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There's a weird fundamental flaw in social groups which is this: 1. Trusting trustworthy people increases efficiency. The less checking and verification you ha
by munificent 7y ago
There's a weird fundamental flaw in social groups which is this:
1. Trusting trustworthy people increases efficiency. The less checking and verification you have to do, the less redundant work there is and the more easily things go.
2. As the number of trustworthy people in a group increases, the value of choosing to trust a random person increases. The odds get greater that they will be trustworthy, letting you reap the greater efficiency of trusting them.
3. As the number of trusting people in a group increases, the relative value of malice increases. The more likely a con artist is to be trusted, the more likely they are to be successful at their goal.
So there's this weird trust graph where as you approach 100% trustworthiness, you also approach 100% exploitability. The group gradually turns itself into a honeypot. So the stable equilibrium point is somewhere less of 100%.
- apacheCamel 7y agoThat makes sense but I guess the question is why? If things work and people are happy with a system, why do the opposite and ruin it? I know it isn't an easy question to answer and could really be anything, but sometimes I really just want to sit down with them and find out why. It is fascinating stuff, but it hurts to think about sometimes. Just because the value of becoming a scammer goes up, doesn't mean we should embrace it.
- volkk 7y agoI think this question essentially boils down to: "why do people commit crimes" and that's not something that has one easy answer
- lixtra 7y agoYou can drive the number closer to 100% by making sure to have strong revenge on malice and a high probability that the revenge hits the right person. In practice that means trust people once you have confirmed identity and if you’re in a trustworthy legislation.
- munificent 7y ago> a high probability that the revenge hits the right person. This is also fundamentally hard, though. As the ratio of trustworthy people increases, the odds of false positives necessarily increase too.