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Comment by barathr | Hacker News Reader

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).

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> 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.

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