The Cement of Society Is... | Hacker News Reader

The Cement of Society Is...

branemrys.blogspot.com

117 pointshoffmannesque159 comments

As a sociologist, I can't help but notice some glaring absences. Allow me to amend:

...gift-giving (Mauss, 1925): Giving gifts creates an obligation to reciprocate, tying people together in bonds of mutual obligation.

...collective effervescence (Durkheim, 1912): People engaging in repeated ritual action which aligns their focus on a common object (Erving Goffman called this "interaction ritual") and who become attuned to one another have a shared intense experience that generates what Randall Collins calls "emotional energy."

...symbolic violence (Bourdieu, 1970): Interests of different groups in society run counter to one another, but the dominant classes and their elites manage to universalize their interests by inculcating subservient dispositions among the dominated through education and other cultural institutions.

A few more that I don't care to elaborate right now: kinship (Levi-Strauss, 1949), libido/cathexis (Freud, 1899), orgone (Reich, 1940), imagination (Castoriadis, 1975), interdependence (Elias, 1937).

This bourdieu fellow seems to be inspired by kafka rather than society as a whole.

Same difference

haha no. Society is not intentionally twisted.

hey fellow sociologist!

the one that imho is really missing is "work", from smith to marx till the present day it has been a cornerstone of social science

Philosophers often miss that one.

https://existentialcomics.com/comic/359

compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humboldtian_model_of_higher_ed...

What do you two sociologists think of the "fear" entry?

and, on the Sparta/1984 nexus: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24069572

(Now I'm curious as to what specific fear, whether more phobian or more deimosian, had a temple at Sparta.)

Edit: Phobos. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...

weird how one of the messages we keep hearing is that automation is just around the corner and everyone needs to be paid to not work. with the breakdown of this and many of the others in the list, it seems to me like someone understands this and doesn't want a cohesive society.

agreed, though there needn't be a conflict. with automation freeing us from mundane labor, we could actually focus on doing meaningful work. work that advances our society globally, that helps to eliminate poverty and lack of education, etc. there is plenty of work to go around that, can't be automated which would allow us to create bonds in our society in a way that no factory work could achieve

Who'd've thunk, two sociologists on the orange website! I thought about including Marx, but it seemed a bit complicated, because there is no trans-historical conception of social cohesion in his work. Marx arguably thinks the glue of bourgeois society is ideology. Work is the glue of a class-in-itself, which is not coterminous with "society" under capitalism.

I thought the idea was to have quotes that explicitly used the word cement, not just quotes pertaining to what keeps society together.

It's good that it's a purely syntactic collection. Viewed semantically, the "cement of society" produces a strange image, as if a single event could, once set in a given form, hold society together forever and ever thereafter. I think society is held together by a process, not an event, so what could the "X of society" be in that case? "The covalent (primary) as well as van der Waals and hydrogen bonds (secondary) of society" makes for a rather unwieldy metaphor.

If I ever put together a Humanistpunk band, it'll be called "The Cement Trucks of Society"...

Bonus clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8FAJXPBdOg&t=190

(TIL feltpunk is a thing.)

>Viewed semantically, the "cement of society" produces a strange image, as if a single event could, once set in a given form, hold society together forever and ever thereafter.

But the collection doesn't concern events, at least the majority of it, but attributes or customs or ideals, etc...

I think that says more about the aptitude of the metaphors in the collection than about whether "cement of society" (where cement normally is poured and ignored) is the best metaphor we can use for what I see: "X of society" where X is an agglutinative process that needs constant renewal (first gained then maintained?) by a society's members.

(In my society we often speak of "tisser des liens" to weave society together, but I think felting is a stronger metaphor than weaving or knitting. The artificial structures of the latter two can be unravelled relatively easily by pulling at loose ends, but the random interlacings of the former resist such abuses.)

Bonus clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrMwxe2ya5E&t=346

The electromagnetism of social cohesion

By symbolic violence do you mean violence through symbols rather than uhm.. symbols denoting violence like sports?

Search[1] yielded:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_violence

which I take to be a sociologist's take on the same elephant this boxer describes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJRoTG0hA9c

Both descriptions are from half a century ago.

[1] on that tangent: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24501978

> tying people together

Concrete is not known for it's tensile strength.

My contribution in image form:

https://creativesystemsthinking.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/...

That's a very compressive[1] structure. Failures appear to be rapid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gXHqKpg__A&t=25

Looks like most of the aggregate is also sheared?

As regards the first observation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24574471

[1] are there any famous tensile structures beyond Skylon (1951)?

Also, social contract (Hobbes and Locke)

About symbolic violence, is what Marx says too?

No, it's not. Marx thought workers could come to consciousness about their conditions through work, which Bourdieu did not.

More and more I think a good answer for this is something along the lines of "...a shared basic reality of facts." Especially lately in the US it seems like there's a schism in the basic understanding of what's happening with stuff like Coronavirus, effects of systematic racism past and present, climate change, etc.

Or at least, an agreement in the value of good faith discussion in pursuit of truth and mutual progress.

How many times have I heard from folks claiming "conservatism" that they don't want progress, in any form-- individual, mutual, societal...

opposite extreme: "'progress'- whatever the cost"... for some reason referred to as 'woke'? (still need to work on understanding that angle)

"replacing what works with what sounds good" --T.Sowell

offtopic rant, but on the subject of politics; to me it seems underhanded to pursue experimental federal programs eg for healthcare- why not demonstrate it works in a few test states.. wouldn't california love to pass something like that? if only there were a way to pass the buck to the federal government for the homeless...

not that the 'red team' political machine hasn't been pulling on the middle as well, claiming to be 'good guys' while corrupting for their own aims; what grinds my gears is either side claiming any kind of moral highground without referencing empirical positive impact

> why not demonstrate it works in a few test states

It's tough to do some things at the state level because there's less money at the state level vs the federal level. It's a lot easier for a business to move from a state to avoid taxes meant to pay for healthcare by rerouting fund from the private market to the public market than it is to leave the US entirely.

The federal government gets it's taxes first from income taxes then payroll taxes, I checked a couple states and most are income then sales/use tax which is a big difference. Not being able to reroute money from employer based systems into the single payer system is a huge hole in any state level attempt at single payer. Also just having more people means a federal level system will have more bargaining power than even the largest states.

As for the etymology of woke I'm no linguist but it seems to flow pretty clearly from the idea of being awake to a problem. The particular slang is just from AAVE, not sure it's possible to trace where the different conjugation started from.

> "I been sleeping all my life. And now that Mr. Garvey done woke me up, I'm gon' stay woke. And I'm gon help him wake up other black folk."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke

> there's less money at the state level vs the federal level

So if anything, it means to me that we need to work on increasing roles of individual states and decreasing federal powers.

That's more of a question of where you come down on the idea of federalism. Personally I think way more stuff makes sense to have created and funded uniformly across the country than fragmented. The biggest budget sinks at the federal level of military and entitlement programs like social security make sense to be there. The military for obvious reasons makes more sense to have funded from there and then social security et al as well because people often move from where they were working to where they retire so trying to fund that at the state level get's a bit dicey for moving the money to where the old people actually are.

> offtopic rant, but on the subject of politics; to me it seems underhanded to pursue experimental federal programs eg for healthcare- why not demonstrate it works in a few test states.. wouldn't california love to pass something like that? if only there were a way to pass the buck to the federal government for the homeless...

Some states have scoped this out, and Vermont passed a law to pursue it. The problem has to do with financing (individual states can't print money) and the freerider problem, which isn't about the homeless, so much as more...libertarian states paying all of their diabetics to move to California to get treated.

It's a bit extreme sounding but cities do this with homeless people today, some places will give out one way bus tickets to move homeless people to another city. [0]

Even without a Machiavellian "muahaha we'll ship all our sick people to X" good cheap healthcare will attract sick people to a state. It was a problem with the ACA where if enough healthy people weren't paying in [1] insurance companies could go belly up from having to cover sicker people they could previously refuse. That's why there was an individual mandate and a backstop for companies that lost too much money on plans.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...

[1] In the case of a single state doing a single payer system it's older or simply sicker people who may make less money because of chronic debilitating illness.

There is nothing "underhanded" about it, and it's nowhere near being "experimental": almost every country in the developed world has universal healthcare and the overwhelming preponderance of evidence demonstrates its superiority in every criterion.

If you think that the debate over healthcare has anything to do with the substantive merits of one system over another, you're viewing it through the wrong lens. It is purely a power struggle between a class of potentates who have become obscenely wealthy from selling insurance, and the vast majority of the public in whose interest universal healthcare is.

Medicare for All being a success in one state would change little by just adding more evidence to the existing mountain because, again, it is not a struggle between differing points of view, but between monied interests and the masses. The colossal propaganda apparatus wielded by corporate interests would continue to wage relentless war against any expansion of such programs.

>Medicare for All being a success in one state would change little

at least it would prove to work here- it's not like the US is in the exact same position as the EU

eg, I'm not sure how they're connected, but it's obvious that the majority of medical research is being done over here, and I never see that mentioned in the comparisons between our systems and overseas; if the overpayment we're doing over here is necessary waste for that goal, that should to be made explicit! health insurance is probably taking more than their honest share of the pie, but complaints that our health care is 'too expensive' never seem to take into account that our (expensive) health care is the best in the world

am I wrong?

> at least it would prove to work here- it's not like the US is in the exact same position as the EU

The EU and Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Bahrain, Brunei, Australia, and New Zealand. It works all over the world. Research on the US system accords with the overwhelming evidence from all around: it would work.

> eg, I'm not sure how they're connected ... medical research

Let's clarify. The repugnant gouging in the cost of hospital care, doctor's visits etc redounds mostly to the profit of private insurance who provide no social value in return. The exorbitant cost of medicine does indeed flow to pharmaceutical companies, but the particulars of how they would be affected depend on the details of how universal health care was implemented.

> complaints that our health care is 'too expensive' never seem to take into account that our (expensive) health care is the best in the world

I have no idea where you got that notion; the US is generally not ranked in the top 20.

https://www.who.int/healthinfo/paper30.pdf

https://healthcarechannel.co/how-australian-healthcare-ranks...

But pharmaceutical companies and health insurance companies are not outrageously profitable compared to chemical manufacturers and other insurers (respectively). The biggest cost center in the health industry is human resources, and nobody seems willing to tackle that (by reducing remuneration to doctors and nurses).

Health insurance definitely is outrageously profitable compared to other insurance sectors: https://www.statista.com/statistics/948687/health-insurance-...

It’s paywalled, but based on the blurb it’s an irrelevant comparison of absolute dollars of profit from a health insurance company versus a non health insurance company selling health insurance. One would expect a grocery store to have more absolute dollars of profit from selling groceries than a gas station would.

The profit margins of a health insurance company are ~5% per the SEC filings of the largest insurance companies, which is not a large profit margin.

> The EU and Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Bahrain, Brunei, Australia, and New Zealand. It works all over the world.

Not necessarily at the same price though. The US healthcare system is crazy expensive because US salaries for high-skill individuals are crazy high (because tuition is crazy high?....). To fund an expansion might be more expensive.

I'm sure it's possible, but if you need more funding, you need more taxes. I'm not at all sure Americans would be okay with that. Remember that you have very low taxes compared to Europe or Japan.

Not qualified to have an opinion on that, though of course that doesn't prevent me from a back-of-the-envelope calculation:

* A third of US healthcare cost is assumed to be administrative overhead just caused by the current system. "Cutting U.S. administrative costs to the $550 per capita (in 2017 U.S. dollars) level in Canada could save more than $600 billion, the researchers say." [0]

* Median wage level for healthcare workers (everyone directly care-related, i.e. including nurses, technicians and MDs) is $68k, about 5.5M people alltogether. [1]

* With the efficency gain of $600B one could double the headcount of medical practitioners and still be better off as a society.

[0] = https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-costs-administrati...

[1] = https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes290000.htm

I'm sure there are large cost savings possible, Canada seems to spend about half as much on administration (17% vs 34%) [1]. While not quite four times as much, that'd still be significant, though whether it's guaranteed to have the same effect in the US is uncertain. Canada and the US may be neighbors, but they're quite different in culture.

[1] https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M19-2818

> Not necessarily at the same price though. The US healthcare system is crazy expensive because US salaries for high-skill individuals are crazy high (because tuition is crazy high?....). To fund an expansion might be more expensive.

Cut new grad salaries in return for halfing their student loan, otherwise the outrageous cost of education is being subsidised by the sick and elderly.

Your "peak healthcare", available to your landed gentry, is the best in the world, no doubt.

One could stop all research for decades, and the US as a whole would still be better off if what was available now was distributed evenly.

As a proxy of the effectiveness of the current US health care system, please have a look at the achieved life expentancy in the US vs. the other G7 countries:

https://data.oecd.org/healthstat/life-expectancy-at-birth.ht...

Yes, the US is an outlier. One example: "In the most extreme case, we see that Americans spend more than 5-times what Chileans spend, yet the population of Chile actually lives longer than Americans".

I'd say the real divide over American healthcare funding reform is not between the industry and everyone else but rather between those Americans who believe government should work to improve the lives of the people and the 40% of Americans who see the role of government as preserving existing social hierarchy.

The healthcare industry does pour a lot of bribe money into preventing reform; see e.g. killing anti surprise billing legislation. However, the bulk of research into why the US doesn't have universal healthcare access points the blame at the blocking minority of Americans who'd prefer not have healthcare for themselves if the alternative is people lower on the social hierarchy (read: non-whites) having healthcare.

This is likely a far harder problem to fix than the already nearly insurmountable problem of excessive corporate influence over government policy.

> However, the bulk of research into why the US doesn't have universal healthcare access points the blame at the blocking minority of Americans who'd prefer not have healthcare for themselves if the alternative is people lower on the social hierarchy (read: non-whites) having healthcare.

Citation needed. This is quite an inflammatory statement to throw out there without a backing source.

I'll agree with the other comment - "bulk of research ... points the blame" - if there is any credible information that does show this, I'm very curious.

My cynical short take is that the insurance/medical industry, sitting on a cash cow, will do anything to keep it being taken away. That seems to be a lot of the motivation for some people to support policies that only benefit corporations / status quo.

Public healthcare for the whole country would be great.

In absence of that, I would prefer to have public healthcare in one state, than not to have it at all.

Alas, claiming that your opponent discusses things in bad faith is often the simplest way to get the upper hand.

It's easier to believe when from your understanding of the world the other side is blatantly lying and misrepresenting things. It forms a bit of a positive feedback loop where seeing bad intentions leads you to being less likely to give slack so you see more bad intentions.

From the left looking rightward at Fox News and many local stations (increasingly owned by and forced to run identical scripts from Sinclair Broadcasting) [0] at the response and the response to the response to coronavirus for example it's hard to ascribe that to just a different interpretation of facts.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxtkvG1JnPk

You do realize that the "other side" has the same EXACT perception of you, right?

It would be nice if people were a bit more skeptical of their preferred news outlets and opinion makers. What I see instead is the continuing existence of the same bubble that led to the shock and surprise at Trump's election. An absolute refusal or inability to consider other views, an inability to interpret events in historical context and with a healthy dose of common sense.

No, of course, I never thought about the perception from the other side. Yes I know that, I believe the things I do though because I either think they're correct, they should be correct, or I hope they'll be right some day, I think I've considered and synthesized information from various sources not just one or a small few. I get that my whole world view is a conglomeration of what I was taught, when I grew up, what I've read etc. but if I didn't think I was at least partially right why would I believe it.

It's not even strictly about the news itself, the underlying philosophy that tilts the news and policy choices seems like it's missing or ignoring a piece of reality. [0] The further from my view the more alien the terrain seems and the less any of the logic makes sense because the priors are so different. Why do we keep swinging back and forth on banking regulations (or business regulation in general) when fundamentally the incentives haven't changed?

[0] Again I get that this is probably what a Conservative feels too but I don't know how to bridge the conceptual gap between the ideological poles here. I went into CS because I can reasonably understand what twiddling a given knob will do and I can control the scope of problems. I have no idea how to even start twiddling societal knobs.

Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind" is a good start.

> I get that my whole world view is a conglomeration of what I was taught, when I grew up, what I've read etc. but if I didn't think I was at least partially right why would I believe it.

Everyone believes this. It becomes dangerous when we start assuming these are the correct beliefs.

> I don't know how to bridge the conceptual gap between the ideological poles here.

Just talk to conservatives, in my experience they're willing to listen.

Might I add that I've had and seen much more success talking to people outside of social media, where people of every political persuasion seem more concerned with performative outrage (makes sense, since that's what social media is designed to encourage).

oh, for sure! Humans just aren't designed to communicate in a one-to-millions paradigm, and it shows strongly in the political divide we all face.

And finding common ground is still easy: "It's bad/unfortunate when police kill people", "It would be good if we could feed and clothe the homeless", "It would be good if more people had access to healthcare" are statements that most people will agree with.

"What laws, mechanisms and tools do we use to achieve those goals?" and "How do we pay for it?" -- that's where you run into differing opinions.

Conservative perceptions of their opponents have very little basis in reality as most of what conservatives perceive regarding their opponents is projection intended to deflect from their own misbehavior.

Conservative messaging is driven almost exclusively by fabricated outrage for which there is no non-conservative equivalent; non-conservative messaging is driven by outrage over actual conservative behavior.

Non-conservative media spreads outrage at factual abuses of power by conservative elites (such as the dismantling democratic norms, or police brutality) while conservative media creates outrage by giving voice to fabricated controversies created over trivialities, such as over tan suits and arugula, or by amplifying non-genuine controversies manufactured by astroturf groups.

There's no more of an equivalency between conservative and non-conservative media any more than there's an equivalency between actual public health experts and the kind of people who think injecting bleach cures COVID-19. There is such a thing as objective reality and the history of the past forty years of conservative politics is a history of conservatives abandoning objective reality in favor of delusions they find comforting.

> There is such a thing as objective reality and the history of the past forty years of conservative politics is a history of conservatives abandoning objective reality in favor of delusions they find comforting.

Again, "the other side" has the exact same concerns about your tribe.

Again, just because conservatives (or anyone else) strongly believes something does not make it true.

Take the conservative position on climate change, for instance, which over the past forty years has degenerated from 'there's not enough of a consensus to act' through 'it's happening but it's not human caused' to 'the science is a Chinese conspiracy theory to destroy America.'

Also note the increasing fondness of senior Republican figures, from Trump downwards, for Q-anon and it's associated conspiracy theories. Notably, there's no Democratic Q-anon equivalent of any statute.

Finally, while in office, Trump has told upwards of 20,000 lies regarding objective facts[0]. There's no equivalent lie count for Obama, Biden, or any other prominent non-conservative in very large part because they, unlike prominent conservatives, accept that objective reality exists and see their duty as finding a way to cope with it.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/07/13/president...

At first I downvoted you.

Then I realized that this is a stupid way to have a discussion, so here's my reply instead.

I would love to see a specific example of "conservative fabricated outrage". Not because I haven't seen any in my life, but to align our understandings of the fabricated outage.

The most recent one is probably that with a new supreme court judge nomination. Here's what I managed to find out:

- according to [1] rejecting a supreme court nominee from the opposite party is a relatively rare, but not completely outstanding event. Last time (ignoring current senate) it happened when Reagan nominated Bork in 1987.

- in "good olde times" senate minority could use filibuster to block the unacceptable nominee. This option has been eliminated by Harry Reid in 2013. All McConnell did was to keep the status quo.

- current situation is in no way unique: over the history of USA 29 times supreme court judges were nominated in election year. In case of aligned senate 17 nominations out of 19 were confirmed. In case of a misaligned senate 2 out of 10 nominations were confirmed.

- in 2016 dems have brought up some very good arguments to why having just 8 judges is problematic and why the president should nominate a judge as soon as possible (even in election year). I personally think these arguments were exceptionally reasonable and they still hold in 2020: the president should indeed nominate a judge as soon as possible

Your turn?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nominations_to_the_Sup...

I'll leave GP to answer the outrage comments, but I think the rest reasonably calls out for perspective.

Merrick Garland wasn't just not confirmed, his nomination was ignored for 9.5 months. As you point out, it's not uncommon for opposition party senates to turn down supreme court nominees, as is their due. It is, however, extremely rare for them not to hear those nominations at all, and Garland's nomination timeline stands out for its longevity.

Out of 163 nominations, only 11 have lapsed (from your wiki link, which lists an incorrect count in the summary). Reverse chronological order of the most recent 5:

- Garland (2016): 293 days. Opposition senate.

- John Marshall Harlan II (1954): 27 days in lapsed nomination + 49 days for confirmation. Ally senate, confirmed by opposition senate.

- Pierce Butler (1922): 14 days lapsed nomination + 16 days for confirmation. Ally senate.

- William Hornblower (1893): 45 days lapsed + 41 days to reject confirmation. Ally senate.

- Stanley Matthers (1881): 36 days lapsed + 59 days to confirm. Opposition senate, confirmed by split senate.

The point being that there is essentially no historical precedent for this behavior, to the point that we need to look 135 years in the past simply to find any example of an opposition senate delaying a candidate's nomination. Even then, Garland is the supreme court nominee with the most time under nomination in US congressional history by a factor of more than 2.

> over the history of USA 29 times supreme court judges were nominated in election year

This doesn't really do justice to the history here, 1/4 of those nominations happened in a single year due to conflict between President Tyler and the Whig party, and an overlapping 1/4 were withdrawals. The last ~170 years of supreme court nominees have been pretty uninteresting and undramatic.

- Garland (2016): lapsed. Ally senate.

- Fortas (1968): confirmed. Ally senate.

- Thornberry (1968) withdrawn because the seat was no longer available, due to some musical chairs replacing Chief Justice Earl Warren. Ally Senate.

- Murphy (1940): confirmed. Ally senate.

- Cardozo (1932): confirmed. Ally senate.

- Clarke (1916): confirmed. Ally senate.

- Brandeis (1916): confirmed. Ally senate.

- Pitney (1912): confirmed. Ally senate.

- Shiras (1892): confirmed. Ally senate.

- Fuller (1888): confimed. Opposition senate.

- Woods (1880): confirmed. Opposition senate.

- Hunt (1872): confirmed. Ally senate.

- Chase (1864): confirmed. Ally senate.

- Bradford (1852): lapsed. Opposition senate.

- 7 various nominations (1844): none confirmed. Opposition senate.

- Crittenden (1828): postponed i.e. rejected. Opposition senate.

- Johnson (1804): confirmed. Ally senate.

- Ellsworth (1796): confirmed. Washington was president and rejected party politics, but the Federalists were friendly with him, so ally senate.

- Chase (1796): confirmed. Ally senate.

- Cushing (1796): confirmed. Ally senate.

I think there's plenty of evidence that Garland's nomination fight radically rocked the boat in US national politics, and we're likely to see similar boat rocking over the next few years as Democrats are pushed harder to abuse the limits of their power in order to improve their leverage on Republicans.

It's not accurate to imply that upcoming crises over USSC nominations will be the result of a Democratic power grab.

More intense fights over control of the USSC will happen because the differential population growth between the states and the rigid allocation of Senate seats means that the USSC is being filled without benefit of the democratic consent of a majority of the American population.

The fact that the USSC is being filled with judges who are hostile to the social values and economic interests of the majority compounds the problem.

Political strife over USSC nominations is not a partisan problem but rather a function of the fact that the US constitution, by design, allows the reactionary minority to dominate the majority. The constitution gives the reactionary 40% the legal right to rule the majority, but this does not mean the majority is under any obligation to meekly accept this.

(putting my hard hat on)

I am not sure the consent of majority or for the perceived benefit of majority is the right way to go.

What if the majority of the class votes that Jenny now must go to all school events wearing nothing but stockings and lingerie?

That's an arguable point; indeed it has been argued since at least Plato. No hard hat required as far as I'm concerned.

Excessive public representation can cause poor outcomes, (hard hat on) such as the governance problems in California caused by ballot initiatives. Letting the public write policy does not seem to lead to good outcomes in most circumstances.

However, representative democracy which combines the requirement that leaders secure consent of the governed with with normalized protections for individual rights seems to be the best system of governance humanity can come up with. Leaders, like employees, tend to do a better job if they can be fired for doing a bad job, and that is what the need for majority democratic consent provides. Protections for individual rights reduces the risk of individuals being harmed by mob rule, such as would be the case in the dress code problem in your post.

Indeed, most of the democratic world combines these principles to good effect. The US is an outlier among nominally democratic countries as it is governed without the consent of the majority.

Political systems that allow for governance without the consent of the majority allow rulers to act with impunity towards the majority and, as such have a very long history of abusing the majority. The kind of people who rise to the top of such systems tend not to be the kind of altruistic people who will govern in the interests of the public, and without any requirement for democratic consent they absolutely will not govern in the interests of the public. Indifference to majority needs, persecution, or even genocide, often follows.

Quite frankly, this is the situation the US has blundered into. Over the past few decades the US has gradually shifted from a polity where broad consent of the governed was essential into a situation where the constitutionally empowered minority (represented by the Republican party) has become increasingly abusive towards majority interests. Under Trump, the minority is now pursuing a platform specifically designed to antagonize--or even persecute--the majority. Fights over USSC nominations are just a part of this.

This isn't a good place for a country to be, especially as a large portion of the American ruling minority population is very pleased by the prospect of persecuting the majority.

The quip I threw out regarding 'tan suits and arugula' was not random; both were outrage incidents manufactured by conservative media in relation to President Obama.

Conservatives manufactured a moral panic over how Obama was unfit for office because he wore a tan suit in public and how he was out of touch with 'real Americans' because he ate arugula.

In contrast, most non-conservatives are disgusted at Trump because of his cruelty towards others, his failure to address COVID-19, the fact that violated democratic norms to put himself in office, and the fact that he is taking steps to rig the 2020 election in his favor.

The kind of scandals that conservatives created around Obama (such as tan suits and arugula) are not equivalent to the actual scandals that surround Trump.

I don't doubt conservatives feel like liberals believe in nothing but power, and I'm sure the left has a few marks against it on that count. But I'd appreciate a few examples of them behaving in such a manner as knowingly lying about how deadly a disease is and then having large crowded in door events shortly afterwards[0]. It's easy to manufacture a narative that has the left drinking the blood of babies, but how much support is there for some large scale malicious thing?

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/09/911109247/trump-admitted-to-p...

There is however such thing as bad faith. Yes, the claim that opponent argues in bad faith itself can be don in bad faith.

But, when the discussion is actually in bad faith, you wont solve the issue by pretending to yourself that it was in good faith.

Discussing, especially online or in politics, is often not for convincing your conversation partner, but for convincing the silent readers. I feel like this objective is more easily reached if you always assume good faith arguments.

I agree with first part but not with second. If you recognize bad faith argument and treat it as such, you can show why it is bad faith. If you don't recognize it that way, you will argue circles or leave implied lies unaddressed.

"good faith assumption"

That would be my guess too

I don't want to sound like a nitpicker, but "basic understanding" and "facts" are two very different things: facts are facts. Their understanding has more to do with the interpretation.

And if we all agree on interpretation of the facts, then cementing the society becomes too easy of a task.

It’s especially egregious in this case with 1/3 of examples being extremely politically oriented (the so-called systemic racism). One of the big issue is when people start thinking their fantasies are reality and will distort every fact to fit in, instead of critically think that they may, in fact, be wrong.

This is a fine example of what I mean. To me, from the left, there's very little room to question the existence of systematic racism. [0]

From my perspective it flows pretty cleanly from several pretty solid facts. Black people were literally property for several hundred years. Once that ended there were explicitly racist laws and actions to keep black people out of any kind of economic or political power. [1] Maybe most importantly redlining kept black people out of home loans during one of the greatest periods of wealth growth in the US during the postwar boom. Combine this with the fact that poor neighborhoods are more polluted, [2] have worse schools, poor parents have less time to devote to tutoring their kids, etc and we get a self reinforcing system.

This system shits on all poor people but history has put a thumb on the scale of who wound up starting where. Given a much longer time span this may sort itself out naturally but with the way wealth compounds in capitalism there are also countervailing forces.

[0] The definition gets muddied a lot so I'll define myself here. Systematic racism is the concept that the interlocking /system/ of the government and economy have a racially biased outcome, ie it's racist, hence systematic racism. Importantly it's not that this system is necessarily currently intentional, though personally for me, not addressing the problem does feel like you get some blame for it's continued existence.

[1] Jim Crow laws, the Tulsa Race Massacre, the Wilmington insurrection of 1898 (look this one up in particular), the list is long and quite consistent.

[2] Which studies show has deleterious effects on educational performance. Pulling one random study out: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6140474/

I think noone in their sane mind will deny that racism does exist. This is a fact and there are scientific ways to check it.

The questions are: how much does racism contributes to poverty among black people? Is it the only reason? Is it the main reason? Are there any other reasons? If these reasons are unpleasant (pick your favorite here) will we still be able to freely discuss them?

If racism is not the reason (let's imagine for a moment), how do we find it out?

If racism is the reason, then which policies are effective in fighting it and which are not? Why white-to-black unemployment ratio in conservative Alabama is the same as in progressive New Jersey? Why both New York and Texas do better?

Why? Why? Why?

Other reasons? http://www.tsowell.com/Discrimination2.html '...challenges the very foundation of assumptions on which the prevailing “social justice” vision is based. The first two chapters of Discrimination and Disparities present a new framework of analysis, and back it up with empirical evidence from around the world, before proceeding to demonstrate why and how so much of the "social justice" vision is a house of cards.'

An issue I see with that line of thinking is that Turks in Germany are also a lot poorer than native Germans, get lower education and rely on welfare a lot more, commit more crimes etc. Yet they immigrated barely 60 years ago and were immigrating as workers, not refugees.

Turks have never been enslaved (quite the contrary, they've been slave-owners for much of their history), there were no racist laws against Turks, yet they still ended up in a very similar place.

That suggests that there might be different reasons why groups are less successful, and might suggest that it's not racism. That the results in different African American groups are very different also makes the simple narrative of "it's because of racism" hard to follow, I think.

I don't think many Germans would argue that Turkish immigrants and their descendants have not been subject to significant degrees of racism and discrimination. It's particularly hard to claim with a straight face that the cultural similarities between between Turkish Germans and African Americans are much more obvious...

> I don't think many Germans would argue that Turkish immigrants and their descendants have not been subject to significant degrees of racism and discrimination.

I'd like to see that argument, if you put it next to racism in the US. Racism towards Turks in Germany might be a slur on the school yard (which, I can assure you, was much more commonly used by Turkish kids), not slavery, Jim Crow and segregation.

> It's particularly hard to claim with a straight face that the cultural similarities between between Turkish Germans and African Americans are much more obvious...

That's not what I wrote. If racism isn't the great explanation, other explanations need to be looked at. You chose to neglect the fact that African Americans are not at all similar in the outcomes, even though they're all experiencing racism in the US, and were, by and large, always treated as a singular group.

> I'd like to see that argument, if you put it next to racism in the US. Racism towards Turks in Germany might be a slur on the school yard (which, I can assure you, was much more commonly used by Turkish kids), not slavery, Jim Crow and segregation.

Sure, I haven't pretended the two countries had exactly the same social and political environments. The respective outcomes for the different minorities aren't exactly the same either.

I'm not even sure what your argument is now: you appeared to be questioning the existence of systematic racism in the US, and yet are now insisting it was extremely bad. If your claim is instead that systematic racism was extremely bad but actually had no discernible effect, that's pretty extraordinary.

Though perhaps not as extraordinary as you choosing to support that with the claim that ---checks notes--- mid twentieth century Germany is a good counter example of a society where migrants didn't encounter any adult racists. Surely you're just trolling for Godwin's Law there.

> If racism isn't the great explanation, other explanations need to be looked at. You chose to neglect the fact that African Americans are not at all similar in the outcomes, even though they're all experiencing racism in the US, and were, by and large, always treated as a singular group.

I'm not sure the fact some African Americans do better than others in any way detracts from the argument that systematic racism is a thing which negatively affects the group. Not all outcomes of shootings are the same; this is not evidence bullets cause no harm. We can look at as many complementary explanations for ethnic minority underperformance as you like, and it's not going to remotely undermine the OP's claim that racism has an effect.

Is it possible that different parts of the world, with different ethnic and migratory histories, might have different dynamics that lead groups to wind up in impoverished situations? Once groups of people are in poverty, yes, I would expect the issues you mention: lower educational outcomes, increased welfare reliance, and increased crime rates.

In the US, the combined demographic trend of Black, urban, and "in poverty" can be traced in substantial part to specific racist policies in the New Deal and post-WWII eras. There's more detail available, but:

a) a substantial amount of government subsidy and policy in those periods was designed to encourage people (especially young families started post-war) to move out of cities, buy land, and raise families there (through low interest rates, development subsidies, etc). This allowed the people who benefited from those policies to start building generational wealth, and essentially created the single-family self-owned non-commercially-functional lot as the fundamental unit of the suburbs.

b) The benefits of many of those policies were both openly and subtly denied to black people, all over the country. Many of the New Deal and post-WWII policies explicitly excluded black people from benefiting. Additionally, redlining (where banks had explicit policies that denied mortgages to black people) and deed covenants (where developers and communities explicitly disallowed sales to black families). This prevented those families from benefiting from the wealth injection I mentioned earlier, occurred all over the country, and was only banned in 1968.

c) After that, poverty is a pretty easy steady state to maintain for specific groups. You just need long-term, focused policing strategies, constant downward pressure on educational and municipal funding, and policies that encourage urban real estate consolidation (and thus rentership).

Where is the argument that this isn't an example of systematic racism denying black people many of the benefits available to the rest of modern American society?

The argument isn't that this was applied to all African American people, the argument is that it was applied to enough to create a correlated gap.

It's totally possible that it has vastly different reasons, but I find the jump to and insistence on "this is it, this must be it, and it's just different elsewhere" to be a bit hastened. It doesn't explain the strong variety in outcome and doesn't seem to apply to other regions. American Exceptionalism is well and good, but it does sound a bit wanted rather than found.

You're in a car. The speedometer reads 50mph. How fast are you going?

You're in a rocket-ship, the speedometer reads 0.5c (half-lightspeed); How fast are you going?

If you understand you'll ask "from what frame of reference?"

I wonder... If there were such a speedometer what would it use as a reference in real life? Earth? Sun? Sag A?

Most useful in space depends a lot on what you're doing at the time. Docking with small separation? Velocity relative to target. Orbiting something? speed relative to that body. Traveling between stars? Tougher but most likely relative velocity towards your target since your path is going to be relatively linear?

But you can easily answer "I'm going 0.5c from the frame of reference the speedometer uses"

But the point is you need to understand what speed is.

50, plus or minus a bit depending on environmental conditions, tire wear, and speedometer calibration, relative to the surface you're driving on.

Not really if the car is running on a treadmill installed by a foreign government.

I covered that. "The surface you're driving on" in this case would be the belt of the treadmill.

Ok you’re right. But you haven’t covered the case when the speedometer is lying :)

"Lying" or miscalibrated? Because I did mention calibration. My speedometer is the mechanical sort, because I drive an old beater. It's incapable of complex deception. If I was paranoid, I could easily verify that the cable is connected to the gearbox appropriately, and trace it up to my instrument panel in about 20 minutes.

"It doesn't matter, as long as enough other people agree that 50mph means the same thing."

Too fast for the city, too slow for the highway. 50mph is a compromise that nobody wants

Basic understanding? How about an extremely high and unwarranted confidence in one's own understanding of what constitutes a fact. I see no signs of having ever even considered whether the categories underlying one's thought are even valid. All I see is the mindless repetition of slogans and a superficiality of understanding. Concepts are merely accepted because the comedian or talking head or my environment want me to accept them. In other words, little interest in the truth and little common sense in interpreting events and claims.

I could not disagree more! I've seen this demand for One Shared Reality Of Facts from all sorts of groups who will never be able to agree on one. I've watched our attempts set many well-intentioned humans at many other well-intentioned (and otherwise) humans' (and otherwise's) throats, yelling at each other because THEY'RE WRONG when they describe personally experiencing a reality that sounds at times completely alien to mine. It seems to be a path toward fragmentation and alienation and not a path toward unity.

I do not wish to speak for anyone else here, of course, but the concepts of "true" and "false" don't really map on to my physical human dimension of reality very well at all, if I think about it! Observing something as "true" is just observing it. Maybe other peoples' thought patterns run differently? Serious question here for you all, my wonderful fellow HN readers: I don't really walk around in what I perceive as reality thinking "that's false, and that, and that over there too". Exactly the opposite! Everything I observe is true, because I observe it. I don't even think about perceiving reality at all. Everything that Is, just Is. This isn't meant to be coy or cutely condescending — I've legitimately just never thought about thinking very much before now.

My concept of the "necessary-shared-binding-force-between-things", if you will, has thus moved away from constantly bikeshedding "truth" and toward the simple observation that all things that Exist exist and all things that Don't don't, such that when another human describes experiencing our physical dimension of reality in a way different than my own, the fact that they experienced it is what's true, not the thing they're talking about when they describe the experience, since I might still completely disagree with that.

Most people have usually also gone one leap beyond "experiences" just within their own mind or some smaller slice of community before it's possible for me to hear from them, so what they will actually share are their proposed solutions to the problems they experience in reality. These suggestions are at times very distasteful to my particular (not-Truth) set of values, if you know what I mean, but still must be ignored and/or forgiven if I want to hope we live together here on Earth. I don't see any other possible alternative if I fail to scream loudly enough at all 9 billion of us until finally we all agree (with all of my suggestions, of course) and can stop arguing, all at once, forever. No solutions aside from the, uh — you know, distasteful ones.

It's been very personally meaningful to me to be able to find something I can consider "true" in common and makes it a lot easier for myself to communicate with other humans who might hold views I find abhorrent, especially when those are toward groups including myself. My views toward our physical-reality-at-large didn't change at all either — I'm the same typical Bay Area lib-left as ever. I'm not suggesting important and difficult subjects should stop being discussed, be discussed less-intensely or less-frequently, or be discussed among a smaller set of participants. I just feel that discussing them will be a hell of a lot easier once every attempt to do so doesn't begin with an existential punch-in-the-face basically telling the other person that they must be lying about the way they perceive reality.

Thinking about it a little more: isn't it kinda extremely fucking amazing that any "truth" or "falsehood" we short-lived humans throw back and forth at one another was, at some point possibly thousands or even tens of thousands of years ago, toggled from a state of non-existence into a state of Existence by a single human mind? Forgive me for torturing the metaphor a bit too hard, but that's one form of true equality I can believe in: that every human mind has the godlike ability to Create new informational "lifeforms" out of complete nothingness. These days AIs have that ability and are our equals too!

It's pretty cool to think about how the moment any new informational lifeform is shared by its creator with any any other mind (human, artificial, or otherwise) it becomes forever outside of its creator's control. You can't really kill them, but the various humans (and otherwise)[0] comprising my country's Federal government has sent many well-intention humans to die fighting wars that try to. You might be able to slow or even stop the spread, but all it takes is for one other person to find one copy of one old book, and boom, it's back[1]!! This made the Dawkins definition of "meme" make immediate and intuitive sense.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKl6WjfDqYA

[1] You just lost The Game.

I think you're right, but I think you might not understand why. All 3 of your examples are part of a new religion that's forming right now. You may not blaspheme against these issues.

Take your systemic racism: What is white supremacy? https://www.showingupforracialjustice.org/white-supremacy-cu...

Out of curiosity, do you agree with that webpage that to be an individual or perfectionist is to be a white supremacist?

On the issue of climate change, I challenge you to be devils advocate. Go to another thread or even another site and pretend to be against climate change. You might expect that you will be told where you are wrong or have a discussion. That won't happen. You will be told how you're a trump lover who needs to die.

That would be a great answer if only there weren't a shit ton a people refusing to accept reality and recognize actual facts.

Normality. Why seek a more complex answer than the one graciously given to us by Terry Pratchett:

"They think they want good government and justice for all, Vimes, yet what is it they really crave, deep in their hearts? Only that things go on as normal and tomorrow is pretty much like today.”

That collective desire is what holds society together.

Alcohol. Banks. Chromosome identity politics. Divorce. Email. Foreigners-as-the-excuse. Generational warfare. Heels. I. Jokes approved as PC. Kafka. LVMH. Minimalism in lieu of poverty. No homes for Millenials. Objects. Puritanism. Quiet carriages. Restlessness. Streaming. Terror. University debt. Vegans. Woks. Xenogamy. Yellow peril. Zoom.

> Puritanism

Owen, Flavel, Sibbes, Manton, Perkins -- it would be amazing if these guys were the cement of our society!

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/puritan

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Owen_(theologian)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Flavel

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Sibbes

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Manton

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Perkins_(theologian)

Is justification produced via works or via faith? I propose a less controversial third option: via adjustment of letter- and word-spacing.

Gotta go back and find that “favourite hn comment ever” thread.

Oh dear, a lot of it is undergoing severe erosion then. With sympathy, sincerity, courtesy and the middle class looking particularly brittle at the moment.

yea, even "the ocean"...

+1 to courtesy

I wrote a song about this -"being right or being clever/is not the glue that holds us all together/being polite when some idiot's wrong/is how we all manage to get along"

https://youtu.be/w5xgVPoI_mA

The Nuclear Family

There were some unstable isotopes in my nuclear family.

I was hoping to see

> The Cement of Society Is... Actual cement. i.e. concrete and steel-reinforced concrete.

Where would be be without it? Society would collapse. And not metaphorically.

Shared understandings of the world and how to live in it.

Myths.

An "officially common" way to see/define the world.

Those myths offer an answer to at least one metaphysical question, and also contains base material of a definition for 'good' and 'bad'.

One doesn't have to believe all local myths, convincingly simulating is sufficient.

'Conscientiousness'[1] (there's some science to this one)

Basically shared values, behaviours, rough sense of justice, morality and humanity, and a sense that individuals ought to aspire to those on some level.

It's funny because in the West we talk a lot about 'freedom' and 'classical liberalism' - I really think that's partly:

a) A response to historically authoritarian systems either political or cultural which were possibly 'too much'

b) An appeal to the ego: none of us really want to 'follow rules', I mean, we all just want to 'do whatever' - it takes 'second order thinking' to act 'morally' and 'responsibly' in whatever context those are defined ... and we're always going to define them a little bit differently.

I think we all understand this on some level, even if our ideologies are wrapped up in something else.

We tend to build ideals around nitpicking, and when a certain 'orthodox morality' clashes with some other form of 'expression' (say, no common acceptance of trans people), then we get into an existential fight with said 'orthodoxy', The 'sides' become polarized, revolutionary, we look at everything through that narrow lense and end up missing all of the other 'very important things' many of us take for granted ... when probably what needs to happen is just some tweaking.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscientiousness

I think you're overgeneralizing. There are several cultures "in the west" that do very much want to follow rules. Both Germany and Japan come immediately to mind.

Neither is a strict rule following culture, but both place a fairly high value on rules that regulate the commons.

> Germany ... Neither is a strict rule following culture

If you put your recycling in the incorrect bin, in Germany, your neighbors might correct the notion that the rule following is not strict.

Then again, age restrictions in amusement parks are completely ignored.

Also, there are fines (or you pay more) for recycling wrong, it is not about neighbors only.

The 'Basic Law' does not refer to the responsibility of Germans towards their community at all. The first several articles, much like other modern constitutions, refer only to German's right to self expression.

German Constitution makes the point more obvious: written just after WW2, obviously, vern concerned with making sure people have 'their rights' = this is fundamentally a liberal concept, and my point about 'historical issues with authoritarianism'.

Almost all of our liberal documents are like this.

But they are not communitarian documents, and our legal system and governments do not generally codify the 'social fabric' that makes our civilizations work well.

Many NGO's exist to promote those legal concepts, particularly freedoms, but very few (except maybe the Church, and possibly indirectly some kind of social justice ones) to promote specifically the kinds of values and behaviours we need to work well a society.

Germany and Japan it seems, have those things very strongly enmeshed into cultural foundations, thankfully, but in 2020 with globalization and the erosion of all culture etc. it might be worth having a look at.

We must live in different “Wests”, you and I.

In the Western world we call our systems of government very generally 'Liberal Democracy' ie something established by classical liberal movement.

Our constitutions are 'rights first' and generally don't speak to any kind of social obligations that individuals may have to others.

Our intellectual framework for society is not communitarian, it's liberal.

It's our parents, communities etc. that teach is about 'responsibility to others, duty, moral obligation' - our legal system is just a scheme to protect us from government and one anohter.

Religion is an interesting one. It's certainly a cement.

It's easy to see the negatives really hard to see the positives but they will be huge, it's so ingrained it will have shaped everything. We will perhaps never know if it was a net gain or not.

> It's easy to see the negatives really hard to see the positives but they will be huge, it's so ingrained it will have shaped everything. We will perhaps never know if it was a net gain or not.

Perhaps for you, but in any case, "religion" is not a single thing and not all religions are equal. Besides, every society has a religion. Every person has a faith. In the US, it is liberalism. In the Soviet Union, it was the Marxism/Leninism/whatever and the State. In medieval Europe, it was Catholicism. For Richard Dawkins, it is scientism.

And the only measure worth discussing is whether the religion in question is true. Your phrasing suggests you see it as some purely instrumental fiction. I reject that view because holding to a faith for its purported "benefits" is an act of bad faith. You believe things because you have reasons to believe they're true, not because you think they'll produce some desired result.

I have absolutely no idea why this comment was downvoted so heavily.

Faith, I would argue includes the urge toward something on a deep/spiritual/fundamental level that you may certainly have doubts of and even contrary evidence for. I would posit that it is in the face of such doubt that faith is exercised the most. The faculty is as much one of hope in something because you know something else points to it being true in the absence of easy confirmation. Being certain of something a-priori naturally requires little faith thereafter. There are practical goods that flow from from faith that certainly bolster that sense that it is good and thus it is true. So I would not discount the value of these practical goods as motivator for faith nor would I treat that as an indictment thereof.

"The Art of Conversing With Men" (an 1805 translation of a 1788 work by Knigge) has two chapters:

    XXIX. On conversation with devotees, puritans and hypocrites.
    XXXI. On conversation with deists, freethinkers and scoffers at religion.

in which he suggests that neither godbotherers nor militant atheists (who are united in their emphasis on orthodoxy over orthopraxy?) are likely to produce stimulating conversation.

https://books.google.ch/books?id=PtQGAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA90#v=onep...

original available at https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/knigge/umgang/chap005.html §§ 27-28.

(note that in §26, Knigge says "Die Erde ist so groß, daß eine Menge Narren nebeneinander Platz darauf haben" which is to advise against wasting time with fools who are Wrong on the Earth. I'd hope that, like angels on the medieval pinhead, we could easily make room for an infinite number of fools who are Wrong on the Internet, and still have place left over here and there for reflective conversations.)

I think the cement of society is people who want society to continue existing.

Humor. If people cant laugh at each other's joke there is no shared culture and it will dissolve soon. It s sadly happening in a lot of tech communities

Q. How many ideologues does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A. That's not funny.

A common enemy, often fictitious, or with enough fictitious components to its character to render it a travesty of reality.

The iterated prisoners' dilemma.

Missing Hobbes, I think he'd have a few choice words.

Is... Guilt.

Conscience..

Civility amongst citizens...

family

Mothers.

...currently crumbling?

Add some rebar.

Which mafia runs a racket on the cement trucks of society?

(Last time I was viewing an x-ray, the orthopedic doctor was surprised to find out that not only does the fracture pattern qualitatively indicate what happened, but there's even a quantitative method to calculate the stresses from angles:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohr%27s_circle

There's even a graphical analogue method, which may be carried out with paper, pen, and protractor, but I've been using software for so long I no longer recall the details.)

Bonus clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xlYCvu9pkc

Trust. Or, as Reagan might have said, "Trust, and verify if you must."

Forgive me if this is too much of a tangent, but can anyone explain "trust, but verify" to me? I can't tell if it's drily ironic (basically meaning 'don't actually take anything on trust'), or kind of meaningless (like the previous interpretation, but meant to be polite and superficially positive), or has a meaning I'm completely missing.

One charitable explanation is initially trust, but verify on your own time. This allows for cooperation and growth of real trust, but lets you, well, verify that you're not being had, just asynchronously.

This and groby_b's interpretation makes sense to me. Basically, assume good faith (within reason), but only temporarily. Not sure it is applicable in all cases the proverb is used, but that's a separate issue.

Approach new information, assuming good intent. Nonetheless, there's no shame or guilt in verifying your assumption by verifying. No offense should be taken, it's merely prudent behavior. Verifying should not imply lack of trust; however, it's conceivable that repeated verifications may render the need to verify in the future a lower priority, due to past precedent.

At least, that's my take.

This seems mostly like a positive spin on "don't actually trust", though. I think if you're not willing to base your actions on the assumption of truth/good faith, you're not really trusting in any meaningful sense.

> This seems mostly like a positive spin on "don't actually trust"

Yes, it's exactly what it has evolved to in some communities ("don't trust, verify"). However, people realize that totally eliminating trust is unrealistic or infeasible at best, and counterproductive or harmful at worst. Trust must be assumed initially, but nevertheless, independent verification and accountability is still a good idea, hence "trust, but verify".

I've explained the history of the quote in another comment, be sure to read it.

I've always seen this as a colloquial expression of "tit for tat" in the iterated prisoner's dilemma. You trust the other party to uphold their bargain up front, but you verify to adjust future behavior.

> Can anyone explain "trust, but verify" to me?

"Trust, but verify" is a long established quote in politics, but in the infosec community it has been used in a different way.

Based on this quote, some members from the cypherpunk community coined "Don't trust, verify", it represents the principle that one should use technological solutions that enable transparency or decentralization, such as free and open source software, P2P networks, cryptography, or reproducible builds to eliminate the dependence of an authority or a 3rd party, whose power may be abused. It's believed by many libertarians (in the broadest sense of the word) in the hacking world. It both represents an infosec doctrine and a political idealism. For example, you must trust your government and your ISP to protect the privacy and integrity of your communication, but if you use end-to-end encryption, you don't need to (and must not) trust - instead, the security properties of the system is independently verified, e.g. by reading code, check digital signatures, etc. In other words, "Code is Law".

Quote Bruce Schneier,

> What we also had, more important than ideas, was the unshakable belief that technology trumped politics. You can see it in John Perry Barlow's 1996 "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace," where he told governments, "You have no moral right to rule us, nor do you possess any methods of enforcement that we have reason to fear." You can see it three years earlier in cypherpunk John Gilmore's famous quote: "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." You can see it in the pages of Applied Cryptography. The first paragraph of the Preface, which I wrote in 1993, says, "There are two kinds of cryptography in this world: cryptography that will stop your kid sister from reading your files, and cryptography that will stop major governments from reading your files. This book is about the latter." This was the promise of cryptography. It was the promise behind everything from file and e-mail encryption to digital signatures, digital certified mail, secure election protocols, and digital cash. The math would give us all power and security, because math trumps everything else. It would topple everything from government sovereignty to the music industry's attempts at stopping file sharing. The "natural law" of cryptography is that it's much easier to use than it is to break.

This quote was popularized by the Bitcoin people and common in the cryptocurrency community, both to signify the distrust of the political and financial institutions, and to promote the perceived security properties of cryptocurrency, i.e. you don't even need to trust the blockchain, because the consensus rule is coded into the source code of your Bitcoin client, your transaction cannot be spoofed or seized - which is a verifiable fact (and it's not what you've found, file a bug report ASAP). Quote Schneier,

> In his 2008 white paper that first proposed bitcoin, the anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto concluded with: “We have proposed a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust.” He was referring to blockchain, the system behind bitcoin cryptocurrency. [...] We might not know someone personally, or know their motivations, but we can trust their future actions. Blockchain enables this sort of trust: We don’t know any bitcoin miners, for example, but we trust that they will follow the mining protocol and make the whole system work. Most blockchain enthusiasts [...] are fond of catchphrases like “in code we trust,” “in math we trust,” and “in crypto we trust.”

However, "Don't trust, verify" is seen as problematic by many people, including Schneier. First, it has become the rallying cry of the cryptocurrency community, which many people do not want to explicitly be associated with. Also, it has been criticized by many, for being unrealistic due to various reasons - to begin with, it's infeasible to verify everything, and you still need to have a general sense of trust that the system is designed to be secure, and even in a decentralized system which trust is verified by code, the need to trust other humans and institutions persist, just in other forms. Read Bruce Schneier's criticism here [0].

> What blockchain does is shift some of the trust in people and institutions to trust in technology. You need to trust the cryptography, the protocols, the software, the computers and the network. And you need to trust them absolutely, because they’re often single points of failure.

> When that trust turns out to be misplaced, there is no recourse. If your bitcoin exchange gets hacked, you lose all of your money. If your bitcoin wallet gets hacked, you lose all of your money. If you forget your login credentials, you lose all of your money. If there’s a bug in the code of your smart contract, you lose all of your money. If someone successfully hacks the blockchain security, you lose all of your money. In many ways, trusting technology is harder than trusting people. Would you rather trust a human legal system or the details of some computer code you don’t have the expertise to audit?

> Blockchain enthusiasts point to more traditional forms of trust — bank processing fees, for example — as expensive. But blockchain trust is also costly; the cost is just hidden. For bitcoin, that’s the cost of the additional bitcoin mined, the transaction fees, and the enormous environmental waste.

> Blockchain doesn’t eliminate the need to trust human institutions. There will always be a big gap that can’t be addressed by technology alone. People still need to be in charge, and there is always a need for governance outside the system. This is obvious in the ongoing debate about changing the bitcoin block size, or in fixing the DAO attack against Ethereum. There’s always a need to override the rules, and there’s always a need for the ability to make permanent rules changes. As long as hard forks are a possibility — that’s when the people in charge of a blockchain step outside the system to change it — people will need to be in charge.

> Blockchain technology is often centralized. Bitcoin might theoretically be based on distributed trust, but in practice, that’s just not true. Just about everyone using bitcoin has to trust one of the few available wallets and use one of the few available exchanges. People have to trust the software and the operating systems and the computers everything is running on. And we’ve seen attacks against wallets and exchanges. We’ve seen Trojans and phishing and password guessing. Criminals have even used flaws in the system that people use to repair their cell phones to steal bitcoin.

> Moreover, in any distributed trust system, there are backdoor methods for centralization to creep back in. With bitcoin, there are only a few miners of consequence. There’s one company that provides most of the mining hardware. There are only a few dominant exchanges. To the extent that most people interact with bitcoin, it is through these centralized systems. This also allows for attacks against blockchain-based systems.

Currently, most people (outside of the cryptocurrency community) have already heard of the original saying and accepted the criticism against it - after all, it's self-evident that completely replacing trust with verification is infeasible. Nevertheless, independent verification is still seen as a good idea and important in general. So the infosec community reverted the quote back to "Trust, but verify."

[0] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/02/blockchain_an...

I think it meant that you should trust your counterparty enough to be willing to make a deal with them, but then verify that they were following through on their end. This was important for disarmament treaties like SALT.

I don't have anything to add to the existing answers other than it's a rhyming Russian proverb, not something Nixon came up with himself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust,_but_verify

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