> Was there ever a time people would trust a piece of paper in isolation? Pretty much all of history. We love it when facts supporting our beliefs are isolate

> Was there ever a time people would trust a piece of paper in isolation? Pretty much all of history. We love it when facts supporting our beliefs are isolated in a single source. We also love it when a source is ambiguous enough to let us draw our own conclusions. The lie of omission has a long track record of being effective. It has the benefit of being useful to the source and/or the receiver. There's redundancy in falsehood selectors. Either the source will lie or we, on the receiving end, will lie. The truth often doesn't stand a chance; somebody is gonna find a way to isolate. Trust is not a behavior that is reliably rational. One could argue that it always has an element of emotional attachment to the familiar.