If everyone in our family / group / society / country was both trusting and trustworthy, we would never know to recognise the first non-trustworthy person to come along. Alternately, if too many people were untrustworthy, very little would get done, and the world would quickly run out of steel-reinforced doors. But how much is the right level of trust?…
News in the Category "Liars and Outliers"
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The Social Issues Shelf: Liars & Outliers
Liars & Outliers: Enabling the Trust That Society Needs to Thrive provides a powerful survey on trust, cooperation, and the evolution of a social system. It considers how traditional trust mechanisms have worked in the past, and how new technology is challenging these traditional functions that create or question trust. Liars & Outliers considers cooperation and social stability, discussing new social cues involved in creating trust and considering how security has come to substitute methods for trust. Any social issues collection as well as libraries strong in business and internet endeavors will find this a powerful pick…
Liars & Outliers: Enabling the Trust That Society Needs to Thrive (Review)
As security professionals, we mainly consider how we can establish procedures, plans, and policies focused on actions intended to protect people, places, and things. We rarely consider the societal mechanisms fostering the trust that allows us to prioritize our actions even though we recognize that we cannot protect everyone, everything, and every place all the time. Without a broad base of trust, society and all of our institutions would fail to function. This is the focus of Bruce Schneier’s newest book, Liars & Outliers: Enabling the Trust That Society Needs to Thrive…
Liars and Outliers, and “They”
“Liars and Outliers” is a book by well-known security author Bruce Schneier. It talks about the role and mechanisms of trust in society, and how these have evolved over time as we have scaled our civilization. See the author’s own take on the big story.
It used to be easy. Humans lived in tribes and everyone knew everyone else. A combination of moral and reputational pressures was in action to keep people in check. In societies, there is often a conflict between personal and group interest, and these pressures make sure that most people act in group interest most of the time…
Liars and Outliers and Moral Theology
Full disclosure: Bruce has been a dear friend of mine for thirty years, and I was an early reader of several drafts of this book.
This is not a theology book—although it is in the top ten books on business ethics at Amazon. It’s a book about trust and society, as seen through an evolutionary paradigm, strongly informed by concepts from game theory. But there’s a lot in it that is useful and applicable to moral theology.
Unlike many books that take an evolutionary or game-theory approach to decision-making, Bruce does not reduce the concept of “self-interest” to meaninglessness by defining it strictly based on “what people do”, and then circularly insisting that people are motivated entirely by self interest. Instead, he acknowledges that people can have multiple, competing interests: some of which are purely self-interested, some of which arise from membership in one or more groups, and some of which can be purely disinterested…
Review: Bruce Schneier’s “Liars and Outliers”
Sometimes it takes an expert from the wrong discipline to expose the hidden truths that guide our faith in one-another; our desire to do the right thing and why it is that some people break all the rules.
Trust is a tenuous concept. More, it is something of a ‘Goldilocks Phenomenon’ in that too much is just about as bad as too little.
Book Review: Liars and Outliers by Bruce Schneier
I recently read Bruce Schneier’s latest book – Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive.
It’s a good book, of potential interest not just to technology people, but also to anyone wishing to understand more about the way the world works. Schneier uses a wealth of examples to demonstrate that without implicit trust towards pretty much everyone around us, society falls apart.
Reading this book convinced me once more that calls for more surveillance and a more extensive police state must be resisted. The underlying assumption (that crime can be brought down to 0% if only we give up most of our liberties) is a false one. Schneier convincingly argues that the cost of wiping out crime is too high for society – we should therefore stop the hysteria about “total security” and get on with our lives…
Bruce Schneier’s Latest Book
It’s Liars and Outliers, and I would rate it the best economics book of the year thus far. He writes about his book here and here.
Schneier views our lives from the perspective of game theory. Every day, we must decide whether to cooperate or to defect. Do I try to arrive at work on time, or do I show up late? Do I drive safely or aggressively? Do I support the goals of my department, or do I work for myself? Does my department support the goals of the larger organization, or does it pursue its own interests? Does the larger organization work to support the goals of the society to which it belongs, or does it pursue its own goals?…
Liars and Outliers: Thoughts and Conclusions
In a previous post, we looked at the first half of Bruce Schneier’s interesting book. To recap, Liars and Outliers examines how trust mechanisms work, whether you’re ordering products online from people you’ve never met, or you’re paying a neighborhood kid to mow your lawn. In order for commerce to function, there must be a certain level of trust.
The second half of the book deals with Organizations, Corporations and Institutions and how their competing interests work out in real world situations. A model often used in the book is that of fishing. Overfishing will deplete the stock and eventually ruin the industry, so most individuals and companies don’t engage in it. However, ‘defectors’ may overfish because of the short term benefits and the low risk of getting caught…
Trust and the Development of Institutions: Reviewing Liars & Outliers
I managed to snag an early copy of Bruce Schneier’s new book, Liars & Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive. It’s a bit different from the books you normally see reviewed on development blogs. I’m a fan of Schneier’s sensible commentary on security issues, so I thought his book might provide some insights relevant to development work. I read it with general questions about institutional development—and specifically the issue of corruption—in mind.
A theory of coercion, compliance and trust
Schneier’s book provides a framework for understanding trust, compliance, cooperation, defection, coercion, and security across a variety of contexts. He starts by noting that trust is essential for our daily lives: we have to trust that merchants won’t cheat us, that other commuters will drive safely, and that the money we put in our bank account will be safe. Our economic and political systems wouldn’t function without trust. And we, in turn, can only trust others if society finds ways to promote cooperation…
Book Review: Liars and Outliers
“Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive,” Bruce Schneier
Bruce Schneier’s latest book, “Liars and Outliers,” isn’t about technology. Schneier, best known as a security and privacy guru, tackles a far larger issue than the World Wide Web: the webs of trust, relationships, reputation and security that have provided the framework for human society since our ancestors began living in groups. Trust may be a sobering topic, but Schneier doesn’t make the material heavy or dense; rather, it’s a genuinely fun and diverting read…
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.