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A default trust society can be much more successful than default deceive/don't trust society. The cost of default don't trust is high. I would say that the wide

A default trust society can be much more successful than default deceive/don't trust society. The cost of default don't trust is high. I would say that the wide adoption of the Christian value of honesty with everyone is probably one of the main reasons for the rise of western Civilization. If we decide to go back to a default don't trust society, we will loose something very valuable. We should try very hard to avoid that.

civilitty 8y ago
I absolutely agree in the first bit. I'm a strong believer in "trust but verify" where you develop relationships based on trust by default with a healthy layer of auditing to inspire confidence long term. My concern is that the ROI of trust by default in the past has opened up our contemporary systems to an unprecedented attack vector. The surprising part is that this phenomena has extended to geopolitics: having control over the GPS constellation is the kind of thing that would have single handedly decided both world wars, yet is now taken for granted by intelligence operatives of hostile nations using our GPS system. It's hard to believe it's worked for so long. As for the Christian value of honesty stuff, I strongly disagree. Communities of chimpanzees and prairie dogs!! commonly exhibit social behaviors that would be indistinguishable from humans despite the fact that they have no formalized moral framework. Chimpanzees or prairie dogs who yell wolf too many times will be ignored. Those that are dishonest or manipulative are shunned. Those that are too aggressive are put down by the tribe. Christianity has nothing to do with it. Honesty is a necessary trait for survival of any complex species dependent on communication for survival
- dingaling 8y ago
  > trust but verify That's not trust.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - civilitty 8y ago
    Yeah, that's why the "verify" bit is so important.
    - bena 8y ago
      The point is that "trust, but verify" has two too many words.
  - enraged_camel 8y ago
    It can be. You can trust someone to have done the job like they claim, but can still verify it to make sure they did it correctly. A second set of eyes rarely hurt.
    - a1369209993 8y ago
      That's not quite right; the point of "trust but verify"[0] is to assume in the short term that they did the job they claim (correctly, even), and start doing work that depends on it, but verify in the background, and roll things back if they didn't. This gives you some of the benefits of a high trust environment while still coping with the occational lying scumbag. Of course, if it's fast/cheap enough, you can go with the much superior "verify and don't even waste time asking", but that's often impractical. 0: Well, the steel-man interpretation anyway; the historical version seems to just be a euphemism for "Don't trust, but claim you do so they look bad if they try to complain about it.".
      - bena 8y ago
        I think the whole bone of contention with the statement is pretty much a semantic argument. What is "trust"? In your scenario, I wouldn't classify it as trust at all, yet I know I've used that word to describe something similar when describing building software. But if you wanted to pin me down, I'd waffle and say, yeah, I'm not really talking about trust. If I trusted function X, I wouldn't check anything about it, I'd assume it's right. So in your scenario, I wouldn't classify what you were doing as platonic trust either. I wouldn't call it trust unless the verification came when the deliverable was due. But then by then, your trust has been violated. For instance I ordered something online. I trust the information FedEx gives me is accurate. It says my package is delivered. I am going home and I expect to see the package at my door. I trust my neighborhood/apt complex enough that I don't expect it to be stolen. That is trust. I don't have anything to confirm what I currently believe, but I still believe it. In contrast, I stopped trusting the USPS at my old apartment. Because a couple of times, they've claimed a failed delivery attempt even when I was home. So I stopped expecting things to get delivered when they said they would be when they would come through USPS. And I never trusted packages to be delivered to the house I lived at before that place. I'd get things delivered to work. When people tell me they "trust, but verify", I tell them it's either or. You can trust or you can verify. When they tell me they trust the results of my work but want to verify it, I explicitly tell them, "I don't want you to trust it, I want you to double-check me to make sure I got it right. I don't fully trust myself. Accuracy is important, I want a critical eye on this in case I missed something. I don't mind being wrong if it means we are right."
sjwright 8y ago
It's a bit parochial to hear someone in the twenty-first century describe honesty as a particularly Christian value. You do know you're talking to the whole world here? Most human cultures have valued honesty to a similar degree. Even many animal communities value honesty.
- adrianN 8y ago
  They were talking about the rise of western culture, for which Christianity is the major religion.
  - rvense 8y ago
    And they were talking as if "don't trust" was the default before Christianity, which is wrong, absurd even.
  - imnotlost 8y ago
    Human and technological development in spite of Christianity and other religions.
- cal5k 8y ago
  Religion has historically and continues to play a major role in geopolitics... there's nothing parochial about it. The Christian belief system was objectively instrumental in the creation of the West's institutions, system of government, beliefs about trade, etc. You don't have to be religious (as I am not) for this to be true.
  - sjwright 8y ago
    EDIT: wahern's reply above is far better than mine. Read that one instead. I'm removing most of what I originally wrote except for this bit: ----------- I would argue that Christianity has influenced western culture far less than western culture has influenced Christianity. And that the key benefit attributable to Christianity—insofar as it was the lucky religion which happened be closest to the people who built western civilisation—is arguably its adaptable and relatively non-invasive nature compared to many of its contemporaries.
dang 8y ago
Please don't inject religion into HN threads. Nothing good ever comes of it.
- njarboe 8y ago
  I should have left the word Christian out. It was not really needed. By the time I saw what it had spawned, it was too late to edit.
  - dang 8y ago
    Yes, it really does boil down to just that word. We can speculate about the reasons, but the effects on a large forum like this one are predictable.
    - explainplease 8y ago
      The problem with excluding religion is that it's relevant. Imagine excluding any other branch of philosophy (science, math, photography, morality, logic), and the effect it would have on conversation. It would make no sense, and it would make it impossible to have meaningful discussions about many topics, as well as impossible to arrive at certain truthful conclusions about them. To exclude religion is essentially a (very closed-minded) religion unto itself.
wahern 8y ago
I've not heard honesty considered a peculiarly Christian virtue. They're sort of orthogonal. Perhaps you're thinking of guilt and conscience, which means people might think that not being affirmatively honest could be considered wrong. Christianity is sometimes conflated with guilt culture (which emphasizes personal conscience), but Western guilt culture comes from Greek Stoicism and it took awhile to permeate through Europe--much longer than Christianity (like millennia longer). And there are plenty of modern Christian converts (entire countries, in fact) which are devoutly Christian but absolutely have not internalized a guilt culture. Very little, if anything, about Christianity requires a guilt culture--indeed, all of the Old and much of the New Testament is perfectly consonant with a shame/honor culture. Note that not telling the truth is not the same as lying. For example, you could choose simply not to disclosure unless asked. Also, the Abrahamic commandment, "thou shall not lie", aka "thou shall not bear false witness against thy neighbor", was a legal rule. Most societies have this rule. Twisting it into a personal moral rule about how you go about your daily life is a result of our guilt-based culture which, again, is separate from Christianity, per se.
gonvaled 8y ago
Human values are not derived from religion; religions are built around existing value systems - to the point of misappropriating them.
- explainplease 8y ago
  Rational arguments are not derived from gonvaled; gonvaled is built around existing rational arguments - to the point of misappropriating them.
  - gonvaled 8y ago
    Maybe you could provide an example moral value which was introduced by religion, and not appropiated from the already existing society?
    - explainplease 8y ago
      There are a few problems with your request. One, it's stated vaguely. What would qualify? Which religion, and which society? You would likely claim that there was some society somewhere which already had such a standard, and that therefore religion had nothing to do with it. It's too easy for you to dismiss any example because your requirements are not well defined. Second, how far back are you willing to go? Go far enough back in human existence and we can't trace the provenance of a certain moral value. Third, it depends on your existing beliefs about religion, creation, etc. If you believe that humans were created by a creator being who endowed them with certain abilities and tendencies, then who's to say whether a certain tendency was a matter of religion or society? If one believes that the tendency first came innate from our creation, and later was made explicit in revelation, was that tendency from religion or society? On the other hand, if you believe that life happened spontaneously and that humans gradually evolved from single-cell organisms, then you have already eliminated religion as a possible source of anything, because no religion would be true, in which case everything would fall under the category of "society." (Alternatively, anyone can claim, "A god spoke to me and you should do what I say," and that would qualify as religion. In which case, I could claim that a god spoke to me, and that you should therefore believe everything I say. And then "religion" ceases to be a meaningful category, leaving us once again with only "society.") So, as you can see, your request is not so simple, and is really just fodder for useless Internet arguments. If you want to discuss it seriously, you will have to address these matters first.
TeMPOraL 8y ago
Barring the Christianity angle, I strongly agree. Trust is a very powerful optimization that humans have figured out. It gives us absurd efficiencies across the board - because without it, we have to add lots of complexity to verify things, and then some more to patch loopholes. That's why I'm suspicious of technologies and systems that are meant to be trustless. They seem like a step in the wrong direction.

civilitty 8y ago

I absolutely agree in the first bit. I'm a strong believer in "trust but verify" where you develop relationships based on trust by default with a healthy layer of auditing to inspire confidence long term. My concern is that the ROI of trust by default in the past has opened up our contemporary systems to an unprecedented attack vector. The surprising part is that this phenomena has extended to geopolitics: having control over the GPS constellation is the kind of thing that would have single handedly decided both world wars, yet is now taken for granted by intelligence operatives of hostile nations using our GPS system. It's hard to believe it's worked for so long. As for the Christian value of honesty stuff, I strongly disagree. Communities of chimpanzees and prairie dogs!! commonly exhibit social behaviors that would be indistinguishable from humans despite the fact that they have no formalized moral framework. Chimpanzees or prairie dogs who yell wolf too many times will be ignored. Those that are dishonest or manipulative are shunned. Those that are too aggressive are put down by the tribe. Christianity has nothing to do with it. Honesty is a necessary trait for survival of any complex species dependent on communication for survival

dingaling 8y ago
> trust but verify That's not trust.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- civilitty 8y ago
  Yeah, that's why the "verify" bit is so important.
  - bena 8y ago
    The point is that "trust, but verify" has two too many words.
- enraged_camel 8y ago
  It can be. You can trust someone to have done the job like they claim, but can still verify it to make sure they did it correctly. A second set of eyes rarely hurt.
  - a1369209993 8y ago
    That's not quite right; the point of "trust but verify"[0] is to assume in the short term that they did the job they claim (correctly, even), and start doing work that depends on it, but verify in the background, and roll things back if they didn't. This gives you some of the benefits of a high trust environment while still coping with the occational lying scumbag. Of course, if it's fast/cheap enough, you can go with the much superior "verify and don't even waste time asking", but that's often impractical. 0: Well, the steel-man interpretation anyway; the historical version seems to just be a euphemism for "Don't trust, but claim you do so they look bad if they try to complain about it.".
    - bena 8y ago
      I think the whole bone of contention with the statement is pretty much a semantic argument. What is "trust"? In your scenario, I wouldn't classify it as trust at all, yet I know I've used that word to describe something similar when describing building software. But if you wanted to pin me down, I'd waffle and say, yeah, I'm not really talking about trust. If I trusted function X, I wouldn't check anything about it, I'd assume it's right. So in your scenario, I wouldn't classify what you were doing as platonic trust either. I wouldn't call it trust unless the verification came when the deliverable was due. But then by then, your trust has been violated. For instance I ordered something online. I trust the information FedEx gives me is accurate. It says my package is delivered. I am going home and I expect to see the package at my door. I trust my neighborhood/apt complex enough that I don't expect it to be stolen. That is trust. I don't have anything to confirm what I currently believe, but I still believe it. In contrast, I stopped trusting the USPS at my old apartment. Because a couple of times, they've claimed a failed delivery attempt even when I was home. So I stopped expecting things to get delivered when they said they would be when they would come through USPS. And I never trusted packages to be delivered to the house I lived at before that place. I'd get things delivered to work. When people tell me they "trust, but verify", I tell them it's either or. You can trust or you can verify. When they tell me they trust the results of my work but want to verify it, I explicitly tell them, "I don't want you to trust it, I want you to double-check me to make sure I got it right. I don't fully trust myself. Accuracy is important, I want a critical eye on this in case I missed something. I don't mind being wrong if it means we are right."

sjwright 8y ago

It's a bit parochial to hear someone in the twenty-first century describe honesty as a particularly Christian value. You do know you're talking to the whole world here? Most human cultures have valued honesty to a similar degree. Even many animal communities value honesty.

adrianN 8y ago
They were talking about the rise of western culture, for which Christianity is the major religion.
- rvense 8y ago
  And they were talking as if "don't trust" was the default before Christianity, which is wrong, absurd even.
- imnotlost 8y ago
  Human and technological development in spite of Christianity and other religions.
cal5k 8y ago
Religion has historically and continues to play a major role in geopolitics... there's nothing parochial about it. The Christian belief system was objectively instrumental in the creation of the West's institutions, system of government, beliefs about trade, etc. You don't have to be religious (as I am not) for this to be true.
- sjwright 8y ago
  EDIT: wahern's reply above is far better than mine. Read that one instead. I'm removing most of what I originally wrote except for this bit: ----------- I would argue that Christianity has influenced western culture far less than western culture has influenced Christianity. And that the key benefit attributable to Christianity—insofar as it was the lucky religion which happened be closest to the people who built western civilisation—is arguably its adaptable and relatively non-invasive nature compared to many of its contemporaries.

dang 8y ago

Please don't inject religion into HN threads. Nothing good ever comes of it.

njarboe 8y ago
I should have left the word Christian out. It was not really needed. By the time I saw what it had spawned, it was too late to edit.
- dang 8y ago
  Yes, it really does boil down to just that word. We can speculate about the reasons, but the effects on a large forum like this one are predictable.
  - explainplease 8y ago
    The problem with excluding religion is that it's relevant. Imagine excluding any other branch of philosophy (science, math, photography, morality, logic), and the effect it would have on conversation. It would make no sense, and it would make it impossible to have meaningful discussions about many topics, as well as impossible to arrive at certain truthful conclusions about them. To exclude religion is essentially a (very closed-minded) religion unto itself.

wahern 8y ago

I've not heard honesty considered a peculiarly Christian virtue. They're sort of orthogonal. Perhaps you're thinking of guilt and conscience, which means people might think that not being affirmatively honest could be considered wrong. Christianity is sometimes conflated with guilt culture (which emphasizes personal conscience), but Western guilt culture comes from Greek Stoicism and it took awhile to permeate through Europe--much longer than Christianity (like millennia longer). And there are plenty of modern Christian converts (entire countries, in fact) which are devoutly Christian but absolutely have not internalized a guilt culture. Very little, if anything, about Christianity requires a guilt culture--indeed, all of the Old and much of the New Testament is perfectly consonant with a shame/honor culture. Note that not telling the truth is not the same as lying. For example, you could choose simply not to disclosure unless asked. Also, the Abrahamic commandment, "thou shall not lie", aka "thou shall not bear false witness against thy neighbor", was a legal rule. Most societies have this rule. Twisting it into a personal moral rule about how you go about your daily life is a result of our guilt-based culture which, again, is separate from Christianity, per se.

gonvaled 8y ago

Human values are not derived from religion; religions are built around existing value systems - to the point of misappropriating them.

explainplease 8y ago
Rational arguments are not derived from gonvaled; gonvaled is built around existing rational arguments - to the point of misappropriating them.
- gonvaled 8y ago
  Maybe you could provide an example moral value which was introduced by religion, and not appropiated from the already existing society?
  - explainplease 8y ago
    There are a few problems with your request. One, it's stated vaguely. What would qualify? Which religion, and which society? You would likely claim that there was some society somewhere which already had such a standard, and that therefore religion had nothing to do with it. It's too easy for you to dismiss any example because your requirements are not well defined. Second, how far back are you willing to go? Go far enough back in human existence and we can't trace the provenance of a certain moral value. Third, it depends on your existing beliefs about religion, creation, etc. If you believe that humans were created by a creator being who endowed them with certain abilities and tendencies, then who's to say whether a certain tendency was a matter of religion or society? If one believes that the tendency first came innate from our creation, and later was made explicit in revelation, was that tendency from religion or society? On the other hand, if you believe that life happened spontaneously and that humans gradually evolved from single-cell organisms, then you have already eliminated religion as a possible source of anything, because no religion would be true, in which case everything would fall under the category of "society." (Alternatively, anyone can claim, "A god spoke to me and you should do what I say," and that would qualify as religion. In which case, I could claim that a god spoke to me, and that you should therefore believe everything I say. And then "religion" ceases to be a meaningful category, leaving us once again with only "society.") So, as you can see, your request is not so simple, and is really just fodder for useless Internet arguments. If you want to discuss it seriously, you will have to address these matters first.

TeMPOraL 8y ago

Barring the Christianity angle, I strongly agree. Trust is a very powerful optimization that humans have figured out. It gives us absurd efficiencies across the board - because without it, we have to add lots of complexity to verify things, and then some more to patch loopholes. That's why I'm suspicious of technologies and systems that are meant to be trustless. They seem like a step in the wrong direction.