I just remember reading "the rational optimist", and they talked about and trust trade.
Basically with trust, trade is unfettered.
We trade productively with trust and we all prosper.
I see this in my life. I have good trust in costco, and I buy there with very little friction/mistrust. I know a bunch of things - they give me a decent price without trickery (unless you count giving my money back as rebates), they vet the products they sell, and they have a great return policy if I don't like the purchase for any reason.
meanwhile buying an airplane ticket, making a hotel reservation or getting a tow truck. That is a low-trust high-nonsense situation that makes me unhappy from reservation to checkout, almost to the point I dread travel. I do travel less, and I'm less spontaneous.
I find myself at Costco several times a week lately, and I always try to interact with employees. Even just "hello", "good morning", or "thanks I'm a fan of your work" gives you an opportunity to sense if employees are happy and treated well.
Good companies take care of their employees and customers.
Amazon solved trust is very much different than my perception of them:
- ads everywhere trying to push low quality product
- fake/bought product reviews
- commingled inventory (up until recently, still I would never buy food items, drugs or other health sensitive items like air filters or sunscreen there)
People have gotten more and more exposed to how the government and politicians have been lying to them for decades. What would you expect but a low trust society with this.
Politicians have been breaking promises and not answering direct questions and burying inconvenient facts for decades.
They've only recently started directly lying.
There is a difference and conflating the two is a large part of the problem.
You can find examples of them lying in history, but those were huge scandals that brought down governments. Lying had consequences. That's what we've lost
Started in the 1950s with the dawn of consumer credit. Mis selling that to buyers was highly profitable and everywhere. Really shook people’s trust. The dawn of the salesman.
Before that it was merely single low trust events. Scandals type. Lead in paint style.
That is not really true, at least from the "global history" point of view.
Sovereigns would debase coins routinely. Scammers would sell snake oil medicine in every village, then disappear. The Church would sell absolutions. All sorts of fake goods flooded the markets, from wine to guano. Bubbles like the South Sea Bubble devastated entire economies. Arguably the Ancient Régime in France was fatally weakened by too many such scandals on its watch.
Quite a lot of the current regulatory framework is a reaction to the ubiquity of scams in history.
Trust has been eroded for the last 30 years for many reasons and most of them are due to how the politicians and public institutions have behaved.
In all western countries, if you dig a little, you will find scandals after scandals from the ruling parties or the so called elite.
Why should a lambda citizen believe that there is any sense of trust anymore when those who are at the top clearly have no problem lying to get in or stay in power?
It's the same problem with the media biases. Newspapers and news organizations have completely stopped providing information and started pushing propaganda. Nothing more.
Then we lament the loss of confidence and the demise of democracy in the west.
The Fourth Turning argues institutional effectiveness is cyclical and that the US is headeds towards the end of tearing down institutions versus building them up (and towards the end of focus on self versus community).
This does assume the current crisis is successfully resolved as it was for the Civil War and Great Depression/WWII.
Prior to the Internet, it was much harder to keep up with all the dirty details of whatever was happening in your parliament/Congress/government/town hall. Most people defaulted to a certain degree of trust by being happily ignorant.
There is a common note among the old political journalists (I mean 100+ years ago) saying that the practical execution of power was extremely dirty and that blessed is anyone who does not know.
Hmmm. This also means that there is an opportunity in there.
In the Early Modern Ages, powerful people wove endless plots against one another, the Borgias held papacy, poisoning was a common way to solve disputes, all sorts of offices were sold openly...
... and in the middle of this, the Huguenots and Calvinists built huge business empires by being known as honest and reliable.
Maybe there is some space to repeat this by just avoiding the entshittification trap. I can see this happening in some corners of the IT world already. For example, Cloudflare has a good reputation in almost all regards. Linux has also held and expanded its market share by not being scammy and sleazy.
I even feel that CloudFlare is beginning to go the way of the enshittification — I don’t have anything in particular to point to at the moment but the data points are adding up, for me
This is interesting because there is a cheating epidemic going on in higher education and I'm continuously wondering what happens if it isn't resolved. Students cheating with impunity breeds more students cheating, into a spiral until all students cheat and the credentials becomes meaningless.
The credentials enable trust at scale.
You're pointing at people leaning on reputations for trust. What happens when the most reputable institutional credentials no longer represent the quality they once did?
Also high schools. demographics of Thomas Jefferson High School (one of the best in the country) vs. Fairfax county.
I spent decades foolishly believing people didn’t cheat because I grew up around a bunch of Christians. Now, cheating is pervasive. Game theory in action
Interesting. When I was at university there were a few foreign contingents known for cheating academically. It was unexpected and strange ...yet, despite that, some of the students were smart yet cheated in areas they were weak in. But also didn't seem to mind sharing assignments in any area among themselves. I guess they assumed they'd learn much of what they needed in the real-world on the job.
It's sad to learn this attitude has begun to permeate our own students. People want to take short-cuts and skip the work necessary to get to the goal and miss out on the learning aspect. Maybe they expect "A.I" to do the thinking for them --but then what will they have to offer a prospective emplyer?
I attended Caltech in the 70s when it had an honor system. An anecdote on how it worked:
A fellow student of mine, "Bob", was taking Ama95, a required class that was one of the hardest classes. All exams were take home, open book, open note, but with a time limit of 2 hours. There was no proctoring, and nobody would know if one took extra time or not.
Bob took the exam to his dorm room, closed the door, and set the timer at 2 hours. He had been up late studying, and fell asleep. The timer woke him. He figured he'd been asleep for an hour. So he drew a line in his blue book, and continued taking the test for another hour. He then wrote an explanation of the line and what had happened, and turned it in.
He received an F. The professor was very apologetic, but explained that he had no choice.
Bob received the news with equanimity, and signed up to take the class again next year. He related this story in a matter of fact manner to a group of us in the dorm library.
The thing about the honor system is it turned the students and professors into collaborators rather than adversaries. The students liked the honor system very much. If their best friend cheated, they'd turn him in. Hence, any attempt at organized cheating meant ostracism. I never saw any of that in my time there.
Nobody stole anything in the dorm that I was aware of.
For contrast, I attended a class at a local college. One of the other students befriended me, and it turned out he did that to convince me to help him cheat. (I declined.) A friend of mine attended another university, and the day he moved into his freshman dorm room it was looted.
Caltech still has the honor system and it was in full effect when I was there in the 2000s-2010s. According to a family member attending as undergrad now, it hasn’t changed.
(Was PCC the local college? That also hasn’t changed except for higher fees and a nicer engineering building)
On a sophomore physics midterm, 60% of the students failed the test (including yours truly). The professor was rather angry about that in the next lecture. Said we needed to work harder.
(Grading on a curve was against institute policy.)
Another unusual oddity: there were no "honors" courses or "weeder" course tracks. No remedial classes, either. (Sadly, Harvard now offers remedial math for their incoming students. Given the intense competition for admission to Harvard, one wonders what their criteria is. The Prof Kingsley days must be long gone.)
> but I do not think the problem is capitalism itself as much as institutions and structures that force short-term rewards.
Capitalism, at least its currently flavor, seems to increasingly favor short term rewards.
Nothing is planned and built for the long term. Companies have no interest in selling you a product that lasts forever. Planned obsolescence and things built to fail are commonplace. In fact they would rather not sell you products, but that you rent them instead.
Governments operate on short term election cycles. Corporations operate in quarterly reports. If something makes sense for the long term but is bad on the short term, it is scraped.
The thing is that petty crime affects the man and woman on the street and it infects lots of others too who figure out, whelp, I guess this is how it works/ A politician embezzling is bad but you don't experience it directly --but for your tax dollars not doing what they are supposed to be doing.
People can put up with a sleazy politician but they can't live comfortably knowing they can't trust their neighbors or trust the police to fight crime for them when the police know DAs will reduce charges, drop charges, etc. Like why bother putting in hard work where you're putting your wellbeing in the balance just so that criminals go unpunished... eventually you end up with a "Caracas" & wild-west experience.
Quite to the contrary, when we observe rampant cheating from the presidency down to shrinkflating food and freeriding the subway, it is a good argument for having an universal morality problem.
There isn't a dichotomy between the saintly people and the scummy political class. A nontrivial part of the voter base of the scummy politicians is formed by regular scummy voters.
There are many faults with the Japanese justice system --but letting petty crime go doesn't tend to be one of them. I'm glad there are places on earth where they still believe in a structured society where actions have predictable consequences.
I have not lived in “the city,” meaning New York, so I cannot speak from direct experience.
I agree that trust is not maintained by moral sentiment alone. But the United States is already a society with relatively harsh punishment, and yet it still has a high crime rate.
So I do not think law enforcement is the whole explanation.
That's because having to pay the large fine does not deter crime, and bumping the price does not have a major affect. Increasing the odds of getting caught is much more effective. [0] shows states this outright in the abstract
I don't even think the examples provided are even what most people would call "trust" scenarios. In most of these examples we should have never ever assumed any trust on the other party in the first place.
I just remember reading "the rational optimist", and they talked about and trust trade.
Basically with trust, trade is unfettered.
We trade productively with trust and we all prosper.
I see this in my life. I have good trust in costco, and I buy there with very little friction/mistrust. I know a bunch of things - they give me a decent price without trickery (unless you count giving my money back as rebates), they vet the products they sell, and they have a great return policy if I don't like the purchase for any reason.
meanwhile buying an airplane ticket, making a hotel reservation or getting a tow truck. That is a low-trust high-nonsense situation that makes me unhappy from reservation to checkout, almost to the point I dread travel. I do travel less, and I'm less spontaneous.
I find myself at Costco several times a week lately, and I always try to interact with employees. Even just "hello", "good morning", or "thanks I'm a fan of your work" gives you an opportunity to sense if employees are happy and treated well.
Good companies take care of their employees and customers.
https://www.costcotravel.com/
> Every email could be phishing. Every phone call could be fraud.
From my personal experience I can say that the majority of E-Mails is spam and the majority of phone calls is fraud.
Every ad could be a virus is why everyone has ad blockers.
Amazon solved trust. Credit cards did too. Guaranteed reliable help when things do go wrong is one way to do it.
Cross border commerce makes trust worse because you can never get justice for being wronged.
Amazon solved trust is very much different than my perception of them:
- ads everywhere trying to push low quality product
- fake/bought product reviews
- commingled inventory (up until recently, still I would never buy food items, drugs or other health sensitive items like air filters or sunscreen there)
This is true to a certain degree, you’ll be wrecked by reviews. If you’re a brand selling direct, then you’re cooked forever by bad reviews.
Best saying I heard on this topic: trust is speed
And time is money.
People have gotten more and more exposed to how the government and politicians have been lying to them for decades. What would you expect but a low trust society with this.
Politicians have been breaking promises and not answering direct questions and burying inconvenient facts for decades.
They've only recently started directly lying.
There is a difference and conflating the two is a large part of the problem.
You can find examples of them lying in history, but those were huge scandals that brought down governments. Lying had consequences. That's what we've lost
Started in the 1950s with the dawn of consumer credit. Mis selling that to buyers was highly profitable and everywhere. Really shook people’s trust. The dawn of the salesman.
Before that it was merely single low trust events. Scandals type. Lead in paint style.
That is not really true, at least from the "global history" point of view.
Sovereigns would debase coins routinely. Scammers would sell snake oil medicine in every village, then disappear. The Church would sell absolutions. All sorts of fake goods flooded the markets, from wine to guano. Bubbles like the South Sea Bubble devastated entire economies. Arguably the Ancient Régime in France was fatally weakened by too many such scandals on its watch.
Quite a lot of the current regulatory framework is a reaction to the ubiquity of scams in history.
Trust has been eroded for the last 30 years for many reasons and most of them are due to how the politicians and public institutions have behaved.
In all western countries, if you dig a little, you will find scandals after scandals from the ruling parties or the so called elite.
Why should a lambda citizen believe that there is any sense of trust anymore when those who are at the top clearly have no problem lying to get in or stay in power?
It's the same problem with the media biases. Newspapers and news organizations have completely stopped providing information and started pushing propaganda. Nothing more.
Then we lament the loss of confidence and the demise of democracy in the west.
The Fourth Turning argues institutional effectiveness is cyclical and that the US is headeds towards the end of tearing down institutions versus building them up (and towards the end of focus on self versus community).
This does assume the current crisis is successfully resolved as it was for the Civil War and Great Depression/WWII.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fourth_Turning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fourth_Turning_Is_Here
Increased transparency is part of the process.
Prior to the Internet, it was much harder to keep up with all the dirty details of whatever was happening in your parliament/Congress/government/town hall. Most people defaulted to a certain degree of trust by being happily ignorant.
There is a common note among the old political journalists (I mean 100+ years ago) saying that the practical execution of power was extremely dirty and that blessed is anyone who does not know.
Well, now we all know.
Hmmm. This also means that there is an opportunity in there.
In the Early Modern Ages, powerful people wove endless plots against one another, the Borgias held papacy, poisoning was a common way to solve disputes, all sorts of offices were sold openly...
... and in the middle of this, the Huguenots and Calvinists built huge business empires by being known as honest and reliable.
Maybe there is some space to repeat this by just avoiding the entshittification trap. I can see this happening in some corners of the IT world already. For example, Cloudflare has a good reputation in almost all regards. Linux has also held and expanded its market share by not being scammy and sleazy.
I even feel that CloudFlare is beginning to go the way of the enshittification — I don’t have anything in particular to point to at the moment but the data points are adding up, for me
[flagged]
This is interesting because there is a cheating epidemic going on in higher education and I'm continuously wondering what happens if it isn't resolved. Students cheating with impunity breeds more students cheating, into a spiral until all students cheat and the credentials becomes meaningless.
The credentials enable trust at scale.
You're pointing at people leaning on reputations for trust. What happens when the most reputable institutional credentials no longer represent the quality they once did?
Just one more unsettling thing to think about
Also high schools. demographics of Thomas Jefferson High School (one of the best in the country) vs. Fairfax county.
I spent decades foolishly believing people didn’t cheat because I grew up around a bunch of Christians. Now, cheating is pervasive. Game theory in action
> I spent decades foolishly believing people didn’t cheat because I grew up around a bunch of Christians.
I will just say this: "Christians" is not a wholly uniform population.
Good point. Presbyterians specifically
That's... Not what they are saying.
They are saying, ironically, that claimed membership of that group or belief isn't actually a high trust signal.
I think they meant Christians cheat a lot (or, enough of them do so as to not be a high trust signal).
Interesting. When I was at university there were a few foreign contingents known for cheating academically. It was unexpected and strange ...yet, despite that, some of the students were smart yet cheated in areas they were weak in. But also didn't seem to mind sharing assignments in any area among themselves. I guess they assumed they'd learn much of what they needed in the real-world on the job.
It's sad to learn this attitude has begun to permeate our own students. People want to take short-cuts and skip the work necessary to get to the goal and miss out on the learning aspect. Maybe they expect "A.I" to do the thinking for them --but then what will they have to offer a prospective emplyer?
[flagged]
I attended Caltech in the 70s when it had an honor system. An anecdote on how it worked:
A fellow student of mine, "Bob", was taking Ama95, a required class that was one of the hardest classes. All exams were take home, open book, open note, but with a time limit of 2 hours. There was no proctoring, and nobody would know if one took extra time or not.
Bob took the exam to his dorm room, closed the door, and set the timer at 2 hours. He had been up late studying, and fell asleep. The timer woke him. He figured he'd been asleep for an hour. So he drew a line in his blue book, and continued taking the test for another hour. He then wrote an explanation of the line and what had happened, and turned it in.
He received an F. The professor was very apologetic, but explained that he had no choice.
Bob received the news with equanimity, and signed up to take the class again next year. He related this story in a matter of fact manner to a group of us in the dorm library.
The thing about the honor system is it turned the students and professors into collaborators rather than adversaries. The students liked the honor system very much. If their best friend cheated, they'd turn him in. Hence, any attempt at organized cheating meant ostracism. I never saw any of that in my time there.
Nobody stole anything in the dorm that I was aware of.
For contrast, I attended a class at a local college. One of the other students befriended me, and it turned out he did that to convince me to help him cheat. (I declined.) A friend of mine attended another university, and the day he moved into his freshman dorm room it was looted.
Caltech still has the honor system and it was in full effect when I was there in the 2000s-2010s. According to a family member attending as undergrad now, it hasn’t changed.
(Was PCC the local college? That also hasn’t changed except for higher fees and a nicer engineering building)
No, the local college was in Kansas where my parents lived.
Some evidence that there wasn't rampant cheating:
On a sophomore physics midterm, 60% of the students failed the test (including yours truly). The professor was rather angry about that in the next lecture. Said we needed to work harder.
(Grading on a curve was against institute policy.)
Another unusual oddity: there were no "honors" courses or "weeder" course tracks. No remedial classes, either. (Sadly, Harvard now offers remedial math for their incoming students. Given the intense competition for admission to Harvard, one wonders what their criteria is. The Prof Kingsley days must be long gone.)
[dead]
The more people lose trust in your work history and other credentials, the more metaphorical leetcode becomes relevant.
> but I do not think the problem is capitalism itself as much as institutions and structures that force short-term rewards.
Capitalism, at least its currently flavor, seems to increasingly favor short term rewards.
Nothing is planned and built for the long term. Companies have no interest in selling you a product that lasts forever. Planned obsolescence and things built to fail are commonplace. In fact they would rather not sell you products, but that you rent them instead.
Governments operate on short term election cycles. Corporations operate in quarterly reports. If something makes sense for the long term but is bad on the short term, it is scraped.
[flagged]
Yeah the unpunished petty crime is the reason, not the entire economy and every politician existing solely to scam everyone.
We don't punish politicians who run scams, and the result is predictable.
The thing is that petty crime affects the man and woman on the street and it infects lots of others too who figure out, whelp, I guess this is how it works/ A politician embezzling is bad but you don't experience it directly --but for your tax dollars not doing what they are supposed to be doing.
People can put up with a sleazy politician but they can't live comfortably knowing they can't trust their neighbors or trust the police to fight crime for them when the police know DAs will reduce charges, drop charges, etc. Like why bother putting in hard work where you're putting your wellbeing in the balance just so that criminals go unpunished... eventually you end up with a "Caracas" & wild-west experience.
These two things don't rule out each other.
Quite to the contrary, when we observe rampant cheating from the presidency down to shrinkflating food and freeriding the subway, it is a good argument for having an universal morality problem.
There isn't a dichotomy between the saintly people and the scummy political class. A nontrivial part of the voter base of the scummy politicians is formed by regular scummy voters.
There are many faults with the Japanese justice system --but letting petty crime go doesn't tend to be one of them. I'm glad there are places on earth where they still believe in a structured society where actions have predictable consequences.
I have not lived in “the city,” meaning New York, so I cannot speak from direct experience.
I agree that trust is not maintained by moral sentiment alone. But the United States is already a society with relatively harsh punishment, and yet it still has a high crime rate.
So I do not think law enforcement is the whole explanation.
That's because having to pay the large fine does not deter crime, and bumping the price does not have a major affect. Increasing the odds of getting caught is much more effective. [0] shows states this outright in the abstract
[0] https://www.economicstrategygroup.org/wp-content/uploads/202...
Crime rates in NYC move in inverse proportion to enforcement.
When the National Guard was deployed in Washington DC, the crime rate plummeted.
Crime rates soared in cities that decriminalized shoplifting.
[flagged]
1. The late stage of capitalism must have started back in Roman times, caveat emptor.
2. Most societies are low trust societies, with certain exceptions usually based on draconian law enforcement.
I don't trust a lot of thought was put into this article
I don't even think the examples provided are even what most people would call "trust" scenarios. In most of these examples we should have never ever assumed any trust on the other party in the first place.