5 ms·

This is something I talk about quite a bit. Modern society requires trust. Trust that bridges are built correctly, airplanes maintained correctly, water treat

by donw 5y ago

This is something I talk about quite a bit. Modern society requires trust. Trust that bridges are built correctly, airplanes maintained correctly, water treated correctly, etc. No one person can manage all of that. We have to trust that other people will do their jobs, and that they don't bear us an ill will. Destroy that trust, and you destroy society. Violence destroys trust. Censorship, however packaged, destroys trust. Ignoring consent destroys trust. Lies destroy trust. Unequally applying rules destroys trust. As does being creative and selective with the truth. American institutions, public and private, have burned literally every ounce of trust they had to get Trump out of office, and are running on a sort of psychological credit balance that they carry with their supporters ("we don't care because our team is winning"). Historically, this does not portend great things at the next intersection.

jimkleiber 5y ago
While I personally do not believe that those orgs "burned literally every ounce of trust they had to get Trump out of office," as I still trust many of them in terms of their skills and intentions, I greatly appreciated how, before that, you laid out your argument for trust overall, so thank you for taking the time to articulate it as you did.
- donw 5y ago
  Probably because your team is winning, at least in terms of institutional power.
  - ben_w 5y ago
    Speaking as a non-American who doesn’t consider either Democrats or Republicans to be “my team”, it looks to me as if Republicans chose Trump in the first place because they have no trust in the system, and Democrats don’t trust Republicans now, not because Republicans chose Trump, but because (and to the extent that) Republicans continue to defend even Trump’s most egregious flaws. Certainly there was sufficient trust by Democrats when, say, Bush Jr beat Gore or Trump beat Clinton, despite the popular vote in both cases. Grumbling about the unfairness, but still accepting who won the presidency. And that’s despite Trump being a birther: claiming Obama wasn’t even eligible to stand for office? That whole thing represented a lack of trust.
    - pdonis 5y ago
      > it looks to me as if Republicans chose Trump in the first place because they have no trust in the system First, I'm not sure Republicans "chose" Trump; it's more that they suddenly found that he had gamed their nomination system and was their candidate and they had no choice but to make the best of it. Second, I'm not sure Republican politicians in general have no trust in the system. They are part of the system as much as Democratic politicians are. > Democrats don’t trust Republicans now, not because Republicans chose Trump, but because (and to the extent that) Republicans continue to defend even Trump’s most egregious flaws. Defending egregious flaws in whoever happens to be the current party front man is nothing new for either party. That may be at least partly because everyone who ends up being a party front man has egregious flaws. Trump's just happened to be more colorful than most.
  - jimkleiber 5y ago
    Perhaps, I think a key component of trust is believing those people are on my team and distrust is believing they aren't, whether the other people believe they are or not. So because I generally trust those institutions, yes, I don't believe they're against me. However, I think it's more of a perspective of who's on my team rather than clearly demarcated teams.
    - pdonis 5y ago
      > I think a key component of trust is believing those people are on my team If this means you don't take an objective look at what those people actually do, and judge it by standards independent of any "team", I think it's a very dangerous strategy. The idea that "my team" should win, regardless of what it takes--that the end always justifies the means--I think has caused more human misery than any other idea we humans have had. If you find that your "team" is using unsavory and unpalatable means to achieve what you think is a "greater good", you should not accept the means--you should rethink the "greater good". Based on human history, it's far more likely that the "greater good" is a lot less than you think and will be more than outweighed by the damage done by the unsavory and unpalatable means being used.
      - jimkleiber 5y ago
        I was trying to say that it is hard to trust someone (or an institution) when we believe that they are not on our team. I didn't mean to imply that just because I think they have good or neutral intentions towards me that they won't do something that will harm me or others. I strongly agree they could do things that most people would consider bad, evil, harmful, etc. I think most of us do things that both help and hurt people. Just as I'm against demonizing someone, I'm also against idolizing them, as I believe they both blind us to the good and bad people will do.
        pdonis 5y ago
        > I was trying to say that it is hard to trust someone (or an institution) when we believe that they are not on our team. And I am saying that the whole concept of "our team" is a dangerous one. We all have to live in the same society. The idea that we should view things in terms of "teams", where our goal is for "our team" to win and for the "other team" to lose, is wrong. We need to all "win", because all of our fates are tied together by living in the same society. We can't "defeat" the "other team" without also defeating ourselves. That's not to say that we must always agree. Of course we will disagree about things, often strongly. But we should disagree as individuals with different opinions about difficult issues where reasonable people can disagree, not as "team members" who feel like we need to play for our own side and against the other. > Just as I'm against demonizing someone, I'm also against idolizing them To me this means you should be against the whole concept of "teams", since that concept by its very nature involves demonizing the "other team" and idolizing "our team".
- tomjen3 5y ago
  You don't believe that, when any discussion of the laptop was banned to right after the election, and it was considered racist to believe in the lab leak theory, right until the president changed and now it is officially considered a possibility worth investigating? I don't agree with Trump, but I can easily see why somebody might have lost the remaining trust in the institutions.
  - jimkleiber 5y ago
    I'm not saying that people don't have their own personal reasons/stories/experiences for losing trust, I just wanted to say that I haven't. And I'm also not saying it's wrong that someone has lost trust, more so to say that not everyone has lost trust.
ithkuil 5y ago
> Trust that bridges are built correctly, The interesting thing about trust in bridges is that it works even after people witness spectacular bridge collapses in their country/area. For example in 2018 a bridge collapsed in Genova, Italy, killing 49 people. At least another two smaller incidents involving collapsed bridges near where I live. And yet people keep crossing bridges every day. You just couldn't function in a modern society if you got paralyzed by fear of bridges; there always were bridges since you were a child and long before; thus you reach the conclusion that such catastrophic events are outliers. I don't think it's because you trust in engineers or society or something like that; you trust yourself and your past experience that you and your friends and family crossed bridges thousands of times and you're still alive
- donw 5y ago
  Two factors are at play. The total percentage of bridges which have their collapsed, as well the the frequency of collapse, plays a role. A bridge collapsing every week for two months would likely have an impact. And there's also a sort of mental inertia: this has been fine for a long time, so everything is still fine now. The latter is why people have died in airplane fires, sitting calmly in their seats, insisting that everything was fine and that they didn't need to evacuate.
  - ithkuil 5y ago
    I think the mental inertia factor is dominant here. Generally speaking people are very bad ad judging objective likelihood of events. Most people don't know often bridges collapse. The wrong estimation goes both ways: a few years in italy there was an outcry for deaths of babies forgotten in the cars by parents (a parent was meant to drive the baby to the nursery but instead drove to work and forgot the baby in the car for hours). It happened a few times over a few years, and as with every random event following the poisson distribution, it also happened that a few such events were clustered in rapid succession such that people thought there was a "baby forgotten in the car" epidemics going on that required some action to be taken; some politician took it on them to push through a law that required every single citizen driving a child up to 4yo to install a device in their backseats that would ring if it detects a weight on the seat and you walk away (and people have been fined for not having bought one). The emotional resonance of the problem was big, but the frequency of the event was blown out of proportion: since 1998 there were 8 cases in a country with 60M people.
tomjen3 5y ago
A potential solution: give large monetary awards to people who prove that a bridge isn't built or maintained properly, that an airplane is faulty, etc. This will ensure people are properly incentivized to do it correctly in the first place, and that somebody is likely to look into the matter.
- b3morales 5y ago
  Open adversarial system like this is hard to balance. If you give private people the privileged access required to effectively investigate, it also gives them a lot of leverage be a harassing nuisance. "Bounty hunter" is not a positive epithet for a reason. If you give the targets the power to shield themselves from that nuisance, it becomes too easy for them to impede rightful investigation.
pdonis 5y ago
> We have to trust that other people will do their jobs, and that they don't bear us an ill will. To an extent, yes. But we can also keep track of who actually has a track record of trustworthy behavior and who doesn't. I do agree that open and free sharing of information is essential for that keeping track to scale, and that institutions in our society have undermined that and have sharply decreased the trust level in US society as a consequence. The appropriate response from us as citizens is to penalize all those people by voting them out of office--even if they are of your favored political party. Whether that will actually happen enough to make a difference is another question.

by donw 5y ago

jimkleiber 5y ago

While I personally do not believe that those orgs "burned literally every ounce of trust they had to get Trump out of office," as I still trust many of them in terms of their skills and intentions, I greatly appreciated how, before that, you laid out your argument for trust overall, so thank you for taking the time to articulate it as you did.

donw 5y ago
Probably because your team is winning, at least in terms of institutional power.
- ben_w 5y ago
  Speaking as a non-American who doesn’t consider either Democrats or Republicans to be “my team”, it looks to me as if Republicans chose Trump in the first place because they have no trust in the system, and Democrats don’t trust Republicans now, not because Republicans chose Trump, but because (and to the extent that) Republicans continue to defend even Trump’s most egregious flaws. Certainly there was sufficient trust by Democrats when, say, Bush Jr beat Gore or Trump beat Clinton, despite the popular vote in both cases. Grumbling about the unfairness, but still accepting who won the presidency. And that’s despite Trump being a birther: claiming Obama wasn’t even eligible to stand for office? That whole thing represented a lack of trust.
  - pdonis 5y ago
    > it looks to me as if Republicans chose Trump in the first place because they have no trust in the system First, I'm not sure Republicans "chose" Trump; it's more that they suddenly found that he had gamed their nomination system and was their candidate and they had no choice but to make the best of it. Second, I'm not sure Republican politicians in general have no trust in the system. They are part of the system as much as Democratic politicians are. > Democrats don’t trust Republicans now, not because Republicans chose Trump, but because (and to the extent that) Republicans continue to defend even Trump’s most egregious flaws. Defending egregious flaws in whoever happens to be the current party front man is nothing new for either party. That may be at least partly because everyone who ends up being a party front man has egregious flaws. Trump's just happened to be more colorful than most.
- jimkleiber 5y ago
  Perhaps, I think a key component of trust is believing those people are on my team and distrust is believing they aren't, whether the other people believe they are or not. So because I generally trust those institutions, yes, I don't believe they're against me. However, I think it's more of a perspective of who's on my team rather than clearly demarcated teams.
  - pdonis 5y ago
    > I think a key component of trust is believing those people are on my team If this means you don't take an objective look at what those people actually do, and judge it by standards independent of any "team", I think it's a very dangerous strategy. The idea that "my team" should win, regardless of what it takes--that the end always justifies the means--I think has caused more human misery than any other idea we humans have had. If you find that your "team" is using unsavory and unpalatable means to achieve what you think is a "greater good", you should not accept the means--you should rethink the "greater good". Based on human history, it's far more likely that the "greater good" is a lot less than you think and will be more than outweighed by the damage done by the unsavory and unpalatable means being used.
    - jimkleiber 5y ago
      I was trying to say that it is hard to trust someone (or an institution) when we believe that they are not on our team. I didn't mean to imply that just because I think they have good or neutral intentions towards me that they won't do something that will harm me or others. I strongly agree they could do things that most people would consider bad, evil, harmful, etc. I think most of us do things that both help and hurt people. Just as I'm against demonizing someone, I'm also against idolizing them, as I believe they both blind us to the good and bad people will do.
      - pdonis 5y ago
        > I was trying to say that it is hard to trust someone (or an institution) when we believe that they are not on our team. And I am saying that the whole concept of "our team" is a dangerous one. We all have to live in the same society. The idea that we should view things in terms of "teams", where our goal is for "our team" to win and for the "other team" to lose, is wrong. We need to all "win", because all of our fates are tied together by living in the same society. We can't "defeat" the "other team" without also defeating ourselves. That's not to say that we must always agree. Of course we will disagree about things, often strongly. But we should disagree as individuals with different opinions about difficult issues where reasonable people can disagree, not as "team members" who feel like we need to play for our own side and against the other. > Just as I'm against demonizing someone, I'm also against idolizing them To me this means you should be against the whole concept of "teams", since that concept by its very nature involves demonizing the "other team" and idolizing "our team".
tomjen3 5y ago
You don't believe that, when any discussion of the laptop was banned to right after the election, and it was considered racist to believe in the lab leak theory, right until the president changed and now it is officially considered a possibility worth investigating? I don't agree with Trump, but I can easily see why somebody might have lost the remaining trust in the institutions.
- jimkleiber 5y ago
  I'm not saying that people don't have their own personal reasons/stories/experiences for losing trust, I just wanted to say that I haven't. And I'm also not saying it's wrong that someone has lost trust, more so to say that not everyone has lost trust.

ithkuil 5y ago

> Trust that bridges are built correctly, The interesting thing about trust in bridges is that it works even after people witness spectacular bridge collapses in their country/area. For example in 2018 a bridge collapsed in Genova, Italy, killing 49 people. At least another two smaller incidents involving collapsed bridges near where I live. And yet people keep crossing bridges every day. You just couldn't function in a modern society if you got paralyzed by fear of bridges; there always were bridges since you were a child and long before; thus you reach the conclusion that such catastrophic events are outliers. I don't think it's because you trust in engineers or society or something like that; you trust yourself and your past experience that you and your friends and family crossed bridges thousands of times and you're still alive

donw 5y ago
Two factors are at play. The total percentage of bridges which have their collapsed, as well the the frequency of collapse, plays a role. A bridge collapsing every week for two months would likely have an impact. And there's also a sort of mental inertia: this has been fine for a long time, so everything is still fine now. The latter is why people have died in airplane fires, sitting calmly in their seats, insisting that everything was fine and that they didn't need to evacuate.
- ithkuil 5y ago
  I think the mental inertia factor is dominant here. Generally speaking people are very bad ad judging objective likelihood of events. Most people don't know often bridges collapse. The wrong estimation goes both ways: a few years in italy there was an outcry for deaths of babies forgotten in the cars by parents (a parent was meant to drive the baby to the nursery but instead drove to work and forgot the baby in the car for hours). It happened a few times over a few years, and as with every random event following the poisson distribution, it also happened that a few such events were clustered in rapid succession such that people thought there was a "baby forgotten in the car" epidemics going on that required some action to be taken; some politician took it on them to push through a law that required every single citizen driving a child up to 4yo to install a device in their backseats that would ring if it detects a weight on the seat and you walk away (and people have been fined for not having bought one). The emotional resonance of the problem was big, but the frequency of the event was blown out of proportion: since 1998 there were 8 cases in a country with 60M people.

tomjen3 5y ago

A potential solution: give large monetary awards to people who prove that a bridge isn't built or maintained properly, that an airplane is faulty, etc. This will ensure people are properly incentivized to do it correctly in the first place, and that somebody is likely to look into the matter.

b3morales 5y ago
Open adversarial system like this is hard to balance. If you give private people the privileged access required to effectively investigate, it also gives them a lot of leverage be a harassing nuisance. "Bounty hunter" is not a positive epithet for a reason. If you give the targets the power to shield themselves from that nuisance, it becomes too easy for them to impede rightful investigation.

pdonis 5y ago

> We have to trust that other people will do their jobs, and that they don't bear us an ill will. To an extent, yes. But we can also keep track of who actually has a track record of trustworthy behavior and who doesn't. I do agree that open and free sharing of information is essential for that keeping track to scale, and that institutions in our society have undermined that and have sharply decreased the trust level in US society as a consequence. The appropriate response from us as citizens is to penalize all those people by voting them out of office--even if they are of your favored political party. Whether that will actually happen enough to make a difference is another question.