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Comment by alethiophile | Hacker News Reader

This is pretty wrong. Hierarchical relationships exist all over the place, and it's still generally fine to trust your boss, or your teacher, or whatever. And in fact you can't run any kind of large organization without hierarchies, and if everyone defaults to not trusting anyone with power over them these organizations would all fall apart.

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I don't think most people trust their bosses, or HR, and for a good reason. For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15018007

And I think yes, larger hierarchical (actually, authoritarian would be a better word - you can have hierarchy with democracy too) organizations are inefficient, so in a sense, they have already fallen apart.

I think trust implies choice in some sense, and if you don't have a choice, then trust is meaningless.

People seem to sometimes think of trust as a binary value, but I think if we look at trust in practice on computer systems we see how it's much more nuanced than that.

Trust is an interface. You need to give others just enough trust to do what they need to do, and that differs depending on their role in your life.

Just because the predominate form of organization is currently an authoritative heirarchy doesn't mean that is the only option. See Democracy at Work. I for one don't submit myself to authoritarianism and as little heirarchy as possible in my career.

Be careful of that. Lots of people have come to grief because they assumed because their boss, teacher or whoever seemed friendly, it was okay to confide in these people about some personal vulnerability such as a health problem, the way they would a friend. And just because society needs a nonzero degree of hierarchy, does not mean it must or should have anywhere near as much as it currently does.

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