Hacker News Reader

Comment by hn_version_0023 | Hacker News Reader

We don’t have a trust problem. We have a lack of trustworthy people in positions of power problem. I see how one can be easily confused. But we (the People) don’t trust politicians or business leaders because they have show repeatedly they’re not worthy of trust.

View on HN

That exactly is the trust problem. Why would trustworthy people even try to gain power, if the public assumes that those in power are untrustworthy and corrupt? And why would those in power remain trustworthy when the incentives are clearly in favor of abusing your power and the public assumes that you will do that anyway?

It's a vicious cycle, but a virtuous cycle would also work in the same way. Reality shapes people's expectations, and people's expectations shape reality.

> That exactly is the trust problem. Why would trustworthy people even try to gain power, if the public assumes that those in power are untrustworthy and corrupt?

To improve society.

> And why would those in power remain trustworthy when the incentives are clearly in favor of abusing your power and the public assumes that you will do that anyway?

They were never trustworthy to begin with if they do that.

Trustworthy does not mean "acts to benefit themselves over others at every opportunity".

"never trustworthy to begin with" seems similar to the No True Scotsman[1] fallacy.

I've been in religious circles where it's very important to defend the idea that once you believe, you're saved. But there's a darker side to that idea, because in order to maintain belief in the face of someone doubting and leaving the faith, everyone in the faith explains it away with "Oh, they never Really Believed in the first place."

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

I can't see any connection to that fallacy. The question was about remaining trustworthy when incentives don't align. Being trustworthy when incentives do align means nothing at all though, does it?

People change. Environments can change people--not just incentives. "He was worthy of my trust, and now he's not" is a better framing when encountering new information than "he was never trustworthy to begin with" IMO.

> > Why would trustworthy people even try to gain power

> To improve society.

Is gaining power the most efficient way for a trustworthy and ethically constrained person to improve society? Keep in mind that if you answer that question "yes", you need to believe that attempting to gain power and use it ethically and responsibly is more effective at helping people than trying to earn a bunch of money and throwing it at GiveWell's top charities[1], after adjusting for chance of success, which is a pretty high bar to clear.

[1] https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities

> Is gaining power the most efficient way for a trustworthy and ethically constrained person to improve society?

I don't know, I doubt anybody really knows. I suspect it would highly depend on the individual and the circumstance they find themselves in. Either way people do things that are not "the most efficient" all the time in all areas of their lives.

> Keep in mind that if you answer that question "yes", you need to believe that attempting to gain power and use it ethically and responsibly is more effective at helping people than trying to earn a bunch of money and throwing it at GiveWell's top charities[1], after adjusting for chance of success, which is a pretty high bar to clear.

I don't answer yes. I think a lot of charity work has pretty dismal results in improving society at a large scale to be honest, but that's another story. In any case it's quite possible to do both. Most political offices come with a salary.

> I don't answer yes. I think a lot of charity work has pretty dismal results in improving society at a large scale to be honest, but that's another story. In any case it's quite possible to do both. Most political offices come with a salary.

I find it unlikely that attempting to optimize somewhat for both effective charitable contributions and climbing the political ladder is likely to result in better outcomes than focusing your full attention on either goal individually. (Also r.e. charity work frequently having dismal results, that is why I specified "givewell's top picks" not "The Foundation for Curing Rare Cancers in Cute Puppies").

I do think that there probably are cases where your best bet for causing the change you want to see is going into politics, but I don't think that politics are high enough value that just being a generically ethical person trying to climb the ladder will have a sufficient positive impact to make it a better course of action than the alternatives.

Maybe I'm overestimating the difficulty of climbing that ladder though, or underestimating the potential for change.

I really don't know what you're trying to say or how it addresses what I wrote. It's not some big gotcha that, in your opinion, society could more efficiently be improved one way and not the other.

A trustworthy person might want to run for political office because they want to improve society with the power of that ofice. This is not up for debate. Certainly not by asking weird rhetorical questions. If you really want to argue the point then cough up a complete and coherent argument.

This seems like one of those situations where there's no silver bullet, no quick fix, just the long hard slog of rebuilding bit by bit.

These conditions (power breeds corruption) have been true since the birth of democracy. And yet you could argue democracy in the US has a reasonable track record, with only the occasional civil war. Why is now the time it is under such attack?

Increased availability of information.

It is far harder now to control the flow of information, as some Middle Eastern leaders discovered in 2011, and a short while later the various democracies of the world.

Consider a little the meaning of us having such a discussion here on HN.

> But we (the People) don’t trust politicians or business leaders

Part of the problem is bad grouping. I trust some politicians, and some business leaders on some topics.

But it's too easy to raise your idols on pedestals where they can do no wrong and you trust them on everything. (Conversely, of vilifying an entire class)

I've watched it happen to a significant proportion of the US population. Ironically, in those cases I've personally observed, it actually started from a distrust of the "establishment".

If there are so many of you then you should start your own platform. There is no reason facebook/twitter/etc have to host your point of view. There is absolutely zero stopping people from doing this. There are conservative oriented web hosting services, put your stuff there and let the money and followers roll in. If your point of view is popular you will draw people in like flies to honey

I suspect you replied to the wrong person; I’m neither conservative nor interested in people sharing or even really much hearing my point of view.

You could argue that one begets the other. I am not going to argue chicken an egg, but US has generally been very anti-government. If you poll Americans about their representatives, the responses are uniformly negative. And yet, we keep re-electing them in massive numbers.

It is absolutely fascinating.

I was under the impression that Americans overwhelmingly disapprove of Congress as a whole, but the individual representatives are about as popular as you'd expect.

I can't really speak for the entire nation ( I can't even speak for my neighbors ), but I am sure not approving of my representatives.. I do, however, lack in willingness/drive/money to push for someone else, because that is the part of the equation that makes it genuinely hard to remove an entrenched bureaucrat.

And that does not even begin to discuss how easy local party representatives make it to run in IL.

We never trusted politicians. We never trusted corporate executives. We never trusted lawyers.

We used to trust that the large news organisations were somewhat self-correcting and accountable. The New York Times, Washington post, Wall st Journal, CNN, NBC, CBS, NPR, etc.

After the total lack of accountability for Iraq and WMD, for 2 decades of Afghanistan, The Russiagate debacle and you can add a hundred things you've seen clearly yourself to this list. Trusting these news organisations is pathologically insane. They're clearly very happy to fabricate, to repeat and amplify pure propaganda with no evidence as fact and pretend it never happened or we were all in it together as though readers/watchers being duped are the real problem.

This is the trust that changed. Lies "for the greater good" have a huge interest rate when the bill comes due.

Nobody was ever inclined to really trust Trump, or Clinton or Bush or Obama or Biden any more than Nixon. Why would you? They're politicians. We trusted the limits on their power and the idea that there was corrective feedback on the system somewhere.

We used to think we wouldn't be subject to pravda levels of lies from our "diverse" media sources. Maybe we were terribly naive when we thought that. Now we know there are true stories, well reported in the Times and the Journal for example but you can't assume that about any given story, especially if it affects military funding either directly or indirectly.

All the WMD pushing assholes appear to be back pushing the next war and again if you think that going to war is not such a great idea given the last few unmitigated disasters you clearly are carrying water for Bin Laden, I mean Saddam, I mean the Taliban, I mean Assad, I mean PUTIN!

Trump (damn him) wanted out of Afghanistan like the majority of Americans. Suddenly there's a totally false story, usually fabricated that he's ignoring PUTIN's bounties on US soldiers in Afghanistan to swing public opinion against the steps to get out.

Biden (let's go) agrees 100% with Trump and American voters that 20 years and 3 trillion is enough and continues Trump's work and gets out. The tone of reporting changes immediately and his popularity plummets.

Nobody "trusted" Biden.

Nobody "trusted" Trump.

Now many, many more of us from all political persuasions are very suspicious of the negative feedback mechanism to keep them in check because it has been abused so very, very badly.

Nothing like providing the raw footage and source documents to de-spin. Anyone doing that is the real focus of censorship.

> We never trusted politicians. We never trusted corporate executives. We never trusted lawyers.

And we should keep it that way! These individuals objectives are not aligned with those of Joe & Jill Everyman.

Nobody ever did, nobody ever will trust such politicians whether you want them to or not. This kind of "trust" is not the point, has not and will not change.

There is another kind of trust that has been greatly damaged at considerable cost. The trust of the corrective mechanisms we use to keep the powerful (who we never have nor ever will trust) in check.

Starting with every large news source, journalist and pundit who cheered for the Iraq war and WMD to do a full and proper account of how they were used to dupe their readers and what they learned from it.

The next war is WMD with the same lying assholes cheering for it. And the one after that. The war machine is simply the most obvious and irrefutable case of it. 20 years and 3 trillion in Afghanistan - lets up the military budget again Joe! Just like Donald did. With zero "how is this paid for?" stories. With zero. "Is this value for money?" stories. With zero resistance to being passed...

Note that if the case for ever more military funding is strong, these questions can be asked, answered and debated thoroughly in the media. and by elected officials? So why aren't they?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com