Trading trust
seths.blog
seths.blog
Trust is a technology, the transition to a high-trust society unlocks so much potential that was previously used on "basic" tasks like guarding your property, making sure your food is fit to eat, not getting scammed in a trade etc.
Bruce Schneier has written a book about trust https://www.schneier.com/books/liars-and-outliers/ ; I don't want to oversell it, I didn't find it amazing, but it has some very relevant discussion on how trust has evolved into our society and institutions. Ultimately a society where people can't trust each other and communicate efficiently will be outcompeted by a society where people can, either through individual altruism, societal norms or institutional enforcement.
Like fossil fuels that take millions of years to form, but can be burned in half a century, trust is burned (enshitification) as cheap accumulated social capital by those without higher loyalty. This for me is why financialisation sucks the life out of nations and why greedy and selfish big-tech companies are some of the most treacherous of all entities.
In tech (and increasingly elsewhere) businesses have realised there are other ways to keep repeat customers without needing customer trust: lock-in, buying out competitors, network effects, being the best for long enough to obliterate competition (at least in customer's minds), branding tied to identity etc. Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Google etc. have very little to gain from trust or products that are better for consumers as people will use their products regardless.
Yes this goes beyond ordinary sharp practices. A larger, more dangerous phenomenon nibbles at our way of life.
A couple of buzzwords/concepts rattling around my circles are "epistemic trust" and "systemic abuse" [0], the former is an effect of the latter. To cultivate it, in old-fashioned psyops talk, is "sapping". Epistemic mistrust changes the way we process all future information and is long lasting.
[0] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psych-unseen/202012/...
From the game theory perspective, a high trust society makes it easy for bad actors to abuse that trust for personal gain, which at large scale lowers trust at the societal level. A low trust society incentivizes people to build subcommunities of higher trust to get things done (which can grow to encompass lots of society) or can be outcompeted by a higher trust society, as you say. Maybe this is all covered in that book.
Clearly there is enough variance to say that societies do not all gravitate towards a fixed equilibrium though. I think a lot of this is due to institutions (eg religion, government, educational systems, militaries) and cultural factors (some cultures value cunning and ruthlessness, others conformity, etc. which can be influenced even by language or the physical environment). Many edgy internet commenters seem to equate low/high trust with race and ethnicity, but if you have ever been in a well run technology company or the US military, or a low-trust homogenous society, you’ll see this obviously wrong.
What I’ve been thinking about a lot lately while I bootstrap is whether it’s possible for a group to be resilient to “selfish” bad actors by making cooperation strictly more optimal than defection. At small scales I think this can be accomplished through a BDFL but I’m really interested in figuring out if another approach can scale into the ~thousands.
In fact, if you look at these "low-trust" societies, all of them have some reason why they haven't been replaced by the high-trust subcultures that you mentioned, reasons usually involving guns.
I consider law enforcement a critical part of a high trust society. I can operate a business and offer lower prices because I don't have to spend extra money on security to defend my goods because I trust that the law will punish thieves. Many times in society I won't do something because, e.g. speeding, because I know the law will come down on me for doing so, even if I know in the short term it would be advantageous for me.
A low-trust authoritarian state that restricts personal freedoms has to use heavy handed policing/secret policing with severe punishments to maintain that system. Without heavy policing the state would probably collapse internally.
A regular place needs policing to prevent the kinds of crimes we consider unambiguously bad like murder, theft, rape. Like I mentioned elsewhere trust/cooperation is game theoretical, and I think that shows up in our genes such that there are always some latent number of people predisposed to antisocial behavior. So you always need that.
But in the second case, the level of trust does reflect how much policing you need. If there is not much crime you don’t need that many police. You probably do always need some but the real world demonstrates that some places just have more criminality (low trust) and require more police.
I think Trust is not really one singular thing either, and it kind of falls apart when you look at places like China or Japan. For example in Japan people don’t generally fear petty theft of bikes or electronics, but they have women-only train cars and the government forces smartphone cameras to make a sound to prevent creepshots. In China you have the zero-sum “it is good for me when others fail” mentality but also Guanxi and genuine patriotism.
Probably technology and law enforcement does allow large scale societies to persist with extremely low trust, but the more concentrated power becomes, the more that state’s continuance is subject to the whims of a small number of people that could either change their mind (like Gorbachev) or fuck things up so badly that they get overthrown (Romania). I think it helps that leaders and police/secret-police also live within that broader low-trust society and so they do have some incentive to not make it too bad.
I had no idea that other social animals were so high-tech!
Now it seems an increasing percentage of the population outright loathe them, and see them as basically everything wrong with the modern internet. Criticism of Google search is way more common now, criticism of Google shutting down products quickly is way more common, complaints about knockoffs and poor quality goods on Amazon are way more common, etc.
It's just wild to see.
More old-fashioned and perhaps less "sophisticated" ways of doing business might just bluntly prioritize trust over many other things, and leave money on the table in the short term. It isn't just that they choose maintaining trust over making the most possible money, it is that they lack the toolset to even really conceptualize what they could make by breaking trust.
Not modern MBAs, though. They'll quantify how much trust you're trading away for how much money no sweat. Even if they're wrong about the exact values they sure are completely capable of conceptualizing the question, and if they notice the externality of transferring a general lack of trust onto the society around them, well, so much the better for being able to monetize an externality, which is the financialization equivalent of hitting the jackpot.
It’s a coordination problem since there’s no way to ensure honesty is 100% rewarded 100% of the time even within the US, let alone across the Earth.
It was truly amazing that one could start / join a conversation with so many relevant and insightful folks (depends on the community; there was always useless noise). I remember trying to learn Erlang a bit and whenever I'd tweet something about it, Joe Armstrong himself would often start a short thread with me to resolve my misunderstanding.
I think the term "enshittification" really covers the process well [0] to explain what happened.
News media is in direct competition with big tech companies for advertising. The more eyeballs go towards big tech and not news companies, the less market share and relevancy they have.
Even worse for them, when people want news now they generally go to aggregators, search for it on Google, or get it served up by a Meta property. It used to be that instead people would read the newspaper or go to a news channel on TV. So news media is furious that big tech controls their top of funnel and distribution channels, as consumers typically prefer it that way vs directly seeking out news by going to cnn.com. In some places they’ve pushed link taxes which tech companies strongly criticized for entirely legit reasons/threatened to pull services, which upped the animosity.
Also, because news is monetized through advertising they need stories and narratives that capture people’s interests and attention. Nobody would care about a story like “Google Scholar revolutionized research discovery and accessibility and improved geographical collaboration a billion %” or “Waymo actually works pretty well no complaints” or “most SF residents actually like Waymo”. But controversy like “Waymo ran into something” is more attention grabbing the more they spin it as evil. Additionally, “good thing continues to be good” is not news but “good thing is actually bad” and “recognizable company X did a bad thing” are news. Similarly “fall from grace” “David vs Goliath” and “these people made a lot of money so you should blame them for not having money” are consistently popular narratives people like.
So news media have literally every reason to drag big tech through the mud and pretty much no reason to ever say anything good about them. For sure these companies have problems but you don’t hear about the good things (IMO Meta has made huge improvements in organizational/data security, and their products drive a lot of commerce in developing countries; Amazon warehouses are usually in places where $15-20/hr is actually a huge step up for local inhabitants; big tech is much better than Microsoft and other old school players at fighting unreasonable law enforcement requests) and the bad things are often overplayed/slanted.
I don't get why the author says this, confidence dropped for everyone. Who is doing this successful propaganda?
And one interesting quote from the linked survey
> Finally, the drops in American confidence may be merely harbingers of wider shifts across the globe, where these companies already operate and where the majority of their future growth is expected to arise. In a special report addended to their annual Trust Barometer, Edelman found that while technology remained the most trusted industry, 14 of their 22 sampled markets around the globe had reported drops in trust in tech companies since the year previous.8 While the U.S. experienced the largest drop, it was followed closely behind by most of the advanced democracies. In these countries, respondents also reported adopting new technology at a much lower level than in countries where tech confidence was higher. This is deeply problematic for companies whose rare new innovations require large-scale adoption to be profitable.
> I don't get why the author says this, confidence dropped for everyone.
I stopped a little to think, and my answer is:
Exactly. It wasn't what I started out with but I think it is a main takeaway:
Our entire web of trust is torn apart.
> Who is doing this successful propaganda?
Our enemies. But they are being smart and lucky. As the Ukrainian meme goes: "we are lucky they are so #%$&@ stupid".
Only here we are the stupid ones and russian and Chinese are the smart ones.
They play both sides of BLM. They play both GOP and DEMs.
They play anti-vaxxers - and get enourmous help from big tech ham fistedly like no others trying to help authorities in a way that even I as a vaccinated and boosted person find crazy.
(What could they have done instead of trying to shut down discussion? It would probably have done wonders if tech execs and politicians had instead shown up in the regular queues for vaccinations. Adult Norwegians still know the reference about the King on the tram during the oil crisis half a century later.)
Media in its chase for clicks also help them, tearing apart again and again trying to make sensations out of everything.
What percentage of the comprehensive causal chain do you attribute to foreign propaganda versus it simply being various domestic phenomena, and upon what do you base your calculations?
I am no social scientist.
I am just an observer.
I observe society getting worse in certain ways, better in others.
The main observation is probably that Russia has been caugth funding both BLM groups and anti BLM groups.
For public companies, the loss is likely just observable behavior - higher prices, worse service, etc. - and likely the root cause is poor incentive structure - incentivizing executives for short term profits over everything else.
For government, the largest factors are likely (1) the way COVID was handled and (2) the behavior of the US federal government since the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Note that this is purely separate from trust in Trump himself, which is its own story but not in the poll. And Congress has always had extraordinarily low trust ratings, so no surprise there.
The press is interesting. Likely there is some propaganda aspect there (I have no data but half the country detests the "mainstream media", sometimes with good cause). But I think that the main issue is likely that many press outlets have come out as naked partisans in the last decade.
The main takeaway I got from this was that arguments from authority are going to be especially ineffective moving forward, no one is going to grant you credibility because of your position as government/press/scientist/doctor/whatever, because people have been abused too many times. And it will take decades to rebuild trust in existing institutions, and won't happen at all without significant transparency and reform.
The old saying is that it takes years to build trust, and seconds to lose it.
In my own life, I have tried to live a life of personal Integrity. It's pretty disheartening, when some people treat me as if I'm being "snotty," and assume that there's no such thing as Personal Integrity (There is such a thing; I assure you).
But most folks seem to appreciate it. I sleep well.
• Character. Is the public trusting? Are they anxious?
• Framing. Is the institution described compassionately, for example, as a national champion or underdog? Or is it described as a villain?
• Sectarianism. Are there motivated partisans who want to disparage the institution?
• Evidence. What particular evidence exists for unethical behavior?
• Ethics. What unethical behaviors have the institution done?
I am skeptical that institutions have become less ethical today compared to the past (e.g., today we would be appalled if a European country waged war against another state to sell narcotics, but Britain literally did that 150 years ago), so I have a hunch that other factors are the primary drivers for declining trust.
Apparently Maslo updated his eponymous pyramid of needs before his death to add "Self-transendence" above "self-actualization" [1], which you could interpret as "moving from only caring about yourself to caring about other people." I think there's an angle here where perhaps the USA as a whole is stuck on "self-actualization", i.e. caring only about each person and individual success, and is failing to have a shared identity where people care about each other.
If we don't solve our trust problem, I think people will stop having kids in the USA and we'll eventually end up like Japan - in population decline and having all the associated economic problems with it. I think that can be directly be linked to excess capitalism - if we focus so much on making money, then we don't have time (or stability or resources) to raise the next generation.
[1] https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/maslow-self-transcendence/
The fatal flaw in all this is that the hierarchies provide perverse incentives at every level to hoard the benefits of participation to oneself. It's a tragedy of the commons situation, where any given individuals misbehavior in supporting the system is unlikely to break it, but if everyone does it absolutely will be shattered.
I remember this from the book Alchemy by Rory Sutherland.
And from the Brookings (linked) article: "For the results we describe below, we rely on a two-wave panel survey in which the same respondents were interviewed twice: first pre-COVID in June and July 2018 and then in the midst of the COVID pandemic in July-October 2021."
That really was not a good time period for institutional trust in America.
"double plus ungood" as mentioned on the root.
This is a general level dynamic. Leaders of all kinds of organizations, from companies to governments, need to build methods of self-control to force themselves to prefer their long-term interests (trusted brands, etc,) over their short term interests. That’s basically what corporate governance is. It’s also basically what constitutional law is, see the scholarship of folks like Jon Elster and Mancur Olson. (Source: my being a guy with a polisci phd.)
Shameless self-promotion: I wrote about this dynamic as a major driver of platform governance challenges across social media as well as transactional platforms like Amazon in chapter 4 of The Networked Leviathan: For Democratic Platforms (Cambridge University Press, August 2023). You can read an open access edition under a CC license for free at https://networked-leviathan.com/
Cory Doctorow’s “enshittification” framework is also a great way of explaining how these problems get worse as companies acquire market power.
I don't think there is any strong evidence that the tech giants are trading in trust. It looks more like there is something bimodal happening where media companies have low trust (Google should probably converge to Twitter/Facebook levels of trust over time) and typical companies score a 2.6 (Amazon should probably converge to being about as trustworthy as a bank).
It was never a sane position to believe these companies are unusually trustworthy. They are companies. Nothing special. Everything is smiles and sunshine while an industry is growing, the knives come out once there is a steady state and they corporate dynamics become a bit more fixed-pie. People had unrealistic expectations; that trust was never sustainable.
I’m not sure much changed with regard to access to information on the internet in the US between 2018 and 2021.
> I don't think there is any strong evidence that the tech giants are trading in trust.
There have been a number of lively discussions here on HN over the past few years about the volume of garbage and/or counterfeit products on Amazon, and their unwillingness to address essentially fraudulent activity re reviews and product listings among their marketplace sellers.
Seeing this transition happen myself (as someone who got an Amazon rewards credit card in 2007, Prime in 2010) I absolutely viewed it as Amazon trading trust for short-term profits. Once upon a time I had trust that I could order from them without a huge amount of research and get quality, authentic products quickly. That has changed significantly, and I think broader sentiment is slowly catching up.
We trade our privacy for "free" goods. We are then constantly surveilled.
The institutions doing the surveillance can better gauge how much trust they can afford to trade for profit.
If this isn't their profit model, what is?
The partisan side of politics (as apposed to the policy and persuation sides) has a way of undermining or sidelining the virtues, and the ability to operate with nuance, for any movement that over-identifies with either party.
It can also do the exact opposite at times. It will be interesting to see how it all plays out in the long run.
Plus trust is something that pays long term rewards, all this advertising that companies spend money on is less effective than my neighbor or friend saying "I've got this thing I love it, you should try it.".
> In each survey, we asked respondents about their levels of confidence in a host of American institutions, as well as their personal policy preferences, their views on the direction of the country, their support for particular democratic norms, their use of social and traditional media, and a wide range of other questions.
For the military, the most critical forms of trust are "don't attempt to coerce or overthrow our government", and "credibly wage war against our enemies if and when called upon to do so".
Being able to nation-build in Afghanistan, under a delusional do-gooder mandate, is not important. For as long as their orders were (in effect) "pretend it's possible", they more-or-less tried.
Whereas only a commander in chief who isn’t from a military background can say “no, we lost this one, time to take the L and pull out”.
But that’s good I guess. A military that tries its best to finish the mission and a commander answerable to the people.
Most sensible people realize that the outcome of campaigns is a political decision, not a military one. The US military generally wins every battle they are in but they don't get to choose how to execute a campaign.
I'd love it if a brand just built good stuff - BUT - if they did, some corpo raider would look at that brand value and think about ways to juice it.
It really makes me sick, you know.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cqU1pFRqYE "Every morning there's a halo hanging from the corner of my girlfriend's four post bed"
Everyone is trying to figure out how to juice everything.
The military is at the top of the chart - think about the different ways politicians use that for their own purposes - not by deploying troops, but the feelings people have about 'the troops'.
Amazon about as trusted as banks.
This is wild.
Maybe I won't believe my bank won't give me access to my money tomorrow, or I won't believe Amazon will keep my money and won't send me the product I bought, but I know my bank try at all cost to introduce me to products that won't benefit me as much but would benefit them a lot, and I know Amazon would post Chinese knock-off products aside legit ones without any way to filter them.