Comment by tveita
2 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-trust_and_low-trust_socie...
Trust is a technology, the transition to a high-trust society unlocks so much potential that was previously used on "basic" tasks like guarding your property, making sure your food is fit to eat, not getting scammed in a trade etc.
Bruce Schneier has written a book about trust https://www.schneier.com/books/liars-and-outliers/ ; I don't want to oversell it, I didn't find it amazing, but it has some very relevant discussion on how trust has evolved into our society and institutions. Ultimately a society where people can't trust each other and communicate efficiently will be outcompeted by a society where people can, either through individual altruism, societal norms or institutional enforcement.
The level of trust in society is game theoretical and unstable at the extremes. I don’t really consider it technology either, you can easily envision hunter gatherers having high or low trust perspectives towards other bands based on eg prior interactions, shared language/beliefs/culture. Calling this technology is like calling language technology, maybe it is, but I think it’s also something we developed evolutionarily because it was advantageous.
From the game theory perspective, a high trust society makes it easy for bad actors to abuse that trust for personal gain, which at large scale lowers trust at the societal level. A low trust society incentivizes people to build subcommunities of higher trust to get things done (which can grow to encompass lots of society) or can be outcompeted by a higher trust society, as you say. Maybe this is all covered in that book.
Clearly there is enough variance to say that societies do not all gravitate towards a fixed equilibrium though. I think a lot of this is due to institutions (eg religion, government, educational systems, militaries) and cultural factors (some cultures value cunning and ruthlessness, others conformity, etc. which can be influenced even by language or the physical environment). Many edgy internet commenters seem to equate low/high trust with race and ethnicity, but if you have ever been in a well run technology company or the US military, or a low-trust homogenous society, you’ll see this obviously wrong.
What I’ve been thinking about a lot lately while I bootstrap is whether it’s possible for a group to be resilient to “selfish” bad actors by making cooperation strictly more optimal than defection. At small scales I think this can be accomplished through a BDFL but I’m really interested in figuring out if another approach can scale into the ~thousands.
What concerns me is the possibility of a zero-trust society that nonetheless shambles onward by having a lot of law enforcement. It's kind of like that in Russia, where you're often buying adulterated foods at the grocery store, but there is nothing you can do about it and the mafia (a.k.a. the government) won't let it get bad enough to outright kill everyone. So, it goes on forever. China might be another example, where the history of communism followed by capitalism under cultural authoritarianism has virtually eliminated the social fabric, but the system clings on through extraordinary measures.
In fact, if you look at these "low-trust" societies, all of them have some reason why they haven't been replaced by the high-trust subcultures that you mentioned, reasons usually involving guns.
I mean, that was the case even moreso in the Soviet Union right? They are the inventors of the phrase “Trust, but verify” after all, as well as the term “politically correct” (before it turned into a slightly different culture war term).
I think Trust is not really one singular thing either, and it kind of falls apart when you look at places like China or Japan. For example in Japan people don’t generally fear petty theft of bikes or electronics, but they have women-only train cars and the government forces smartphone cameras to make a sound to prevent creepshots. In China you have the zero-sum “it is good for me when others fail” mentality but also Guanxi and genuine patriotism.
Probably technology and law enforcement does allow large scale societies to persist with extremely low trust, but the more concentrated power becomes, the more that state’s continuance is subject to the whims of a small number of people that could either change their mind (like Gorbachev) or fuck things up so badly that they get overthrown (Romania). I think it helps that leaders and police/secret-police also live within that broader low-trust society and so they do have some incentive to not make it too bad.
> What concerns me is the possibility of a zero-trust society that nonetheless shambles onward by having a lot of law enforcement.
I consider law enforcement a critical part of a high trust society. I can operate a business and offer lower prices because I don't have to spend extra money on security to defend my goods because I trust that the law will punish thieves. Many times in society I won't do something because, e.g. speeding, because I know the law will come down on me for doing so, even if I know in the short term it would be advantageous for me.
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Trust is a valuable and precarious thing, It's hard and slow to build but easy to destroy. It's our greatest advantage against authoritarian regimes, and that's why destroying trust is a long term strategy of non-linear warfare against our culture.
Like fossil fuels that take millions of years to form, but can be burned in half a century, trust is burned (enshitification) as cheap accumulated social capital by those without higher loyalty. This for me is why financialisation sucks the life out of nations and why greedy and selfish big-tech companies are some of the most treacherous of all entities.
Fiancialisation and short term incentives are part of the problem, but not all of it.
In tech (and increasingly elsewhere) businesses have realised there are other ways to keep repeat customers without needing customer trust: lock-in, buying out competitors, network effects, being the best for long enough to obliterate competition (at least in customer's minds), branding tied to identity etc. Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Google etc. have very little to gain from trust or products that are better for consumers as people will use their products regardless.
Of course businesses require some level of trust. If Amazon simply took your money half the time and didn't ship your order, they would have problems. Of course, we can debate the degree to which they should be selective about and have more controls over third-party shippers, etc. But tradeoffs (and there are almost always tradeoffs) are different from saying that trust doesn't play a role at all.
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"Trust is a technology?"
I had no idea that other social animals were so high-tech!
According to the Silicon Valley mindset, anything is a technology if you try hard enough to squeeze money out of it.