22 ms·

The high price of mistrust

• kyrieeschaton 6y ago
  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-ethics-of-delay/ https://www.chronicle.com/article/robert-putnam-and-the-ethi... https://www.city-journal.org/html/bowling-our-own-10265.html https://www.city-journal.org/html/bowling-our-own-10265.html
  • manux 6y ago
    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?
    • mjburgess 6y ago
      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".
    • seneca 6y ago
      > 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.
  • pjc50 6y ago
    Thinly veiled campaigning for the return of segregation? Because nothing increases trust like "whites only" signs?
    • mjburgess 6y ago
      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 6y ago
      > 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?
      • clairity 6y ago
        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.
      • hinkley 6y ago
        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.]
    • hinkley 6y ago
      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.
  • kmeisthax 6y ago
    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.
  • throwaway2245 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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 6y ago
      Holding on to publishing the results because you don't like the political consequences sounds like self-censorship to me
      • throwaway2245 6y ago
        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.
• i_am_proteus 6y ago
  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.
  • gumby 6y ago
    > 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 6y ago
      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 6y ago
      I'll agree, but also note that commodities are fungible.
      • gumby 6y ago
        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.
• rememberlenny 6y ago
  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.
• yrimaxi 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
    That's an interesting question, which is similar to the broken window fallacy : https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/08/broken-window-fallacy.asp 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 6y ago
  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)
  • umvi 6y ago
    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.
    • roywiggins 6y ago
      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.
      • slibhb 6y ago
        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.
• Ozzie_osman 6y ago
  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.
  • aidenn0 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      > 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.
      • logreybaby 6y ago
        1984?
      • twoquestions 6y ago
        You may also be thinking of Snow Crash. Creepy stuff!
      • SaberTail 6y ago
        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.
• overton 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    > 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 6y ago
      The lack of trust and community participation described in the article.
  • throwaway_4253 6y ago
    I wonder if you're unfairly conflating the term "social capital" with the general caustic meanness of economic "capitalism". Putnam is a political scientist, not an economist. I honestly think that most of the relentless unpleasantness of capitalism doesn't come from capital itself, it comes from competition and conflict over scarce resources. It's this conflict between different pools of capital which makes capitalism relentless and exhausting, and the fact that such conflicts are often won by the side which starts with more for unrelated reasons which makes capitalism unfair and often of very questionable morality. I think it's relevant to the article to point out that I this model, all of these conflicts are essentially low trust environments since the actors have by definition opposing goals. But "social capital" doesn't have to be about conflict. Let's say I am fortunate enough to have a friendly relationship with my next door neighbors. To give a cliched example, let's say I want to bake a cake and am running low on sugar. Being able to ask them allows me to finish my task without stopping everything to run to the store. Likewise, if they need to leave town for an emergency, they can call me to check on their place or walk their dog. These examples don't involve any conflict, so it's not clear who's losing out on any of them*? The social capital of our friendship definitely made us more productive, but who wouldn't want that? This isn't about pleasing some kind of corporate manager and churning out more widgets, it's just about personal quality of life, so what's left for there to be a problem with the idea of social capital? * I suppose if we're being extreme then we could say that the sugar providers and grocery store lost in the first exchange by my ability to avoid buying another bag. I'm not sure this is entirely true, though, since I'm very likely to buy more sugar on my next trip anyhow. They've lost out on the urgency perhaps, but as a side note I believe that urgency is the core of the other worst aspects and cruelty of commercial capitalism; urgency sometimes forces incredibly wasteful behavior in the name of "winning the race" against a competitor or many other kinds of artificial deadlines, etc. (Anyhow I digress...)
• tomjen3 6y ago
  > 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.
• elgfare 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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 6y ago
      I see what you mean, and when it comes to institutions and government, we are also very trusting.
• minikites 6y ago
  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-revolted-by-transit/ 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 6y ago
    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.
    • iguy 6y ago
      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?
    • lotsofpulp 6y ago
      > 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.
• jrexilius 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    > 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.
    • jrexilius 6y ago
      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.
      • AndrewBissell 6y ago
        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.
• jedimastert 6y ago
  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).
  • somedude895 6y ago
    I remember when I lived in Barcelona and filled up my motorbike at a gas station. I went inside to pay and the lady was shocked that I left my helmet on the bike's seat for the 30 seconds I'd be away from it, and urged me to go get it lest it be snatched. Real eye-opener as well. Back in Switzerland I'd never give that another thought.
• alexis2b 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    Check out Polkadot! All the 'Powerhouse' Players came together to start a semi-trustless system of governance that's pretty interesting.
  • brianvli 6y ago
    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/ https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/staking/
• ndiscussion 6y ago
  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-america-in-color.32426/ 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 6y ago
    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.
    • itsyaboi 6y ago
      As opposed to the massive racial, gender and environmental problems we are currently facing, with a additional pyramidion of used needles and feces?
      • finiteseries 6y ago
        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.
      • mcguire 6y ago
        Those massive problems are significantly less massive than they were then.
      • renewiltord 6y ago
        Bro, America was legally segregated then. Give me a break.
    • Melchizedek 6y ago
      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.
• PhilosAccnting 6y ago
  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/ 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 6y ago
    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.
• yamrzou 6y ago
  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?
  • lainga 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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 6y ago
        ? 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?
  • misterbwong 6y ago
    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".
• 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
  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.
• adolph 6y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion 2. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36076.The_Speed_of_Trust https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36076.The_Speed_of_Trust 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_trade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_trade
  • mcguire 6y ago
    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."
• sinoue 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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.
• ilaksh 6y ago
  I really hope that people who appreciate this article will take a look at the work of Jonathan Haidt such as The Righteous Mind.
  • rossdavidh 6y ago
    Well I did, and I'm a big fan of Haidt.
• hezag 6y ago
  > 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.
• winrid 6y ago
  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.
  • kirse 6y ago
    The level of community and how close people are seemed unreal All of that exists in Christian churches and their deep (but often quiet) influence over many social efforts and programs across the United States. Have you visited one recently? Rally is also a pretty tight community as well, everyone is always there to help you press on regardless, whether its a tow out of a ditch on stage or lending a spare for a blown fuse in service.
    • bollu 6y ago
      What is "Rally"?
      • winrid 6y ago
        Stage Rally!
    • winrid 6y ago
      All very true! That's why I don't think Christianity is a terrible thing, despite not being a believer. Regarding Rally - yeah I know - I drive stage. I've had my fellow competitors help me fix my car between stages, there is no family like the rally community. EDIT: By the way, China has these things too. I was thinking of the things I wish we had.
• khawkins 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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 6y ago
• scythe 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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.
  • mikem170 6y ago
    I agree with you on calling out the moral absurdities in our health care system, and how that is a reflection on our level of social trust. I'd like to see changes, also. Cynically I would say that politically we have optimized for profit and bureaucracy. Would I be wrong? I'd say that this is because our democracy is imperfect - money, corporations, and corruption are driving too much of our politics. It's always bothered me that so many people would presume to fix health care at the federal level. For a while Congress has been one of the least trusted institutions in the country. Why do we expect them to fix anything? The Affordable Care Act was anything but that, it did nothing to control costs or fix all the pricing transparency problems. Poor folks get a free yearly visit and screenings but have to pay a few thousand dollar deductible when they are sick (money they typically don't have) before they get any covered care, while the government subsidized insurance premiums go right past the recipients directly into the pockets of the insurance companies. I'd be more comfortable seeing something like many of the countries in Europe have, price controls on drugs and simple standards set at a national level, with implementation details, tax collection, and administrative details left to the states or provinces. The states were just starting to innovate before the ACA. Vermont tried single payer. Massachusetts had Romneycare. NY and California we making plans, etc. With the ACA the feds commandeered the whole thing, and didn't do so great a job with it. I think that the states are in a much better position to fix this, but that the insurance companies and other related incumbents would rather have this controlled from a federal level where they can most easily influence the outcome to be in their favor.
• medium_burrito 6y ago
  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.
  • yrimaxi 6y ago
    > 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 6y ago
      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.
• punnerud 6y ago
  I feel Clubhouse is the first app that is reversing this trend. Only talk and connecting strangers.
  • fullshark 6y ago
    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.
• offtop5 6y ago
  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.
• mcguire 6y ago
  "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."
• artur_makly 6y ago
  this reminds me about a civic trust study that was done globally: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6448/70 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6448/70
  • rossdavidh 6y ago
    Interesting article. The first thing that leaps out at me from the graph is: the bigger the country, the lower the trust. There are other trends, I'm sure, but that one is pretty clear.
• b0rsuk 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    > 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 6y ago
      I trust the investigative journalist Tomasz Piątek, educated at Milan University, with awards and boks more than a rando in a HN comment.
      • randompwd 6y ago
        You didn't link the video or reference the speaker. You just wrote: > One youtube talk I watched listed that as a sure sign democracy is under attack in a country. From everyone elses perspective, you are the rando in a HN comment.
        • b0rsuk 6y ago
          Fair point. I don't remember which one exactly it was (they are 2 hour long) but it was from the series "Dochodzenie Prawdy" on the channel "Reset Obywatelski". The episode number was between 1 and 8. The talks are in Polish language only.
    • mikem170 6y ago
• luxuryballs 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    >nobody looked Numerous lawsuits were filed, all failed. Or are you suggesting the courts are corrupt as well?
• peterthehacker 6y ago
  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.
• sharadov 6y ago
  Is this true? We are getting into cars with perfect strangers and allowing strangers to live in our houses?
• Ericson2314 6y ago
  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.
• etherio 6y ago
  Although mistrust can sometimes be warranted, as a way to prevent others from poisoning your life, I agree that it's also something to be careful about. This reminds me of a quote from EM Forster's novel Howard's End: > “You remember ‘rent’? It was one of father’s words— Rent to the ideal, to his own faith in human nature. You remember how he would trust strangers, and if they fooled him he would say, ‘It’s better to befooled than to be suspicious’—that the confidence trick is the work of man, but the want-of-confidence trick is the work of the devil.” This quote links back to this article and mentions the cost of closing yourself off and growing distrustful, which is really losing faith in human nature and kindness. Interesting read!
• roussanoff 6y ago
  I really like the paper that shows that higher density of associations (the way Putnam measures "social capital") was associated with higher support for the Nazi party in Germany[^1]. Things are not as simple as "trust=good". [1]:https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/690949?journalCode=jpe https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/690949?jou...
• lykahb 6y ago
  With more trust, there is less profit the corporations can make, and less tax income. There are many reasons for the decline of trust in the community. I think that one of them is marketing that exploits fears of strangers or peddles weird apps that replace parts of human interaction.
• _cs2017_ 6y ago
  Anyone knows of research that compares trust across companies? (Perhaps it's more interesting to look at trust separately for between-peers, and employee-manager; as well as at different seniority levels; but I suppose it would be too hard to collect such detailed data.) Across countries? (Similarly, some breakdown would be quite interesting.)
  • KajMagnus 6y ago
    > compares trust across companies Did you mean different companies trusting each other, and thus being "hyper productive" if getting things done together? In a way that lasts also after the individuals (executives, managers, people at the companies) who initially created that high trust, have left? It sounded more as if you had in mind to compare the "trust level" inside different companies, with each other? Maybe plotted against profitability? In any case, sounds like interesting topics to me. > Across countries Did you mean how much people in different countries, trust others in the same country as themselves? Or if nearby countries can "lift each other up" by people and politicians there, trusting the people & politicians in the other nearby countries
• dredmorbius 6y ago
  David Gerard made this point a few years ago interviewing with the Financial Times on his book Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Decentralisation is the paramount feature in bitcoin, but it turns out that that's a bad idea that's really, really expensive, because it turns out that a tiny bit of trust saves you a fortune. "Decentralised" isn't a useful buzzword in a lot of ways, because it turns out that you want to be a part of society. https://soundcloud.com/user-544122300/gerardpod https://soundcloud.com/user-544122300/gerardpod Thought's ocurred to me that advances in communications technologies serve to undermine social trust mechanisms. https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6jqakv/communications_advances_undermine_trust/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6jqakv/communi... Others as well: https://medium.com/@SeanBlanda/medium-and-the-reason-you-cant-stand-the-news-anymore-c98068fec3f8 https://medium.com/@SeanBlanda/medium-and-the-reason-you-can... (https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/71xbx2/sean_blanda_how_online_media_are_reducing_trust/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/71xbx2/sean_bl...) And the late David Cornwell, a/k/a John le Carre: the veterans of the S.I.S. [the British Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6] think, which is yes, kompromat was done on him. Of course, kompromat is done on everyone. So they end up, the theory goes, with this compromising bit of material and then they begin to release parts of it. They set up an ex-MI6 guy, Chris Steele, who is a patsy, effectively, and they feed him some stuff that's true, and some stuff that isn't true, and some stuff that is demonstrably wrong. Which means that Trump can then stand up and deny it, while knowing that the essence of it is true. And then he has a stone in his shoe for the rest of his administration. https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6x8tns/control_chaos_and_trust/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6x8tns/control...
• sershe 6y ago
  As someone who grew up in very low trust country, I have to point out in response to several other comments that trust is also not natural. Trust needs to be fostered and guarded, and one sure-fire way in which it erodes in people is if they see norms being violated with impunity. That both makes it more acceptable for people to violate norms (like that riot paper I can't find now, where they found each person would throw a rock if they saw N people around them throwing rocks, so it's a cascade of higher and higher Ns); but also more importantly creates a cynical attitude in those who won't violate the norms that their chief goal is to protect their own well-being from bad/stupid people, the rest be damned (the bad and stupid people might as well suffer, and the others, well I guess they should just also fend for themselves). This applies on all levels from govt corruption, to e.g. neighborhood care. Russian cities are full of shabby-looking flats ("condos") with cars parked on the lawn, the playgrounds that are lightly vandalized, and dirty unmaintained common areas; however, many of the cars are luxury and if you visit someone you'd see they have a nice (if small) pad even by Western standards. And probably a steel door. That is because you see people treating common areas like crap, so at worst you also treat them like crap ("everyone parks on the lawn!"), and at best you retreat into your own little world and make it perfect, outside and everyone else be damned, and traversing from your flat to your car becomes sort of a tolerable necessary evil, who cares what it looks like. I've been thinking about this a lot given the recent deterioration of the West coast cities. I've definitely become much more lower trust than I used to be, and I realized another reason I don't like houses is that you cannot just put a steel door in and be mostly safe from crime - too many entry points :)
• known 6y ago
  If society can't respect diversity it results in https://archive.is/mPsqz https://archive.is/mPsqz
• ozim 6y ago
  This article seems like "it was better back then". Well in my opinion we don't have communities like we used to have with deep trust, even the families are not the same anymore. On the other hand I am not afraid to go to neighboring city (or when I was a kid it could be even other part of the city) so someone would come up with "hey you are not from around here, what are you looking for a trouble here son?". We traded deep trust for broad trust. This way price of transactions on bigger scale went down a lot, even if they went up on personal or local level. In the end broad trust is more useful for people because it enables mobility. One can move to a big city and won't be instantly scammed. If we would value deep trust only, there would be no way for people to move out from "dead end" places. One could live his whole life in one place and have his deep trust network but that is less and less possible in the current world. That is why we need broad societal trust. "Bowling alone" - bowling leagues and PTAs, if someone lives 2 years in one place on average he is not going to be there long enough to be accepted in his local group.