Healthy communities are comprised of people who are trusting and permissive by default. The cost is that on occasion these communities will be exploited.
Personally I think it's a very low price to pay for all its benefits.
It takes about 20 minutes or so to go through, but I highly, highly recommend it for anyone that hasn't already seen it.
It's entirely possible to find a happy medium. You can be trusting without being totally naive about individuals with bad intentions.
In hindsight it’s always easy to say what the right outcome should have been, but, in Wright’s case, he has enough legitimate credentials that it’s hard to argue that we shouldn’t at least hear him out.
his credentials are lacking and also completely irrelevant.
The goal really is to let everyone be safe in trusting others to the point of naivete, because trust is that huge of an efficiency hack.
(I mean, think of the ridiculous amounts of energy Bitcoin wastes with its proof-of-work scheme, precisely because it tries to replace trust with computation. This energy is what trust saves you.)
I went to a three storey old factory turned into an antiques store. 150 000 square feet. Three floors of booths of all kinds of stuff. Coins, cards, collectibles, toys, furniture, everything. The whole place had maybe five visible employees. It was all consignment. You'd pick up $300 worth of nicknacks from the top floor and walk it down to the first floor to buy. It's incredibly easy to steal from if you wanted.
So what I see are hundreds of individual vendors that don't need to be at their booth because of the trust between vendors, the managers, and the public.
If we were part of a culture where theft was all but guaranteed, that store just wouldn't be able to exist.
Do you think they have cameras?
Best state Gini coefficient [0]. Great income mobility (also best in US [1]).
It also has a rampant fraud/ponzi/mlm issue [3]. They come from the same source- There is a general level of trust that is much higher than anywhere else I've lived or experienced. Mostly rooted in a trust in others is part and parcel of the culture and dominant religion. I don't think the upsides would be achievable without the downsides that seem endemic to it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_Gini_co... [1] https://business.utah.gov/news/utah-at-top-in-nation-for-upw... [3] https://www.deseretnews.com/article/900068203/does-utah-dese...
Are we doing that, though? It feels like we're generally very trusting and, organized in society, very forgiving. Hell, in lots of business cases, cheating makes money, getting caught and paying a fine is just the cost of doing business - and it pays.
I understand the theory, and I agree. I don't see it being applied however.
In the dream/goal I presented I was hoping for swift, indiscriminate and - yes - severe justice. The lack of all three wrt. crimes against public or even individual trust is a problem for contemporary societies.
But that doesn't work if the justice is "apparently random".
If that is how it's perceived, then trust violators will have no incentive to avoid violation. They, and everyone else, will believe that it doesn't matter whether they violate trust or not, since justice is a lottery ticket given to everyone, where the prize is punishment, and it doesn't matter what you do.
I strongly disagree. This would make sense if humans were all rational actors who only took an action after performing the risk calculus of expected reward vs. potential punishment. But that's not how humans work, and thinking this way only results in a justice system that is unnecessarily cruel, ignores rehabilitation, and doesn't actually work that well at preventing crime.
Relevant sources:
Sentence Severity and Crime: Accepting the Null Hypothesis "Most reviews conclude that there is little or no consistent evidence that harsher sanctions reduce crime rates in Western populations[1]."
Do Harsher Prison Conditions Reduce Recidivism? "Inmates housed in higher security levels are no less likely to recidivate than those housed in minimum security; if anything, our estimates suggest that harsher prison conditions lead to more post-release crime.[2]"
[1] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/652230
> This would make sense if humans were all rational actors who only took an action after performing the risk calculus of expected reward vs. potential punishment. But that's not how humans work
This is indeed how humans work sometimes. Not in the heat of the moment, but when coldly calculating how to make more money with less effort. Fraud is not a crime of passion, it's premeditated, evaluated in advance. More certainty of consequences, and perhaps the severity of them, may be what's needed to further reduce it.
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