter). Culture is made from the choices and shared
| knowledge of individuals. Being open to others is a
| prerequisite to influencing change. Accepting imperfections
| and poor decissions in others is a prerequisite to improving
| things. I don't see a magical switch that can be flipped to
| suddenly change a culture, nor do I see secret cabals
| controling us from the shadows, so no help from the
| illuminati or whatever.. It's the choices we make and the
| views we hold about our fellow citizens, and those are better
| in real-life than on-screen.
| lainga wrote:
| 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).
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| We're kind of barreling toward this reality in pockets of the
| western world. Where I live in the US (wealthy blue state,
| not rural Alabama, don't get your hopes up) you pretty much
| can't do fair business at a fair price without a personal
| reference or prior business relationship. And in some of the
| smaller wealthier towns you can see this kind of behavior
| start to creep into local government. Of course this is a far
| cry from not being able to rely on the police but it's
| definitely movement in that direction.
| foolinaround wrote:
| ? Where I live in the US (wealthy blue state, not rural
| Alabama, don't get your hopes up) you pretty much can't do
| fair business at a fair price without a personal reference
| or prior business relationship.
|
| Are you able to share an anecdote on this?
| sharadov wrote:
| Is this true? We are getting into cars with perfect strangers and
| allowing strangers to live in our houses?
| hezag wrote:
| > _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.
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| 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.
| vaduz wrote:
| Excluding sole traders and cooperatives (and sometimes even
| including those, as the easiest way to lose friends is said to
| be to go into business together), it is entirely natural for
| the company and coworkers not to trust each other, not fully,
| as the goals and incentives of the company are not the same as
| goals and incentives of the employees. Your goal isn't likely
| to be to subordinate your life entirely to what the company
| wants, in a cult-like manner, with no regard for any other
| priorities like family, friends or personal growth - thus at
| the very least the kernel of mistrust always remains.
|
| Some companies just manage to mask it better or tone it down to
| a level that if felt to be acceptable.
| victorpr wrote:
| While true for many (the majority, even), it's not impossible
| for company-employee relationships to be symbiotic as well,
| not every company is like you describe.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| 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.
| umvi wrote:
| > 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 because they knew the monitoring software flags
| such behavior as a positive indicator that the reader has
| increased comprehension of the memo.
| twoquestions wrote:
| You may also be thinking of Snow Crash. Creepy stuff!
| SaberTail wrote:
| It's not a short story, but maybe you're remembering a bit
| from "Snow Crash"?
|
| > Y.T's mom pulls up the new memo, checks the time, and
| starts reading it. The estimated reading time is 15.62
| minutes... Y.T.'s mom decides to spend between fourteen and
| fifteen minutes reading the memo. It's better for younger
| workers to spend too long, to show they're careful, not
| cocky. It's better for older workers to go a little fast,
| to show good management potential. She's pushing forty. She
| scans through the memo, hitting the Page Down button at
| reasonably regular intervals, occasionally paging back up
| to pretend to reread some earlier section. The computer is
| going to notice all this. It approves of rereading. It's a
| small thing, but over a decade or so this stuff really
| shows up on your work-habits summary.
| umvi wrote:
| Yes, that's exactly what I was thinking of. I didn't know
| it was part of a book, I think I originally read this
| paragraph on someone's blog. Thanks for sharing the
| original source!
| logreybaby wrote:
| 1984?
| irpapakons wrote:
| 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?
| the_local_host wrote:
| Anyone who removes the "you break it, you bought it" scenario
| by denying you access to production is actually doing you a
| huge favor.
| cbetti wrote:
| 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.
| Majestic121 wrote:
| Yes, it's pretty common not to provide direct access to
| production data in general.
|
| In my experience, migrations are usually part of the code
| base, evaluated as such with PR and whatnot, and run
| automatically when deploying.
|
| It depends on the size and context of the company, but I
| would not necessarily see this as a lack of trust.
| sanderjd wrote:
| The better way is for nobody to have direct write access to
| the database, but instead for automated tools to do things
| like that, using reviewed code and config and writing an
| audit log of actions taken. The trust thing is part of the
| reason this is a good idea, but it's mostly a good idea to
| avoid good-faith accidents. I think it is common for
| companies that haven't yet had time to build those automated
| tools to delegate their work to senior, very trusted,
| engineers. But that's not a _good_ solution, it 's just more
| expedient, and a bit better than the database being world-
| writable, which is a _bad_ solution.
| twoquestions wrote:
| I'm in a small company in that position, what's also helped
| is wrapping UPDATE statements in a transaction with a
| verification SELECT statement to make sure everything
| worked ok, then committing the transaction.
|
| Saved my bacon more than once!
| indemnity wrote:
| Why is this not automated?
| b0rsuk wrote:
| 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 realize no one else offered help.
|
| It's worst when governments demonize journalists and media. One
| youtube talk I watched listed that as a sure sign democracy is
| under attack in a country.
| randompwd wrote:
| > 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.
| b0rsuk wrote:
| I trust the investigative journalist Tomasz Piatek, educated
| at Milan University, with awards and boks more than a rando
| in a HN comment.
| jedimastert wrote:
| My professor once talked about a Canadian small town he worked in
| for a while where people where people generally left their keys
| in the ignition when they went to the store.
|
| I actually remember the weird feeling I got when I moved from my
| parents home (where we didn't lock our doors at night) to my
| first apartment (where I definitely did).
| peterthehacker wrote:
| 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.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| I can't put the article better than it puts itself. I'd recommend
| everyone read it top to bottom. tl;dr If everyone's playing tug
| of war, everyone has to spend all this effort pulling just to
| stay where we are.
|
| What I'll add is how this seems to show up in HN discussions. A
| frequent trope here is an article about someone or some company
| doing something that pisses people off, then the comments
| debating whether it's the incentive-maker's fault and it's not
| wrong for people to maximize according to the incentives
| provided. The whole thing is a microcosm of this lack of trust.
|
| It's like the prisoner's dilemma. What's lost isn't the decision
| to trust, it's the whole framing. In a perfect trust society,
| taking the compete option in a prisoner's dilemma would be seen
| as immoral. In a zero trust society, the whole choice reduces to
| analyzing the payoff matrix. That's what's lost. It's the change
| from a framing around 'cooperation is the moral action' towards a
| framing around payoff matrices.
|
| I'd argue that on HN, the general sentiment is on the payoff
| matrix end of the spectrum.
| winrid wrote:
| Hopefully this isn't too much of derailing the conversation:
|
| This was something that surprised me about China when I visited,
| although maybe it shouldn't have.
|
| The level of community and how close people are seemed unreal,
| coming from the US.
|
| Maybe part of it is the "forced" community - city/urban blocks
| gated off with single entrance/exit ways, in some cases. I'm not
| sure.
|
| But the dancing every night in the street in big cities, the
| elderly gathering to play Mahjongg in dedicated buildings, and
| other things, really opened my eyes about how far apart we are.
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