Trust
Having trust in our fellow humans is essential to creating a culture of happiness. Creating a universal in-group is necessary to allow easy trust in a diverse, multicultural, connected world.
"In a networked world, trust is the most important currency." -Eric Schmidt
How many people do you trust when you get on an airplane? Think about every person that researched, invented, built, inspected, maintained, and operates every component, and the systems and institutions of accountability incorporated into those processes to ensure that trust is earned and maintained. No matter how skeptical you are of the institutions of modernity, you put your trust in them every day by the thousands.
Trust in Institutions
Trust in institutions is a necessary prerequisite to progress in modern society. Since nobody can have true expertise in more than a few of the thousands of technical disciplines that currently exist, it is necessary to have authorities that can be trusted to deliver accurate information and recommend best practices to the people.
The erosion of this trust in recent years has resulted in increased political polarization, the proliferation of misinformation and conspiracy theories, contrarianism, pseudoscience and grift. Social media platforms have accelerated this process by allowing the promotion of this information to a global audience, where in the past there would be editors, producers, and fact checkers that would prevent these corrosive ideas from reaching a wide audience.
The institutions themselves have done themselves no favors when it comes to keeping the public trust. There are many cases of corruption, regulatory capture, grift, perverse incentives, and unintended consequences that have eroded that trust. However, these rarely represent conspiracies. Systemic issues caused by bad incentive structures, balance of power, or lack of transparency and oversight can make it seem like there is a grand conspiracy. Really, it's just a process that makes serving the capitalists more salient and rewarding than serving the public. Lacking free will, the people who function in that system do what comes naturally.
The only way to restore trust in institutions is to build in the necessary transparency and oversight, and educate the public on how and why those things work to ensure the institution serves its public mission. The education step is important, because many institutions actually have very good security and oversight, but lose the public trust because most people don't know why those things work. Modern election systems are a good example. The voter registration process makes fraudulent voting extremely difficult to perform on any scale without getting caught, but people don't understand why it works.
Trust in the Process
If we are not able to agree on basic truths about reality, then having a discourse based on fundamentally different assumptions is fruitless. This is part of why political polarization is such an intractable problem in the age of social media information bubbles.
In these cases, it is necessary to take a step back and find agreement on the process for determining truth. What counts as evidence? How does logic work? How can we tell if we are thinking critically or being contrarian?
Belief in misinformation requires falling for one or more propaganda techniques or logical fallacies. By refocusing the conversation on how to identify these mistakes, it is possible for them to self-correct, where focusing on the false beliefs will only elicit contradiction. If we can start by agreeing on what constitutes evidence, science, and logic, then there is a possibility that this foundation can be used to identify beliefs that contradict them.
Trust in the Goal
Another way to restore trust in an era of polarization is to refocus on our shared goals. What are we trying to accomplish with policy? What kind of society are we trying to create?
So much political debate revolves around shot-term policy proposals and wedge issues like abortion. The fact that we differ on policy implies that we have different goals, but is that really the case? Or are both sides trying to realize similar goals with different approaches?
Taking a step back focus on our goals can reveal common ground that can be built on. The Quality of life versus quantity of life goes into detail about the fundamental goals that generate our views on many divisive issues.
We can also agree on broad goals for the future of society, such as eliminating poverty and increased leisure time. People of any political persuasion agree that these goals should be pursued, they simply differ on the methods. These methods are based on ideology, not best practices. Where these differ, we can point to our shared trust in evidence as a reason to choose best practices over ideology to achieve our shared goals.
Trust in Authority
The Argument from Authority is one of the most common logical fallacies you will encounter in the modern information environment. It is the most common tactic used by pseudo-intellectuals on podcasts promoting pseudoscience to peddle their latest grift. The worst are the ones with advanced degrees from respected universities, or who have some significant success in business or entertainment, because those still elicit a good deal of trust in authority that can easily be abused.
We need to be able to trust experts based on their authority because the specialization of modern science and technology makes "doing your own research" quite impossible. The key thing is to understand when an expert is speaking about their domain of expertise, or if they are just a smart person talking about a subject they only possess a surface level understanding of. Tech billionaires sharing their thoughts about quantum mechanics is a good example.
Trust Wikipedia
We also need to be able to trust at least some information sources. Social media will obviously always be untrustworthy, but can we trust Wikipedia? Peer-reviewed science journals? Textbooks? What makes them trustworthy? Wikipedia has been shown to be far more accurate on average than the encyclopedias it replaced. [1][2][3] It is the most trustworthy platform the internet has produced, owing to its transparency and moderation policy, as well as being the only one with the goal of accurately describing each subject instead of sharing opinions about them.
Trust the AI
The trustworthiness of artificial intelligence will be a huge issue in the near future, as many people will inevitably convey god-like authority to its answers, and not without some justification! People need to know where AI gets its training data, as well as transparency about the controls designed to prevent hallucinations that result in misinformation. Being able to trust the god-like authority of AI is what makes it useful. If you have to check every answer, you might as well skip AI and go back to traditional search. To earn that trust, AI developers must choose transparency over proprietary technology, which they have little incentive to do without regulation.
Personal Trust
Personal trust is an essential ingredient to any love relationship, and relationships of any kind. So don't be a liar.
"A person who trusts no one can't be trusted." -Jerome Blattner
Once trust is broken it is very hard to regain, so the best policy is to always be honest from day one in any relationship that you care to nurture, which should be all of them!
Who to Trust?
Deciding who to trust with important advice about life choices is tough these days. There are a lot of wrong choices out there vying for your attention. The more thy vie, the less you should trust them. That is the first rule.
Why should you trust this wiki? It says a lot of things about the nature of reality, but so do a lot of people. What makes this wiki, and other trustworthy sources of information, any different?
- Doesn't depend on any unverifiable supernatural claims.
- Doesn't depend on unpublish scientific theories.
- Doesn't depend on rejecting the scientific consensus in any major field of study.
- Doesn't suggest any conspiracy to keep this knowledge from the public.
- Direct links to source material on Wikipedia that is independent and trustworthy (see above).
- No appeals to personal authority. Anonymous editing ensures that such appeals cannot be made.
- Defers to the authority of subject matter experts in their fields.
- No obfuscation, neologisms, and other language meant to sound smart by confusing the reader.
- No in-group virtue signaling or out-group demonization and use of ad hominem attacks.
- No easy answers or shortcuts, just a map to make the hard answers easier to find.
- No original content. All supporting educational and reference material comes from independent sources.
- No books, dietary supplements, donations, paywalls, courses, seminars, or other requests for money.
Not everyone with a book our a seminar is untrustworthy, but every untrustworthy guru grifter has a book and a seminar for you to buy.
Think about it. Is there any other "theory of everything" that doesn't rest on the unpublished theories of a fringe scientist? Are any of the gurus of sacred geometry willing to admit that fractals are just a metaphor for the organization of reality that helps us understand it, and the whole universe is not actually contained in every atom? And why is there always some kind of financial commitment required to get on the path to enlightenment?
The hallmarks of pseudoscience and grift are easy to spot for anyone that knows what to look for. This wiki works hard to avoid them so that the trust needed to succeed at its goals can be earned.
Restoring Trust
Videos offering ideas for how to restore trust in our institutions.
These are two interviews of the same person, a shorter one and a longer, more in-depth version.