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Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

I loved the understated humour of:

  "Some social scientists believe teaching kids that literally
   everyone in the world they hadn't met is dangerous may have been
   actively harmful."

Harms take many guises. Mutual distrust drives people to mediate and avoid others through technology as a psychological shield.

That breeds bad technology which divides and dehumanises, and feeds the loop.

Here on HN some people have argued for using cashless and automatic systems, not because they are "more efficient" but as a way to avoid smalltalk with a cashier or waiter. Having a map/GPS smartphone is handy, but it stops casual interaction for directions or local advice.

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I enjoy thinking of trust as a social technology. We've seen how ridiculous a trustless transaction system would look with Bitcoin having to validate things to a ridiculous extent. Similarly, a society that distrusts wastes a lot of time and energy doing things by themselves, which is inefficient in the best case and leads down harmful and delusional avenues in the worst. We should be engineering our cities and communities with the intention of creating surface area for trust to emerge (e.g. public transit where we can just coexist in the same space), rather than mandating that trust ought to occur, since that isn't how brains work. Give strangers the opportunity to see that others are not so bad. We all prosper, economically and spiritually.

Good thoughts.

Trust is such a complex subject.

For example, I see a fault in current cybersecurity thinking caused by misunderstanding "zero trust". In the right place zero-trust is precisely what we need, and the US government has recently made a huge policy leap in defaulting systems to zero-trust.

But oddly (not paradoxically) the place to deploy zero-trust is internally. And the place to design systems which leverage trustability is on external facing ones.

People who don't get it throw up their hands and say "that's crazy, it's the people outside we cannot trust". Surely our internal systems are trustworthy, so no need. On the contrary, it's precisely because internal trust already exists that security and low friction benefits accrue from going full zero-trust. For public facing systems the benefit comes from a more trusting stance, backed by high system security and resilience.

It's pretty much the opposite from what we've been doing.

Yes!

I think people are so afraid to be wrong or give bad advice since it's all to easy to be disproven (you said the street was X but it's actually Y, never-mind the fact that X runs parallel to Y and is just one block away) that they would rather remain silent. We used to learn better by being OK to be slightly wrong, then taking no offense when offered a gentle correction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_world_syndrome

edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_management_theory

It also stops, or makes it more difficult, to assault/rob a cashier. Though I think picking food will always be better with a human, given all the random questions you can ask them.

> stops casual interaction

... and the often hilarious scene that ensues when you don't share a common language. Some of my best memories are made of things like this.

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