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Comment by seydor | Hacker News Reader

> It’s government that provides the underlying mechanisms for the social trust essential to society.

It's not anymore. Surveys show that people nowadays trust businesses more than they trust the governments, in a major shift (https://www.edelman.com/trust/2023/trust-barometer)

We need trust because we want the world around us to be more predictable, to follow rules. We trust corporations because they do a better job at forcing people to follow rules than the government does.

This is not a change brought about with AI, it changed BEFORE it. (And just because an AI speaks humanly, doesnt mean we will trust it, we have evolved very elaborate reflexes of social trust throughout the history of our species)

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That's a different use and meaning of the word trust. The essay is specifically talking about the difference between interpersonal trust (the sort of trust that might be captured by a poll about whether people trust businesses vs. government) and societal trust (which is almost invisible -- it's what makes for a "high trust" or "low trust" society, where things just work vs. every impersonal interaction is fraught with complications).

> interpersonal trust (the sort of trust that might be captured by a poll about whether people trust businesses vs. government)

That's not how I read "interpersonal trust"; I read it as the kind of trust you might confer on a natural person that you know well.

i m talking about societal trust

Is it not the case that, knowingly or not, people actually implicitly trust government when they say they trust businesses? i.e. they are able to trust businesses because the businesses themselves operate within a well regulated and legally enforced environment provided by the government (notwithstanding the odd exception here and there).

I trust government quite a lot more than I trust businesses (although my trust in both is quite low). Government, at least, is something that we have a say in. Businesses aren't.

I trust the government waaaay more than a business. If there is a camera, and someone steals my wallet, and they see who did it. They know it was Bob Pickens who took my wallet. My trust in government erodes if Bob Pickens isn't in jail by noon tomorrow. There are many countries in the world right now where that scenario has iron clad trust. In SA Bob Pickens would have his hand taken. That's a bit extreme, but in the US there's literally no guarantee Bob won't be in jail, and in fact stealing other people's wallets, on camera.

When those kinds of trusts start breaking down, the world can get very scary, very quickly.

How it is, is that when you query a human about themselves, you get a System 1 subconscious heuristic approximation, the accuracy of which is massively variable, but not necessarily random.

This is quite deep in the social stack, so at this point we just "pretend"[1] it's true.

[1] I use "pretend colloquially: it's actually not even on the radar most of the time, unless one works in marketing, "public relations", etc.

...Do people actually say they trust "business(es)", like they actively assert it? I think most people act as if they trust businesses because it's an immense pain or impossible to get through normal life without doing so.

The short history of cryptocurrency has repeated the reason why all those decades of securities and banking laws/regulations exist.

The collapse in trust of governments is due to lobbyist bribing politicians. And corrupt politicians. And media controlled by a few billionaires who benefit from that distrust.

I think transparency has far more to do with the distrust than any media. Governments got used to being duplicitous hypocrites for generations. The fact government response is to immediately circle their wagons and resist any efforts to become more trustworthy proves they have well-earned their distrust, and no amount of doom and gloom over the dangers of lack of trust will fix that.

“collapse in trust of governments”

I’m pretty sure it’s for 2 reasons: 1) politicians are slick hair car salesman types that have no shame, 2) government being incompetent.

Re 2, if the government could do the things they promised to do, things they charge us for, California high speed rail for example, then people would trust them as much as big business. I can sue a big business, but thanks to incentives I rarely have to. The government on the other hand has lost more lawsuits, screwed over more people, and destroyed the environment to a much greater extent than any single business could manage to do. They use their monopoly on violence to avoid accountability, and waste public funds on their own lifelong political careers, frittering public money away on their own selfish partisan squabbles. Businesses are rarely too big to fail, and therefor cannot behave with impunity. There are only 2 parties. Imagine a world with only 2 corporations!

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