The Scarcest Thing in the World
honest-broker.com
honest-broker.com
I think we just had a very short period of universal information access during about 20 years in history in which we thought we do not need trust (as in trusted third parties, or journalism). I guess we just have to learn to build our trust bubbles again in an efficient way and pay people to be our trust anchors.
> ”Or if I had told you that your dinner at a Paris restaurant might be made out of bugs, you would have thought this was a horror film or comedy routine. But not anymore—so take a close look at that special du jour before chowing down.”
I thought a restaurant was serving something made of bugs without disclosing it to customers, pretending it was something else. Turns out, the linked news article is just about EU approving insects for human consumption.
That is not even remotely related to lack of trust. Only in his imaginative and speculative mind where that will lead to restaurants lying about their ingredients. It’s not evidence of scarcity of trust. It felt very dishonest from someone calling themselves “honest broker”.
How so? Assuming the guy you are talking to is real, what's the difference between talking to someone in VR and in a skype call?
>It’s no secret how you construct one. You emphasize transparency and straight talk. You don’t manipulate people—which is the defining vice of our age. Instead you respect their rights, which also come with responsibilities. Above all, you strive for honesty.
Ok great. Everyone will still assume you are lying.
The most interesting thing in this article is that 65% of employees trust their employer, I would expect it to be much lower.
It was already a status symbol that was sold to anyone willing to pay, the price was around $15K.
Good luck then. You need to pay more than Google or Apple though.
> At first, politicians took the biggest hit. During the course of my lifetime, public trust in elected officials has collapsed from 75% to 25%.
It's no wonder. After years of only protecting the interests of the big companies while taking money from them, nobody trusts them anymore.
I'm wondering how long it will be before a far-fetched, sophisticated false news story is planted with multiple videos of shaky and grainy "cellphone" footage that will lead to mass panic or war, Gulf War WMDs, Gulf of Tonkin, and Spanish-American wars notwithstanding.
EDIT: Perhaps we need a chain-of-custody trust framework for cameras with cryptographic-signatures incorporating device model, serial number, time, and location for authentication purposes.
And then consider the capabilities of deep-faking images and voices, and add an actual malicious intent behind it. That's indeed pretty chilling.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds_(1938_ra...
Here in America, very vitriolic, libelous, openly lawless newspapers helped lead to the US Revolution. We have much laxer laws about quality and stronger protections for the press than Britain as a result. We have a tradition of encouraging lies and counter-lies to be published.
The War of the Worlds seemed real to some people because it used the typical means of interrupting the show for breaking emergency news that people were used to at the time. It's not that radio was trusted. Some people were fooled. There's no real evidence of a national panic as a result, though. There were a great number of highly questionable newspaper articles claiming there was a panic, though, as papers will.
Comparing and contrasting generalities about then and now that don't hold for every situation:
It was easier to fool people then because they were more trusting, e.g., didn't lock their front door. It was harder to fool people generally as critical thinking skills were better developed and there were fewer concepts to think about. People also tended to exercise greater self-control then than now. It was easier to fool people in the past because information about the current state of the world and details held by authorities weren't as freely available.
It's easier to fool larger numbers of laypeople today who are generally less informed and less educated than in the past. (Even manual laborers were once schooled in Latin at the turn of the century. Geography and basic facts about the world were well known.) It is harder to fool people now more consistently because of instant communication to almost anyone else. It is easier to fool people now because community and social ties tend to be weaker than they were. It's easier to fool people now because information maybe freely available but it's not interesting enough to, or studied by, many people.
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Fiction needs suspension of disbelief. If the pretext seems too outlandish, then it is received as ludicrous or dismissed as wild science fiction. OTOH, if that belief seems plausible and plays into taboos or phobias, then it disturbs the comfortable. Furthermore, humor and fiction both need tells to set themselves apart from serious presentations, perhaps a ancestor of Poe's law. (The "tell" should've been that it occurred on Halloween night, while an anti-tell was the lack of commercial interruption.) I vote for "Welle's law" when spoken word is involved.
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- WRH arguably caused the Spanish-American war.
- The Gulf of Tonkin incident probably didn't happen, but red-baiting and proxy war ambitions led the military-political-industrial complex to present a mostly fabricated story as the pretext to invading Vietnam.
- Few journalists spoke out against the second invasion Iraq, a plan hatched by Cheney for profit, especially about the WMDs that couldn't be found.
- Not many journalists objected to RT America or Sputnik and used them as their mass media public square forums. It was transparent to anyone halfwitted because these networks would have their own Kremlin plants who would speak outlandishly like a conspiracy theorist drunk uncle every family seems to have.
I'm concerned about news organizations of all slants where anchors see themselves as character actors and influencers first who drive a reality with them in front than Walter Cronkites, detectives, fact checkers, or writers who report important information, wherever it leads. The "winning" of a particular faction cannot be had by the dissolution of society and the isolation in anechoic chambers free from tough questions and reinforcement of that particular dogmatic orthodoxy. This way has tended to lead to culture wars that spill over into sectarian violence.
Adobe et al are working on open source tools and (meta)data standards to make this possible and third party verifiable.
1. Is this person honest and/or truthful (which is not the same as honest)?
2. Does this person conform to our tribal ways of acting/speaking/etc.?
3. Do I believe I can benefit from this person?
4. Other?
It's difficult to have meaningful conversations about such a confusing subject unless all of that is untangled, imo.
Words have meaning, and the only trustworthy source we have for those meanings, when in doubt, is the dictionary (and it's the job of dictionaries to keep the meaning up-to-date as yes, word meanings may change over time):
"Trust: to believe that someone is good and honest and will not harm you, or that something is safe and reliable"
Source: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/trust
Your meaning numbers 2 and 3 are not included, and I would think nearly everyone agrees that's not part of the meaning of the word.
When it does matter, disinformation so far doesn't seem to work. It's very likely Russia is trying to disseminate fake news of all sorts about the war in Ukraine, but even the label it came up with ("special military operation") never caught up, except as a joke.
A different but related problem is conspiracies. But most often they're not caused by people trusting sources they shouldn't, but by the opposite: people not trusting reliable sources.
It was Cardinal de Retz, a French political schemer and memoirist, who said: "On est plus souvent dupé par la défiance que par la confiance" -- One is more often fooled by mistrust than by trust.
Contrary to what the article seems to be saying (not sure about that, as it's far from clear), I would think excess of caution is more problematic that misplaced trust.
This one fits in
1- Tribalism has been steadily declining. In the past, people tended to assume the worst (because of a more hostile environment). 2- Registries, ratings, scores, and other records are widespread, available, and (by and large) trustworthy. Certifications and other credentials make it easier to evaluate competence. We are much more likely to "trust" people these days. 3- People believed in metaphysical phenomena. Trust in reality has never been higher IMHO. The level of education is rising. Half of the population was emancipated quite recently. 4- Tech-enabled trustless consensus is not something you can just dismiss. It's a recent concept. It may have profound implications. 5- Societies have gotten more resilient. The standards of living keep going up. Trust thrives in wealthy communities.
There's no trust crisis. In absolute terms, there are more scams and disinformation attempts than before (because the world gets more complex). But proportionally speaking, I don't think trust is at its lowest. The examples and stats in the article are only valid when adopting a narrow view.
I think it's hilarious how much journalists don't trust Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, et al. But at the same time continually call for them to censor "misinformation" and trust that they would do it well.
But which does both - at the same time??
edit: title says scarcest not scariest