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Comment by SkyeCA | Hacker News Reader

> How can you possibly make due diligence when everyone around you is incentivized to lie?

You can't and the correct response is a total lack of trust by default because that's the easiest way to protect yourself.

They really are out to get you(r money).

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> You can't and the correct response is a total lack of trust by default because that's the easiest way to protect yourself.

Rather off-topic, but it's funny how this principle applies in the exact same way when it comes to traffic for instance. It is unfortunate it has to be like that, but not trusting any other traffic and assuming they can at any point do the thing you'd least expect them to do is just safer. Especially when e.g. cycling this saved my from injuries or worse more than just a couple of times. And that's even in a country with relatively high numbers of cyclists.

On the other hand you can at least expect that if someone causes an accident they will suffer consequences. Courts and insurance exist as mechanisms to transfer liability including for medical bills, and the criminal system (in many countries) can and does punish people for reckless driving.

Sure, you still need to look after yourself in the moment - but there are incentives in place to discourage drivers from misbehaving and those incentives do help reduce the likelihood that you will be a victim of an accident. They’re not great! Bad drivers get away with a lot, and cyclists are not adequately considered in many mechanisms, but they are better than nothing.

Yet ‘nothing’ is what we have with respect to online fraud, where the situation is more akin to one where driving laws don’t exist or aren’t enforced, nobody drives cars with license plates, you can’t get insurance, and if you are run off the road the police’s reaction is to tell you that roads are inherently dangerous places. Bad drivers will never be caught, and if they drive over you they get to steal your bike and sell it. Entire businesses are set up around forcing cyclists into streets where they can be mowed down with steamrollers, and the police claim to be powerless to stop them.

There are numerous mechanisms that exist that make it possible for us to share roads without inherent trust. And even those are inadequate. Fraudulent behavior online has none of the societal mechanisms that we have created to constrain driving.

There are plenty of countries where driving laws aren't enforced. Using the Internet anywhere is sort of like driving in a corrupt developing country. This creates a certain amount of cognitive dissonance in people who have spent their whole lives in functional developed countries where obeying the law is the default behavior.

Right. The internet is more like driving in the kind of country where people give you advice like ‘if you come across roadworks and a guy dressed as a cop tries to wave you over, you need to hit reverse and pull a J-turn out of there or you will die’.

Try navigating the streets of Asia.

I am a firm believer that commuters and pedestrians Urban Asia are suffering from PTSD just by going from point A to point B.

I failed my driving test in the US twice because I kept stopping at green lights. Back home, if you don't do that, you'll die or kill someone.

There's nothing unfortunate about it, because you don't have perfect information. There's plenty of ways for traffic to behave unexpectedly for reasons that are out of their control (deer running into road, tire blows out, etc).

This is why driving schools teach defensive driving. You can't control anyone else but yourself.

This way of thinking is heavily ingrained into the Swedish traffic laws, where a key point is that there exist no rights in traffic, only obligations. If there is an accident there is generally two parties at fault. One party can be at more fault (which courts/insurance companies cares about a lot), but every driver, cyclist, and even pedestrian are directly responsible to prevent accidents. This also apply to boat captains. People have gotten in legal trouble for strictly following the rules in places where common sense implied that doing so unnecessary caused an accident.

This mind set means that anyone on the roads or on the sea should never assume or trust any other participants, and thus to the best of a person ability communicate intend, verify that everyone is behaving correctly, and apply a defensive posture in order to create margins against unwanted outcomes.

I wouldn’t describe it as the correct response, more like “the best one we can think of right now.”

Living this way is that it’s really exhausting, saps quite a lot of joy out of life and makes people more lonely. It’s far from optimal and a more sustainable option would be to work our way back to the community trust we used to enjoy just ~30 years ago.

You can gain a little bit of it back by living in a low population density area.

I live in a small enough town that if I screw somebody, my name will be hosed until the day of my funeral.

End result is I've left $10s of K of easily pawnable construction materials out for years (sorry any thieves reading, it is gone now) and no one touched it. There are several houses around me that have been abandoned for years, no one has ever touched them, except as a free service to help maintain their road.

If I go into 'town' it's a good bet almost everywhere I go, my wife or I will see someone we know. If you do not hold a door for someone, they will remember. If you cut them off in traffic, they will remember. If we lie to others, it will be known by everyone in short order, and we will never have any halfway decent job here again, unless the money can somehow be made in a trustless service.

Not at all snarky because I have no idea what the real answer is here, but although this sounds pretty good, it strikes me how in conflict this would be with most peoples' ideals if we tried any sort of system to scale this to larger populations (like a city).

Perhaps we want privacy-but-not-anonymity. Or perhaps society doesn't scale easily.

The real answer is to rebuild the high trust society by relentlessly removing the low trust elements, the same way the high trust society was created to begin with.

That isn't a real answer. There is no effective way to remove the low-trust elements who physically operate in jurisdictions with no effective law enforcement. Like what are we going to do, fire cruise missiles at random Internet cafes in Nigeria and Cambodia?

We are heading for a period of a not-fully-connected internet. Already people are cutting off China and Russia from their sites because their bot traffic is either overwhelming or malignant.

Afghanistan just cut all the fibers.

There are alternatives such as cutting the internet cable or requiring insurance on all cross jurisdictional transactions.

Those are not alternatives. VPNs and botnets already exist. We have minimal practical ability to control Internet traffic or transactions between most foreign countries. All it takes is a single compromised device in the USA for the scam traffic to get through.

There are very few transatlantic cables that carry all of the internet. It would be very easy to cut them. VPNs don't make any difference.

Come on, be serious. No one is going to cut any transatlantic cables just to prevent scams. VPNs make a huge difference: as long as you can get a route out somewhere then you can use a VPN (possibly to a compromised host) to make your traffic appear to be coming from another source.

You can't VPN on a non existent path. Or bomb them. All it takes is an actual desire to stop scammers.

I don't know if I'd say that every mistake you've ever made being remembered forever is something to be "gained".

Just to be perfectly clear, "every mistake you've ever made being remembered" is already in place. The only difference is that it is used to profile you and sell you more stuff as opposed building a working community, where 'bad members' can be identified and shamed.

Nah. You're taking too literally something that should only be figurative. Internet advertisers don't remember when you cut someone off in traffic by mistake, or don't wave back one morning when you're feeling grumpy, or you have a disagreement with a customer regarding when work was considered finished.

You are living in the past. I do not mean it in pejorative sense. People are wholesale dumping their entire lives into various llms. Various advertising profiles know much more than you cutting off someone in traffic. More than that, they can infer a lot more. And if they don't, they will be replaced by companies that do..

>People are wholesale dumping their entire lives into various llms.

Not to be dismissive, but that's on them. You can control what you tell the bartender. You can't control what people whisper about you behind your back.

>Various advertising profiles know much more than you cutting off someone in traffic.

They "know" different things. Also, oh no! You mean to tell me advertisers are tracking me to optimize which ads get blocked by uBO? Woe is me! What ever shall I do? Try opting out of having a bad reputation in a small village.

It is.. not a bad argument, but again, a little dated.

<< You can control what you tell the bartender.

Except you are not telling this to a bartender. Sometimes you don't even tell it at all. Can you control what your bank parses this way? Can you control what your insurance throws there? Can you control what data brokers have on you ( and plop there )? I may have given you a wrong impression that individual plop means 1 to 1 impact. It does not.

And that is before I get to the part that a bartender was unlikely to spread your personal stuff in any meaningful way.

<< They "know" different things.

Chuckles. See above. If you think there is no 'fusion' going on, I don't think we should continue this conversation further.

<< ads get blocked by uBO

Man.. I use ubo and noscript, but you have to not want to know to live under the impression that there is no concerted effort to, ideally, remove user's ability to run what they choose to run.

<< Try opting out of having a bad reputation in a small village.

You either move or not be a bad actor to have that kind of reputation.

For that you need repeated interactions and reputation networks. It requires densely networked communities where defection is punished with ostracism and tainted reputation. It works in small communities that have known each other for generations and are expected to rely on each other in the future.

The ability to move into new circles every few years incentivizes defection and low trust interactions.

However tight knit, reputation based groups will tend towards risk aversion and conformity and tall poppy syndrome and nepotism. Low trust enables outlier performance.

>Low trust enables outlier performance.

Business moves at the speed of trust. Outlier performance can only exist in a high trust environment. Low trust society is highly correlated with low economic activity.

Big city US and entrepreneurial mobility requires formalized interactions that rely less on trust. The high trust environments put a limit to outlier performance. They are clannish, rumor and reputation driven etc.

High trust environments are usually high trust inwards and low trust outwards toward outsiders who show up. They may show great hospitality but won't trust you with their affairs. Outlier entrepreneurial risk taking behavior only works in places that have medium-trust for everyone, by using contracts and other formal things.

High trust is incompatible with high mobility and "fresh starts". High trust is built when there's a way to retaliate and there is a way for reputation to spread. High trust among strangers only works if you can assume that the strangers are embedded in high trust networks that are in some way connected, even if you don't directly know each other.

If you can pack up and go anytime, trust will be lower. But for economic efficiency, being mobile is positive.

There are tradeoffs here. People didn't just become low trust randomly.

Usually clanish and highly nepotistic societies are classified as low trust. High trust is related to "I trust my neighbors to do the right thing" not "I trust them because they are of my clan".

Yeah maybe I'm mixing up the terms a bit.

There are always ingroups and outgroups. And the ingroup can't expand in an unbounded way if there's high mobility.

Also,marriage patterns are relevant here. Clannish behavior is most prevalent in high-cousin-marriage societies, and you have a more expanded circle of trust when the familial relatedness is more distributed.

High trust is quite unstable either way. You need something to connect you. It's far from automatic. We'll have to rediscover a lot of this stuff that was just thrown out with all the rational Homo oeconomicus theories about people being fungible cogs in a machine and that you can just shred communities and shuffle around the pieces in an atomized way and expect things to go on with trust as before, because this sort of stuff is less measurable.

There is an alternative. Remain open - cautiously, but open.

This may mean you get scammed. (I mean, be more careful with larger amounts...) But when you get scammed, remain open anyway. Yeah, you can lose some money that way. But the alternative is "really exhausting, saps quite a lot of joy out of life and makes people more lonely", so even losing some money could be a net win overall.

Yeah, I'm pretty cynical online but in real life I actively choose to err on the side of trust. It just makes things easier.

I've had some annoying incidents from it, but surprisingly few terrible consequences.

If you spend your time with people who don't value honesty, then you'd probably need to be less trusting. If you weren't great at spotting subtleties, vibes, norms etc, same. If you or the people around you had a reputation for being distrustful, if you looked unusually threatening / objectionable, if people had a specific distrust of you, then it could cause more trouble. Even in big cities, low-trust / high crime societies, dangerous circumstances or new environments, probably best to dial up the caution.

But in everyday life in a medium-large western European city? Your bag probably won't get stolen. The dodgy looking guy asking about your phone probably does just want to see the model. The pack of teens probably don't realise they're being so loud, and the acquaintance complaining about their bank glitch probably will pay you back the money if you loan it.

'Probably' isn't much consolation when you're being stabbed to death, but then, we assume that we 'probably' won't get hit by a runaway car or choke on this sandwich or slip on that ice, life is a series of calculated risks and in my opinion, most humans in real life are far nicer than one might think, from the internet.

You could also become adept at pattern recognition of low trust corollary behaviors.

We will look back on this age as the one of the uncanny valley before smart screens and speakers arrived that auto-detect and warn about AI generated content.

That’s a nice thought - but I think that screen and speaker makers will be incentivized to explicitly NOT do that through their partnerships with the AI and other conglomerate companies that will be building these tools. (If not flat-out be purchased by AI companies under the guise of safety for those that want it while they quietly nerf the technology)

Their incentive is to sell screens. If there is a screen maker what filters these out, then I (and I assume many other people) would buy their screen.

>> You can't and the correct response is a total lack of trust by default because that's the easiest way to protect yourself.

This has slowly eaten away at the idea that we used to live in a high trust society that has now completely transformed into a society where you cannot trust anything, ever, in any capacity.

I felt like I had kind gained back some control from not clicking on any links in emails and using my phone sparingly. But with this new crop of AI tools, you're right, it makes it a lot easier to separate you from your money and the criminals are becoming way more sophisticated and persistent in their attacks.

Communities used to be smaller, even in big cities, so the number of scammers you encountered was fewer.

Now that long distance calls are free, the Internet connects you to everyone else on it, and paperwork is digitalized across entire populations, the reach - and therefore statistical likelihood of encountering- scammers is much higher.

Scammers have more incentive to reach widely than anyone else (well, except advertisers, but that's something of a fine line). So the ratio of scams to non-scams went way up.

My grandpa always liked to say

"They only want your best... Your money"

That's no way to live. The optimal amount to get scammed is >0, because to 100% avoid it you have to cheapen and weaken your life to an unreasonable extent.

It's like how the only 100% secure system is offline, off, unplugged, wiped, and slagged. Or how the only way to be 100% safe from communicable disease is to be the last living human.

And that's what makes our tolerance for grift and scams so obnoxious. It's one thing when dishonest people lie and cheat and steal, it's another entirely when our institutions and leaders forgive, excuse, enable, and even embrace it.

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