4 ms·

The Scarcest Thing in the World

• croes 3y ago
  Dark ages are coming. This one fits in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37108580 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37108580
  • tgv 3y ago
    They are coming again. This time, the techies will have been instrumental in its creation, purely out of self-interest.
• hulitu 3y ago
  > I’d pay more for trust, and I’m not the only one. Good luck then. You need to pay more than Google or Apple though. > At first, politicians took the biggest hit. During the course of my lifetime, public trust in elected officials has collapsed from 75% to 25%. It's no wonder. After years of only protecting the interests of the big companies while taking money from them, nobody trusts them anymore.
  • glimshe 3y ago
    Politicians from the even older days also protected the interests of big businesses, landowners etc. Gosh, traditionally politicians were the big landowners. There is something else to it. The charts begin in the post-WW2 era, maybe there was major influence from the government's success in defeating the Axis.
• Archelaos 3y ago
  This article itself is free. Can I trust it?
  • quickthrower2 3y ago
    No. You read and make up your own mind. But it always has been like this with the written or spoken word. “Seeing is believing” is no more, at least in the digital realm. Physical is safe for now.
• 1letterunixname 3y ago
  Chris Hedges' rhetoric of "digital hallucinations" now has a literal meaning. I'm wondering how long it will be before a far-fetched, sophisticated false news story is planted with multiple videos of shaky and grainy "cellphone" footage that will lead to mass panic or war, Gulf War WMDs, Gulf of Tonkin, and Spanish-American wars notwithstanding. EDIT: Perhaps we need a chain-of-custody trust framework for cameras with cryptographic-signatures incorporating device model, serial number, time, and location for authentication purposes.
  • tetha 3y ago
    You just made me think of the War of the Worlds radio show from 1938[1]. This feels very similar and the article touches on that too: The radio was the one trustworthy medium with a short latency. Newspapers were also considered trustworthy back in the day, but overall slower - couple hours to 1-2 days from event to news. And now it was telling you aliens were attacking earth - and even with the reminders how this is fictional - it resulted in panic. And then consider the capabilities of deep-faking images and voices, and add an actual malicious intent behind it. That's indeed pretty chilling. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds_(1938_radio_drama) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds_(1938_ra...
    • drewcoo 3y ago
      In which day were newspapers considered trustworthy? _My_ newspapers were trustworthy but _theirs_ were not, just like today. Here in America, very vitriolic, libelous, openly lawless newspapers helped lead to the US Revolution. We have much laxer laws about quality and stronger protections for the press than Britain as a result. We have a tradition of encouraging lies and counter-lies to be published. The War of the Worlds seemed real to some people because it used the typical means of interrupting the show for breaking emergency news that people were used to at the time. It's not that radio was trusted. Some people were fooled. There's no real evidence of a national panic as a result, though. There were a great number of highly questionable newspaper articles claiming there was a panic, though, as papers will.
      • 3y ago
• c7DJTLrn 3y ago
  I think chemical warfare is much scarier than machine-generated images of the Pope wearing a puffer jacket. edit: title says scarcest not scariest
  • bombcar 3y ago
    Linux is much scarier! https://youtu.be/zpVD24fBI7g https://youtu.be/zpVD24fBI7g
  • quickthrower2 3y ago
    I think ai driven psy-ops is scarier than dissolving salt in water
• riedel 3y ago
  The most clickbait title in the world? (Spoiler alert: 'trust' is debatably 'the scarcest thing in the world'). I think we just had a very short period of universal information access during about 20 years in history in which we thought we do not need trust (as in trusted third parties, or journalism). I guess we just have to learn to build our trust bubbles again in an efficient way and pay people to be our trust anchors.
  • soneca 3y ago
    And the article is full of those clickbait tricks. Like: > ”Or if I had told you that your dinner at a Paris restaurant might be made out of bugs, you would have thought this was a horror film or comedy routine. But not anymore—so take a close look at that special du jour before chowing down.” I thought a restaurant was serving something made of bugs without disclosing it to customers, pretending it was something else. Turns out, the linked news article is just about EU approving insects for human consumption. That is not even remotely related to lack of trust. Only in his imaginative and speculative mind where that will lead to restaurants lying about their ingredients. It’s not evidence of scarcity of trust. It felt very dishonest from someone calling themselves “honest broker”.
    • cyberlurker 3y ago
      I clicked that link and had that tab opened to read later. The idea that Parisian restaurants were serving bugs maliciously had me concerned. Your comment reminded me to check it out. It’s frustrating that I fell for clickbait in a blog about “trust”.
• sebzim4500 3y ago
  >Mark Zuckerberg bet his entire company on something fake How so? Assuming the guy you are talking to is real, what's the difference between talking to someone in VR and in a skype call? >It’s no secret how you construct one. You emphasize transparency and straight talk. You don’t manipulate people—which is the defining vice of our age. Instead you respect their rights, which also come with responsibilities. Above all, you strive for honesty. Ok great. Everyone will still assume you are lying. The most interesting thing in this article is that 65% of employees trust their employer, I would expect it to be much lower.
• drewcoo 3y ago
  People seem to have at least two distinct and often conflicting things in mind when they talk about trust: 1. Is this person honest and/or truthful (which is not the same as honest)? 2. Does this person conform to our tribal ways of acting/speaking/etc.? 3. Do I believe I can benefit from this person? 4. Other? It's difficult to have meaningful conversations about such a confusing subject unless all of that is untangled, imo.
  • brabel 3y ago
    Please don't try to redefine words based on your personal experiences. Words have meaning, and the only trustworthy source we have for those meanings, when in doubt, is the dictionary (and it's the job of dictionaries to keep the meaning up-to-date as yes, word meanings may change over time): "Trust: to believe that someone is good and honest and will not harm you, or that something is safe and reliable" Source: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/trust https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/trust Your meaning numbers 2 and 3 are not included, and I would think nearly everyone agrees that's not part of the meaning of the word.
• whywhywhywhy 3y ago
  > Twitter changes requirements for verification checks. What was once a sign that you could trust somebody’s identity gets turned into a status symbol, sold to anybody willing to pay for it It was already a status symbol that was sold to anyone willing to pay, the price was around $15K.
  • quijoteuniv 3y ago
    That people trust in things before it does not mean that they were trustworthy. Am i mistaken?
• fallingknife 3y ago
  > Mark Zuckerberg bet his entire company on something fake—but he could just as easily have tried to increase the trustworthiness of his platform. Users would have loved that, and embraced it with much more enthusiaism than his failing metaverse. I think it's hilarious how much journalists don't trust Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, et al. But at the same time continually call for them to censor "misinformation" and trust that they would do it well.
  • chrisjj 3y ago
    Some journos do one; some do the other. But which does both - at the same time??
• bambax 3y ago
  All information isn't created equal. It doesn't actually matter if some people believe a photo of the Pope wearing a Balenciaga puffer jacket is real. When it does matter, disinformation so far doesn't seem to work. It's very likely Russia is trying to disseminate fake news of all sorts about the war in Ukraine, but even the label it came up with ("special military operation") never caught up, except as a joke. A different but related problem is conspiracies. But most often they're not caused by people trusting sources they shouldn't, but by the opposite: people not trusting reliable sources. It was Cardinal de Retz, a French political schemer and memoirist, who said: "On est plus souvent dupé par la défiance que par la confiance" -- One is more often fooled by mistrust than by trust. Contrary to what the article seems to be saying (not sure about that, as it's far from clear), I would think excess of caution is more problematic that misplaced trust.
• apienx 3y ago
  On average, there's a lot more trust than in the past. 1- Tribalism has been steadily declining. In the past, people tended to assume the worst (because of a more hostile environment). 2- Registries, ratings, scores, and other records are widespread, available, and (by and large) trustworthy. Certifications and other credentials make it easier to evaluate competence. We are much more likely to "trust" people these days. 3- People believed in metaphysical phenomena. Trust in reality has never been higher IMHO. The level of education is rising. Half of the population was emancipated quite recently. 4- Tech-enabled trustless consensus is not something you can just dismiss. It's a recent concept. It may have profound implications. 5- Societies have gotten more resilient. The standards of living keep going up. Trust thrives in wealthy communities. There's no trust crisis. In absolute terms, there are more scams and disinformation attempts than before (because the world gets more complex). But proportionally speaking, I don't think trust is at its lowest. The examples and stats in the article are only valid when adopting a narrow view.
• bryanlarsen 3y ago
  A good rule of thumb is that anybody labeling themselves as honest usually isn't. "Honest Al's Used Car Sales".