Comment by elgertam
12 hours ago
> it's more about America transitioning from a high-trust society to a low-trust one.
We're talking about Princeton, here. Trust among elites remains persistently high. In fact, it's likely higher than ever due to assortative mating & geographic sorting. Elites, even students in the Ivies, still have trust of government and elite institutions, which the elite stratum itself runs. Trust between elites and lower strata has declined, where elites and middle- and lower-classes have significant mistrust between each other, and the latter have lower trust within their own strata than in the past.
What's more likely IMO is that 1) the cost of cheating (i.e. the cost of assembling a ripped off assignment multiplied by the risk of being caught) has declined precipitously due to LLMs and 2) elite institutions remain the most ruthlessly competitive in the country and even the world.
> Trust among elites remains persistently high
I don't think any human alive believes this. The "elite" are just known as being scammers who lie and BS about everything very openly and they'd sell their own child if it got them a dollar. The past 10 years have been nothing but "elites" churning scams and paying bribes and bragging about it. They most certainly aren't trusting each other. Just look at how the president holds people up as his greatest ally one day, then discards and villainizes them the next day once he realizes he can get more benefit from elsewhere.
I think Trump is an exception, a cult leader in the worst place possible.
The elite in-group trust hypothesis would however explain Musk sustaining an unreasonable Tesla share price in the face of falling sales, delayed launches to the extent competitors pre-empt him on his own announcements, and political toxicity to the extent his showrooms got smashed up and burned.
The morgue manager at Harvard Medical School spent five years selling donated body parts online. The Cornell president just backed his Cadillac into a student asking him a question in a parking lot. This isn't high-trust culture. It's people who stopped believing anyone was watching.
> It's people who stopped believing anyone was watching.
Which, in the era of social media, video surveillance, smartphones and dashcams, is crazy. Once you leave your home, you have to assume everything you do is recorded and might end up online or in court.
These people don't operated under that assumption because they run the systems. They don't care if it's recorded because the system will never make a big deal out of it. Ain't no different than a cop driving drunk because his coworkers won't prosecute him.