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Comment by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | Hacker News Reader

Sigh. People will adjust. My point, and a subtle one at that, was that it does not bode well for the society of low trust ahead.

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What people say to respond to this critique is that high-trust people were always a problem. Low-trust societies have procedures in place that nobody ever considers just skipping because we're both good guys and you're from Boston, too, right?

High-trust societies are self-regulating scammers paradises. Filled with people citing Occam's Razor, and affinity fraud. Even worse, for minorities the procedures never get dropped, but they're still expected (pressured) to drop procedures to fit in, so they end up highly unequal societies.

The kind of high-trust we need to get back (at least here in the states) is the kind between neighbors on the same block. Of course it’s never been wise to trust someone just because you’re both from Boston, but in the past neighbors generally trusted each other and socialized.

It’s particularly striking when I visit my parents’ house. I’m a millennial and I don’t even know my neighbors names and my parents, who are boomers, routinely talk, text and visit their neighbors. Their neighborhood (at least among the old people) feels like a community. Mine does not.

This is also why parents don't let their kids play outside unsupervised anymore. No trust.

You need a long time to establish trust. In European villages, if you moved to a place, and weren't born there you were considered an outsider, newcomer, and what's more, likely even the first generation who was born there was still considered a newcomer. Just because you went there from 100 kilometers, even though you speak the same language and have almost the exact same culture.

High trust communities need a lot of time to develop and a lot of annoying gossip and reputation stuff that can feel nosy. My grandparents were always keenly aware of "but what are they going to say?!", what will they think of the mother if this or that (if the child uses swear words, if people peek through the window and see a messy room, if there is weed in the garden, if a guest is not stuffed full with food, if the curtains are still closed at 7 am, indicating that they are lazy and sleeping in etc). They were always worried about optics and reputation. They were in turn always evaluating how everyone else lived and behaved, who helped and who didn't, who lives neatly and orderly, or who doesn't cook for his (edit: her) husband properly, or which man is a drunkard or gambler, who shows up to church and who doesn't etc. This is suffocating but necessary for the kind of reputation that prevents antisocial behavior.

Of course that's the other extreme, but the point is, you need 10+ years of living together and interacting, helping out in renovations, knowing the families, regularly sharing dinner etc to get it going. People move too often nowadays for this to be viable. And of course having to stay put has disadvantages for efficiency and adaptability, there's a reason why people are moving around.

> who doesn't cook for his husband properly

At least they were forward-looking on social issues.

But trust is necessary for the society to run efficiently. High-trust environments are more efficient.

Technically, we can read the banks' financial reports, the executives' background checks, the video recordings of their gold reserves... to decide which banks are less likely to run away with your money. But no one wants to live in such a place.

All the reports and checks are worthless ina low trust society because they are equally as corruptable.

It's like the blockchain people trying to push blockchain for inventory management.

Trust is a tax , which is low in high thrust societies and high in low thrust societies. All you archieve there costs more, more surveilance, more stress , more guards, more fraud in science, products, services. It naturally appeals to the paranoid subset of society which wants to sell itself as a protector service.

Current economic prosperity is coasting on the effects of high trust society. When the trust tax increases the economy reverts like in South Africa.

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