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Comment by jrexilius | Hacker News Reader

I've spent a lot of years overseas, in third-world or developing countries, often torn by tribal or civil war, or other natural and man-made disasters. I have come to realize how foundational trust is in a functioning economy and self-governing society. We in G8 nations often don't see it, like fish not thinking about water. I've been extremely concerned with the efforts of sub-groups in our societies attacking the foundations of trust. It's like watching people, on a boat at sea, tear up the hull for firewood... The irony is that the basic nature of people (the world over) really hasn't changed: people are msotly good and want to live in a healthy community. But culture, context, and experience can overrule those tendencies.

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> I've been extremely concerned with the efforts of sub-groups in our societies attacking the foundations of trust.

I assume you're referring to the neocons who lied us into the war in Iraq (and keep us there to this day), the Wall Street bankers & executives who created the 2008 financial crisis and the politicians who bailed them out at the people's expense, the military/intelligence and tech industry figures who set up a vast domestic mass spying infrastructure and then hounded the people who leaked it into hiding or prison, and the media apparatus which has run cover for all these sorts of things, right?

To me it often looks like a lot of what is described as "attacking trust" is actually just pointing out that it's already been worn down to a nub. We wouldn't have to deal with the emperor being naked if those darn troublemakers would just stop pointing out he's not wearing any clothes.

No, actually I'm referring to groups on the left _and_ right. While popularizing the attacking of shared society and our systems foundations did start with the counter-culture left in the 60s, it has certainly become a bipartisan effort in recent decades.

All the things I mentioned were entirely bipartisan affairs. In fact, we just witnessed the president who initiated the Iraq War feted and lauded by the press for his appearance at the inauguration of a new president from the "opposing" party who enthusiastically endorsed that war as a Senator.

The counterculture left is a very broad category, with some legitimate and organic elements mixed up with some very confused, self-indulgent, or aimlessly subversive ones. But it didn't fire the first shots in the attack on trust, not by a long shot.

Not sure about your timeline; the 60s were predated by the McCarthy era.

It would be a lot harder to attack them if they didn't provide such a basis for it.

There was a time when journalists at least attempted to be independent:

https://conversationswithslava.substack.com/p/coming-soon

Glenn Greenwald:

https://reason.com/2021/01/23/journalists-are-authoritarians...

> Did you vote for Donald Trump in the last election?

> I didn't vote. It's ironic: That's the one old journalism trope that I agree with, which is that if you vote, you psychologically become too connected to a politician. I prefer to just keep my distance.

They're a dying breed.

And it was never the case that journalists were 100% objective and unbiased. That's impossible. But there was a point in time when they at least made the attempt. Avoided the appearance of impropriety.

If you want people to trust you, try being trustworthy.

Glenn Greenwald's personal issues with (1) what he considers the appropriate relationship between journalism and "objectivity" and (2) his ability to maintain that relationship if he votes are not my problem.

There are dozens/hundreds/thousands of journalists around the world who are perfectly capable of reporting in a way that is useful, insightful, factual, while still voting in elections. I don't want journalists that I read to avoid the appearance of impropriety, I want them to tell me about the world in ways that I can't find out for myself. And I want them to vote.

I'm actually generally disgusted by meeting journalists who claim to not have opinions about the things they report on. I would hope that their opinions would be complex, because when you know enough about most things in the world, you realize that most things are pretty complicated and there generally aren't simple answers. But this BS of "I just try to report on what I find out, I don't really have an opinion" is, for me, a shorthand for "I'm too afraid of drawing conclusions about anything, which means I can't help my readers to do that either".

It's helpful to distinguish between journalists and historians.

Historians have the time and context to make judgments and draw conclusions.

Journalists are reporting on things that happened today, and the deadline is in an hour. The story may still be happening by the time the piece is published. You don't have all the information, so any opinion will inherently be misinformed.

Report the facts and leave the opinion to someone else.

It's possible that what we really need is a separate class of people in between the two. Reporters who provide facts on things that are actively happening, and commentators who provide opinion on things that have finished happening, e.g. a month later once the facts are better established and there has been time to do a thorough investigation, but not years or decades after the fact.

The problem is how to prevent the two from merging together and creating what we have now.

There are many, many journalists who work on stories that do not have "hour from now" deadlines.

People reporting on, for example: the move towards renewable energy supplies, the redistricting/closure of Chicago public schools over the last decade, gerrymandering processes in a half-dozen states ... in fact, I'd wager than the majority of things that journalists write about are not "hot news" at all.

You cannot "report the facts and leave the opinion to someone else". Even the order in which you report facts is implicitly an opinion.

> There are many, many journalists who work on stories that do not have "hour from now" deadlines.

But now it sounds like you're agreeing with me. So the ones who are reporting on stories that are still actively happening should hold off on the opinion, right?

> You cannot "report the facts and leave the opinion to someone else". Even the order in which you report facts is implicitly an opinion.

"100% is impossible so 90% is no different than 3%" is the perfect as the enemy of the good.

I'm not agreeing with you.

>Journalists are reporting on things that happened today, and the deadline is in an hour.

This is not the definition of a journalist.

>"100% is impossible so 90% is no different than 3%" is the perfect as the enemy of the good.

This is written as if reduction of journalistic opinion is the goal. I don't agree this is a goal. I'm not interested in a reduction of subjectivity in journalism. I'm interested in an increase in factual, expansive, multi-viewpoint reporting and analysis. If that comes with 3% journalistic opinion (whatever that means) or 83%, I'm fine with it.

What's not ok is journalistic subjectivity filling in for factual, expansive, multi-viewpoint reporting. However, there are plenty of journalists who are clearly capable of avoiding this issue.

>Report the facts and leave the opinion to someone else.

Exactly. But that doesn't mean that journalists (or anyone else, as that's important in many non-journalistic contexts) don't or shouldn't have opinions.

Rather the goal should be to report the facts without bias.

That may sound like hair-splitting, but it isn't. We're humans and we all have opinions, biases and ideas of our own.

But when it comes to reporting news or just facts/results (e.g., revenue figures, safety/efficacy testing results, etc.) the idea is to consciously set aside those biases.

Some do that better than others, which prsents an arbitrage opportunity that allows those with no desire or intention to report honestly/factually to insert blatantly false and/or misleading information.

Quality reporting of news and fact doesn't require a lack of opinion or bias about the subject at hand. Rather it requires the desire, willingness and ability to set aside those things in support of trustworthy reporting.

There are many reasons why that arbitrage opportunity exists, but the existence of opinions on the part of those reporting isn't a major contributor, IMHO.

As the old saw goes, "opinions are like assholes. Everyone has one."

When things are going well, you can stand by and observe. We're in a death spiral and need as many hands on the tiller as possible.

The death spiral is caused by journalists putting their hands on the tiller.

If people are running around lying with partisan motivations, the most important thing you can have is a source of information trusted to be at least mostly objective. Someone to take the time to do the investigation and tell you what really happened in any given case, and carry good faith arguments from each side, not institutions that pick a side and defend them no matter what.

Because people lose trust in institutions with an obvious bias. And then what do you have? Twitter?

Go head and spin this however you want, but I was strictly talking about a persons responsibility to vote and perform their civic duties.

Journalists lying to viewers faces about peaceful protests while streets burned in the background has helped the death spiral more than you can imagine.

Glenn Greenwald is used to claim that point-of-view journalism is perfectly fine, as long as the point of view is factually grounded. He said it on multiple occasions. If you look at his work and tweet feed, it is strongly point of view driven and at times emotional (the prevailing emotion and perpetual outrage). He does not seem to like concrete politician, but it very very clear who his enemies are. Glenn Greenwald is not an example of someone who is not psychologically connected or avoids the appearance of impropriety.

Glenn Greenwald on Trump during Biden inauguration: "Trump left the White House about as weak, cucked, and submissive as it’s possible for a grown adult to scamper away." I really dont know what he wanted Trump to do, he was way more critical of Biden and democrats then of Trump last months. Leaving during innaguration without causing issues sounds like exactly what is expected.

But the very same day, he called the "chills" tween inappropriate, claimed that such tweet is overly emotional and equated that tweet with being on public tv. Glenn Greenwald is last person that has any grounds to pontificate about objectivity and bias.

Sustainable trust is earned, not blindly given.

It is the responsibility of each participant to criticize the status quo and those who have taken up responsibility and power, or else they keep building on brittle, hierarchical foundations until everything crashes down.

Yes, there are populists who spread political lies, insecure managers who default to micro-management, bureaucratic systems that slow everything down and disillusioned workers. Their common trait is mistrust: They often have been hurt by those that they should be trusting, they are not being heard and sometimes they see through the bullshit. The best case is that there is simply a lack of real communication, education and direct involvement, because that problem is solvable.

It is very simple: for trust to grow and stabilize, both parties need to care and invest in each other. There is no shortcut, no trick and no amount of marketing, propaganda or talk will get either side out of this. That means both sides need to admit their mistakes, be vulnerable, caring, hopeful and most importantly honest and transparent.

Chomsky has explained that the counter-culture of the 60’s was viewed as the “crisis of democracy” by the Trilateral Commission. An excess of democracy: special interests like women, the elderly, environmentalists, ethnic minorities, and so on were trying to enter the public arena. In short: the general population.

(What is a non-special interest? Business interests.)

It is completely illogical to immediately conclude that people who are complaining and pointing out that things are not right are necessarily themselves the cause of all that strife. Maybe they were responding to antecedent causes?

> What is a non-special interest? Business interests.

Ironically, business interests are the original special interests that Adam Smith warned about: “The interest of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers. To widen the market may frequently be agreeable enough to the interest of the public; but to narrow the competition must always be against it, and can serve only to enable the dealers, by raising their profits above what they naturally would be, to levy, for their own benefit, an absurd tax upon the rest of their fellow-citizens. The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.” (Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter 9)

> Chomsky has explained that the counter-culture of the 60’s was viewed as the “crisis of democracy” by the Trilateral Commission. An excess of democracy: special interests like women, the elderly, environmentalists, ethnic minorities, and so on were trying to enter the public arena. In short: the general population.

The problem is with the rhetoric. You don't need to daemonize the system to reform it. For example, AFAIU the Women's Suffrage movement didn't take that course. Nor did the early mid-century Civil Rights movement. Later in the century (e.g. with the Vietnam War protests) radical Leftist academic discourse went mainstream. Conservative academics and pundits started adopting similar rhetoric not long after (consider Reagan's anti-government slogan), which really went mainstream in the 1980s and, especially, the 1990s with Gingrich's Republican Revolution campaigning strategies.

The rhetoric has essentially become nihilistic. People like Chomsky are as much to blame as anyone else. But you don't become someone as famous as Chomsky without radical, absolutist rhetoric. In that sense academia in general is to blame. Though, there were other dynamics, e.g. opinion journalism, that brought the academic discourse into the popular discourse.

So you’re just going to whine about tone? Not even try to argue for or against what I have put forth?

I've seen an argument made that people fundamentally need to be able to trust that their government officials are honest (read: acting in good faith) and fundamentally competent. For a certain generation of people, Watergate eliminated any notion of the first, and the Iran-Contra affair blew away the second.

The real problem is that both of those needs are self-fulfilling: if people expect their politicians to be tacitly dishonest and incompetent, they're fine with electing openly dishonest and incompetent politicians because "at least they're open about it".

> I assume you're referring to the neocons who ...

Could you expand upon why? You mentioned your own perceptions on "attacking trust", but I didn't find much of that (or any assignment of blame to anyone) expressed in the parent comment.

The parent mentions "the efforts of sub-groups in our societies attacking the foundations of trust" so it seems pretty clear to me there's an assignment of blame to someone there. There's a bit of sarcasm in my reply in that, usually, when I see people doing that in regards to this topic, they're not referring to the sort ruinous, trust-eviscerating projects I cited, but rather to things like "misinformation" or "divisive rhetoric" which, when properly viewed in context, are more symptoms than causes.

Spying is something nearly every single person I know can get behind, on the left or right. I’ve never seen it bleed into real life lack of trust.

Everything else on the other hand: https://news.yahoo.com/ex-gop-pollster-frank-luntz-172755768...

> “Bret, I couldn't control them. They just started yelling at each other, and it would take me two minutes to say to them, 'stop' - to put my hand up to the camera like I did right there for them to get control of themselves," Luntz said

Heh, thanks for the link, there's a certain dark enjoyment in seeing Luntz reap what he has sown.

> I assume you're referring to the neocons who lied us into the war in Iraq (and keep us there to this day), the Wall Street bankers & executives who created the 2008...

Really? Why reach back, in the case of neocons, to the early aughts? We need somebody that many people trusted who abused that trust, or someone attacking the trustworthiness of trustworthy people. I'm pretty sure you can find examples just in the last year. These are probably the ones the OP had in mind.

This is what I've found incredibly healthy and liberating about less developed countries. Nobody believes politicians or assumes that government has their best interests in mind. That level of trust appears as a toxic mythology from my perspective.

Instead they look for their own solutions.

So your assessment of the benefits of several hundred years of continuous political culture, along with a semi-continuous chain of protest movements, in "developed" countries is ... "meh" ??

Cynicism at this level does nothing but ensure that your worst take on government is what we actually get.

I thought that the parent made an interesting observation.

It's not cynicism, it a simple fact, backed up by history, of what happens when nobody trusts their government, when a the government of a people deviate too much from the interests of those people and making their lives more difficult instead of less, when all of that goes too far.

This can lead to reform. It can also lead to instability. It doesn't matter whether a country is "developed" or not. Developed countries can still have corrupt governments that are not responsive to their people, civil wars, etc. It can happen quick, or take a long time.

The stakes are high. Can enough of us agree on how to fix our problems? I don't know. I think that removing corporate and union money from politics would be a good first step, which is what most other countries already have done. Beyond that I wonder if we've grown our federal government too far past it's design specifications, expecting whoever is president this year to fix all our problems, leaving the other 49% of people very upset.

Perhaps it would help if I elaborated. I feel that you're filling in the blanks with some of your own projections.

The locals here openly accept money for voting. Politicians and bureaucrats are widely regarded as liars and cheats. The government's authority is checked by continuous protests. Government officials don't want to rock the boat or create further instability.

Similarly, the people have very little interest in politics. There's not constant bickering or hyperbolic demonization. Political fights don't permeate every sphere of life.

Everyone mostly stays in their own lane.

Yes, corruption is a problem here. Corruption is also a problem in the US. However the barrier to entry is higher. K street lobbyists don't come cheaply.

Yes, the government is ineffective. The question is, do the people want it to be effective? Even the private sphere is similarly ineffective. That's just a cultural norm, separate from the relationship to government.

Yet they are still developing countries. Maybe being a low trust environment isn't actually working in their favor and having a government you can trust to solve problems is good. A corollary: maybe working to sow distrust in the government doesn't promote the general welfare.

You're being downvoted, but you hit the nail on the head.

I feel like for people of my vintage (born in the early 80s) the whole war on terror was extremely caustic to my generational cohort. It was a weird environment where every trusted institution in society lined-up in support of both wars, and then actively worked to sideline any debate and discussion. The Dixie Chicks got infamously cancelled for saying something completely milquetoast against the Bush and the war.

And just as we thought we were turning a corner on the War on Terror the financial crash of 2008 hit. Here, it was another highly regarded institution: finance. Young people might not remember this, but finance used to be the industry you would track into if you were a high achieving member of the intelligentsia. The industry was viewed as being staffed to the gills with the best-and-brightest and was afforded anodyne coverage from the establishment media. So naturally, when they imploded the country and then went on TV and blamed it on losers with mortgages[1], and proceeded to face zero real consequences because the justice system never bothered putting laws in place to protect regular people and felt such actions would "punish people for taking risks" (which as an aside: if you are just externalizing risk to 3rd parties you aren't actually "encouraging people to take risks")

It's a trope, but social trust has been eroded because people feel like there's basically "meritocratic" caste system in this country: if you go to the right school, get into the right industry, and make enough money you are granted a measure of impunity when you externalize harm that you quite frankly shouldn't have.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zp-Jw-5Kx8k

"Young people might not remember this, but finance used to be the industry you would track into if you were a high achieving member of the intelligentsia. The industry was viewed as being staffed to the gills with the best-and-brightest and was afforded anodyne coverage from the establishment media."

Speaking as someone who was born before the 80s, my perception is that you have misread this situation. The rise of finance was a consequence of the "greed is good" 80s, which meant that disproportionate rewards went to financial industries, which was both a cause and a consequence of the collapse of every other career open to the intelligentsia.

You see a similar situation on a smaller scale in the rise of Silicon Valley's start up culture, where that is seen as the most valid or only career choice in spite of asymptotically levelling benefits.

The demonstration that "the best and brightest" operating open loop without regulation leads to spectacular busts is left as an exercise to the reader.

You are correct, grab any of the excellent financial history books written by Frederick Lewis Allen. People assume things that have not existed very long have always existed.

Could it have been the other way around, where the rise of finance industries caused the "greed is good" 80s?

I've assume that Nixon taking the U.S. off the gold standard precipitated the growth in the finance industry, the government needs banks to grow money supply and debt, right?

"Greed is good" may have just been an add campaign designed to justify what was already happening, a frenzy of finance, consumerism, and debt that has not stopped yet.

>there's basically "meritocratic" caste system in this country: if you go to the right school, get into the right industry, and make enough money you are [ ... ]

This is a description of the absolute opposite of what "meritocratic" means.

> This is a description of the absolute opposite of what “meritocratic” means.

Well, its actually exactly what the use that brought “meritocracy” into the common lexicon was referring to, though that use was satirical.

No, "meritocracy" was brought into the common lexicon in the 1960s, specifically as an alternative to existing forms of social structure. A system where it did not matter which school you went to, in particular.

I do not read the GP as being satirical in their use, although the use of quotes makes it somewhat unclear.

Well, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy absolutely is satire (or rather, satire used to serious effect). But it's true that this was very quickly forgotten.

No. dragonwriter is referencing the original history of the word. The author Michael Young who coined the word in 1958 was using it in his book to show everything wrong with a “merit” based system, as he explains here: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment

This gives a good background:

https://kottke.org/17/03/the-satirical-origins-of-the-merito...

"Michael Young popularised but did not coin the term “meritocracy”. That came in 1956, two years before his book, when in the magazine Socialist Commentary (to which Young contributed) the industrial sociologist Alan Fox put the word in quotation marks and defined it as “the society in which the gifted, the smart, the energetic, the ambitious and the ruthless are carefully sifted out and helped towards their destined positions of dominance, where they proceed not only to enjoy the fulfilment of exercising their natural endowments but also to receive a fat bonus thrown in for good measure”.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/oct/21/michael-youn...

“Michael Young adapted his 1955 Ph.D. thesis into a dystopian novel” - https://discoversociety.org/2018/10/02/the-birth-of-meritocr...

“When the word meritocracy made its first recorded appearance, in 1956 in the obscure British journal Socialist Commentary, it was a term of abuse, describing a ludicrously unequal state that surely no one would want to live in. Why, mused the industrial sociologist Alan Fox, would you want to give more prizes to the already prodigiously gifted? Instead, he argued, we should think about “cross-grading”: how to give those doing difficult or unattractive jobs more leisure time, and share out wealth more equitably so we all have a better quality of life and a happier society.” - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/20/merito...

“Jean Floud, Alan Fox, and Michael Young had a number of commonalities. Jean Floud taught at the London School of Economics while Michael Young was pursuing his PhD. Alan Fox was a member of that 1950s circle of left-leaning thinkers that included Jean Froud and Michael Young. Since all three are now dead, it's tough to say which amongst those three coined the word "meritocracy". Michael Young had already been evincing thoughts along the lines that led to his publication of The Rise of the Meritocracy since 1951. Most references go with Michael Young as the originator of the word. One last thing is certain: The term as coined by one of those three was anything but complimentary. It was instead quite derogatory.” - https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/34390/did-the-t...

“the magazine Socialist Commentary (to which Young contributed) the industrial sociologist Alan Fox put the word in quotation marks and defined it as ‘the society in which the gifted, the smart, the energetic, the ambitious and the ruthless are carefully sifted out and helped towards their destined positions of dominance, where they proceed not only to enjoy the fulfilment of exercising their natural endowments but also to receive a fat bonus thrown in for good measure’.”.

1. Young says he created the word, and we have no reason to doubt that (as per Guardian link).

2. It was used in a negative sense in 1956

I think you are cherry-picking. If you wish to disagree with the generally held beliefs, then I think you should pick a better reference than one comment on an Internet page.

It's weird. You're right, but those are still seen as "meritocratic", and one could argue were meritocratic historically, at least in some degree, because in theory you get into the right school by scholastic merit, you get into the right industry by merit of your learned and demonstrated skillset and willingness to work in that industry, and you have money by merit of having created value from your hard work in industry.

In practice you get into the right schools because you belong to the right social circles, you get into the right industry because you come from the right schools, or are in the right social circles, and you make enough money because you got into the right schools and industry or inherited by virtue of being born into the right social circles...

When meritocracy was being pushed as a social goal in the 1960s, it related more to the question of who end up in positions of power, positions where they could make decisions that would affect society.

It was not necessarily about who was going to get rich. It was about no longer picking decision makers from the children of the existing decision makers.

It ran into two problems. The first was that we didn't really think through how we were going to establish merit in the first place. What's happened there is that we've adopted a bunch of stupid shorthand ("they graduated Harvard") that essentially is undifferentiated from what we were doing before we tried to build a meritocracy. We never found (maybe never tried to find) any way of establishing that a kid with a degree from a public university in Kansas was actually going to be better at national infrastructure planning than the one from Harvard (or not, for that matter).

The second problem is that the people who benefited from the meritocratic goal (I am one of them) have worked quite hard to pull up the ladders behind them (us). We've erected all sorts of barriers (but mostly cost) to ensure that only our descendants and direct beneficiaries get access to the social institutions that are now used to define "merit".

It's in air quotes for a reason - we label it meritocracy but there are clearly structural issues in place that preventing our society from being such a thing.

War on Drugs started it, but the War on Terror accelerated it. The GOP misinformation campaign is finishing it off...

Realistically, this is just a reversion to things in the early 20th century. The system of trust we've built up is only about 50 or 60 years old, and it's decayed as people took it for granted. Hopefully we're noticing it now.

Finance was slimy as hell long before 2008.

People like to think they live in unique times, but they don’t.

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