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> It's the opposite. Trust nothing, and we end up with pure chaos and the tragedy of the commons. I think it is worse. We only need to look at popular authorit

> It's the opposite. Trust nothing, and we end up with pure chaos and the tragedy of the commons. I think it is worse. We only need to look at popular authoritarian countries. Talk to the peoples that grew up there. Where they fear their neighbors. And that is the point, that is part of the control, you don't know who will "turn you in" for speaking up, so you don't. So you live in fear, you stay quiet for so long that the thoughts become even quiet to yourself. Trust is a necessary part of a society. Trust, but verify. But you still need trust. Without trust, the burdens are far too great. The world is too complex for one man to know everything. We have so much information and there is so much to know, one man is unlikely to even truly know one thing. Look at those with PhDs for an example. How narrow the research is. How narrow their expertise is. Do one yourself and you'll see that there are deep rabbitholes even in what appears to be a very simple topic.

scarface_74 2y ago
> Talk to the peoples that grew up there. Where they fear their neighbors Well I can talk to my parents who grew up in the Jim Crow south where they weren’t trusted to drink from the same water fountain go to the same school or get in the same pool. Or today you can look at any neighborhood’s NextDoor forum when they see a black person “suspiciously” walking in the neighborhood and entering a home with their key. https://abcnews.go.com/amp/US/ving-rhames-officers-pulled-guns-home/story?id=56890288 https://abcnews.go.com/amp/US/ving-rhames-officers-pulled-gu... Not to mention we just elected a President who ran on Haitians are eating pets and fear mongering of “other”.
- ethbr1 2y ago
  > Not to mention we just elected a President who ran on Haitians are eating pets and fear mongering of “other”. Prompted by unverified claims going viral on TikTok. Ceding mindshare to organizations whose only allegiance is to profit (and therefore eyeball time) is a loss, even compared to a world of less-than-perfect professional journalism. Journalism as a well-funded, independent, competitive market for news is the cornerstone of any democracy. Because without it, a populace can't be educated enough to vote in even their own best interests. (Exhibit A: Trump being elected on a manufactured illegal border crossing crisis)
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    So you blame TikTok for a grown man and our now President getting his information from TikTok? The population doesn’t want to be “educated”. They knew exactly what they were getting. How do you “educate” people who in their heart believes that for instance saving Israel will bring on the second coming of Jesus during the rapture and if they condone the “gay lifestyle” they are going to burn for eternity and the nation will be set on fire?
    - ethbr1 2y ago
      I blame the lack of alternatives to TikTok. The US no longer has a market of well-funded, professional sources of journalism. (Of the kind and scale that existed before ~2010) It has for-profit partisan outlets and social media, and those are insufficient substitutes to power a democracy.
      - scarface_74 2y ago
        Again, you blame one of the candidates - someone who we would hope surrounded himself by experts - for believing what he saw on TikTok? There were plenty of alternatives to TikTok to get information that was more credible than a Chinese own media company.
        ethbr1 2y ago
        I do not blame one of the candidates: I blame the failing US media landscape. Look at NYT revenue [0], and it's the largest and most solvent of the big papers left. Newsrooms of everything after it (WSJ, WP, LAT) are even more gutted. 24/7 news channel "journalism" isn't a substitute, even when you can find it between the filler shows. And it takes money to fund high quality journalism. Facebook and Google hijacked those funding streams, but then didn't use those profits to fund an actual replacement. Instead, their platforms (and the ones that came after them) reward attention algorithm hacking and race-to-the-bottom in content quality. And now, they've decided that even funding a fact checking function is inconvenient to their bottom line, so ditched that responsibility as soon as the political winds allowed them to. [0] https://m.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NYT/new-york-times/revenue https://m.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NYT/new-york-times/r...
- codr7 2y ago
  Yep, the fear has to go, and it will.
taurknaut 2y ago
> Trust, but verify Tellingly, Reagan’s America is where I really notice cultural growth dying out and trust vanishing.
- potato3732842 2y ago
  I'd put the bit flip more around the time of Johnson/Nixon.
  - jfengel 2y ago
    There really was a bit flip at the time, though it was more of a return to form. It grew out of McCarthyism and the John Birch Society, which themselves were the phoenixes born of the ashes of paranoia about anarchists and communists from the early 20th century. And more controversially, I'd trace that to the same arguments as the Civil War and going back before the Revolution. We seem to have had periods of calm prosperity (post Civil War, post WW II) against a base of xenophobia and internal dissension that goes beyond just ordinary differences of opinion. The late 60s were the end of one of those periods, and it has been an exponential curve ever since. It's all inflection points for over half a century.
- grraaaaahhh 2y ago
  I feel like its easy for "Trust, but verify" to degrade into "Verify, then trust". It's that initial step of distrust while verifying that starts to sour things.

scarface_74 2y ago

> Talk to the peoples that grew up there. Where they fear their neighbors Well I can talk to my parents who grew up in the Jim Crow south where they weren’t trusted to drink from the same water fountain go to the same school or get in the same pool. Or today you can look at any neighborhood’s NextDoor forum when they see a black person “suspiciously” walking in the neighborhood and entering a home with their key. https://abcnews.go.com/amp/US/ving-rhames-officers-pulled-guns-home/story?id=56890288 https://abcnews.go.com/amp/US/ving-rhames-officers-pulled-gu... Not to mention we just elected a President who ran on Haitians are eating pets and fear mongering of “other”.

ethbr1 2y ago
> Not to mention we just elected a President who ran on Haitians are eating pets and fear mongering of “other”. Prompted by unverified claims going viral on TikTok. Ceding mindshare to organizations whose only allegiance is to profit (and therefore eyeball time) is a loss, even compared to a world of less-than-perfect professional journalism. Journalism as a well-funded, independent, competitive market for news is the cornerstone of any democracy. Because without it, a populace can't be educated enough to vote in even their own best interests. (Exhibit A: Trump being elected on a manufactured illegal border crossing crisis)
- scarface_74 2y ago
  So you blame TikTok for a grown man and our now President getting his information from TikTok? The population doesn’t want to be “educated”. They knew exactly what they were getting. How do you “educate” people who in their heart believes that for instance saving Israel will bring on the second coming of Jesus during the rapture and if they condone the “gay lifestyle” they are going to burn for eternity and the nation will be set on fire?
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    I blame the lack of alternatives to TikTok. The US no longer has a market of well-funded, professional sources of journalism. (Of the kind and scale that existed before ~2010) It has for-profit partisan outlets and social media, and those are insufficient substitutes to power a democracy.
    - scarface_74 2y ago
      Again, you blame one of the candidates - someone who we would hope surrounded himself by experts - for believing what he saw on TikTok? There were plenty of alternatives to TikTok to get information that was more credible than a Chinese own media company.
      - ethbr1 2y ago
        I do not blame one of the candidates: I blame the failing US media landscape. Look at NYT revenue [0], and it's the largest and most solvent of the big papers left. Newsrooms of everything after it (WSJ, WP, LAT) are even more gutted. 24/7 news channel "journalism" isn't a substitute, even when you can find it between the filler shows. And it takes money to fund high quality journalism. Facebook and Google hijacked those funding streams, but then didn't use those profits to fund an actual replacement. Instead, their platforms (and the ones that came after them) reward attention algorithm hacking and race-to-the-bottom in content quality. And now, they've decided that even funding a fact checking function is inconvenient to their bottom line, so ditched that responsibility as soon as the political winds allowed them to. [0] https://m.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NYT/new-york-times/revenue https://m.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NYT/new-york-times/r...
codr7 2y ago
Yep, the fear has to go, and it will.

taurknaut 2y ago

> Trust, but verify Tellingly, Reagan’s America is where I really notice cultural growth dying out and trust vanishing.

potato3732842 2y ago
I'd put the bit flip more around the time of Johnson/Nixon.
- jfengel 2y ago
  There really was a bit flip at the time, though it was more of a return to form. It grew out of McCarthyism and the John Birch Society, which themselves were the phoenixes born of the ashes of paranoia about anarchists and communists from the early 20th century. And more controversially, I'd trace that to the same arguments as the Civil War and going back before the Revolution. We seem to have had periods of calm prosperity (post Civil War, post WW II) against a base of xenophobia and internal dissension that goes beyond just ordinary differences of opinion. The late 60s were the end of one of those periods, and it has been an exponential curve ever since. It's all inflection points for over half a century.
grraaaaahhh 2y ago
I feel like its easy for "Trust, but verify" to degrade into "Verify, then trust". It's that initial step of distrust while verifying that starts to sour things.