Trust, A Double-Edged Sword
I was discussing this topic with T the other day. Trust isn’t always a good thing. In fact, trust can be an excuse for sheer laziness and a means to try avoiding responsibility for your own actions.
Don’t get me wrong, trust is a great thing. It’s very hard (and very unenjoyable) getting through life without trusting people. However, people tend to use this as an excuse not to think. No matter who it is telling you something and how much you trust them, I firmly believe you have to to some extent critically analyse what you’re being told. There are several reasons. Firstly, everybody lies. Secondly, humans are fallible and make mistakes – someone might be feeding you a load of horse-pucky, not to maliciously mislead you but simply because they are wrong.
To claim you were mislead because someone told you something and you believed it because you “trusted” them, if you didn’t actually think about what they said and check how it compares to any other evidence you have on the topic, is sheer laziness.
Just my musings on the matter
Just my musings
March 7th, 2008 at 2:34 pm
I think this precise mechanism can even be a kind of manipulation, such as in the stereotypical ‘dating game’ scenario:
X wants badly to get into Y’s pants/life/confidence, so X bombards Y with embarrassingly intimate admissions about themselves. The popular stereotype even has X making up embarrassing fictions about themself, to fill out this bombardment.
By doing this, X makes Y feel obligated: after all, they’ve just placed *so much* trust in Y by ‘entrusting’ these ‘secrets’ to Y. Y would seem inexcusably cruel and rude not to rejoin in kind.
Of course, such an exchange doesn’t *have* to be manipulative.
It just often is…
March 7th, 2008 at 5:02 pm
The worst part of that is, it’s generally totally subconscious (kinda). The conscious aim of X is to “increase intimacy” and little more; what X is doing in reality is forcing an artificial intimacy on Y and implying emotional blackmail.
That’s also where the whole trust thing falls down (and in many ways links with the Geek Social Fallicy thing) – the assumption that because you trust someone, they should trust you.
March 8th, 2008 at 1:33 am
There’s a technical definition of trust, which says that it’s when you let someone in a position where they can hurt you. It takes complements in the same way: to trust someone with a knife means to let them in a position where they can hurt you with a knife.
As for laziness, sometimes there’s a legitimate trade-off; sometimes, checking would cost more than the situation merits. I trust the wikipedia for my trivia, because, really, who cares if I get those wrong?
η
March 12th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
Oooh! Even better, and mind-bogglingly relevant: Bruce Schneier points out that ‘giving’ your trust to someone means disproportionately more or less depending on your relative power.
This ties into all of these threads:
1. Placing trust in people or institutions who have power over you is something that warrants even more careful, critical thought than trusting other individuals. This sounds obvious, but consider: How much important information do you rely on any single friend for? How much more do you rely on your main news broadcast service?
2. When X bombards Y with ‘secrets’, even if they’re all true, the value of those ‘secrets’ to Y is proportional to how much power Y has over X. If X starts in a position of power over Y, Y will gain very little from Xes ‘secrets’.
3. Someone with a knife is arguably in a position of power, yeah. By comparison, the distribution of trivia on the internet is hardly a powerful role.
Sabik’s comment came right after the Schneier thing in my feed reader, so I just had to point these out.
March 12th, 2008 at 9:29 pm
I guess I’m talking more about when people make big, important decisions one a single piece of evidence, because they “trust” it.
Ok, here’s an example: I tell T that Sabik was making rude phonecalls to me every Thursday night. T promptly beats the pulp out of Sabik, because he “trusts” me. This is despite the fact that on Thursday nights T is socialising with Sabik, so other evidence directly contradicts what I said.
I guess my gripe would be the part where T then protests that it’s not his fault he did what he did – he TRUSTED me! It’s sheer laziness that he didn’t even look to the other evidence, and an attempt to absolve himself of responsibility for his violent actions (after all, he was acting on what I told him!)