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 "Book Reviews"
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The Tribal Mind: Moral Reasoning and Public Discourse
Excerpt
[In The Righteous Mind, Jonathan] Haidt writes:
Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate self-interest and make cooperative societies possible.
It is interesting to compare this perspective with what one finds in Liars and Outliers, a recent book by Bruce Schneier on the social problem of trust and security. Schneier, a security consultant, 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?…
Det komplexa samhället och dess fiender
Bruce Schneier
Liars & Outliers: Enabling the Trust That Society Needs to Thrive
Wiley 2012
Det är inte alltid lätt att vara småhandlare. ”När slaktaren kommer till mig för att köpa ett djur, vet han att jag vill lura honom”, berättar en boskapshandlare för Oxfordprofessorn Diego Gambetta. ”Men, jag vet också att han kommer att vilja lura mig. För att vi ska kunna komma överens behövs ’Peppe’ [en tredje part] som kan få oss att komma överens. I utbyte får han en del av köpesumman.”
Det behövs inget särskilt stort mått av välvilja från bryggarens, bagarens eller slaktarens sida för att vi ska kunna äta oss mätta. Tack vare marknadsmekanismerna behöver vi inte vädja till något mer än deras vinstintresse. Men, som boskapshandlaren illustrerar, både kräver och bygger marknaden på tillit. Och där det inte finns, måste det skapas – till ett högre eller lägre pris…
Review: Of Parasites, Trust and Morality
Without trust, society splits into warring tribes and parasites prosper. The financial crisis of 2008 is a powerful example of what can happen when individuals or small groups set their own gain above the common good. Meanwhile, the U.S. debt debate shows how political polarization can lead to potentially crippling paralysis.
People are moral creatures, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes in “The Righteous Mind.” Citing brain research, evolutionary psychology and the social sciences, Haidt says successful societies use a shared sense of morality to bind citizens to the common good. In a broad sense, religion has been a highly effective tool for building social cohesion and trust. Security expert Bruce Schneier, who charts similar ground in his book “Liars & Outliers,” largely agrees…
Trust Me!
Now why would you do that? I mean really, why would you trust me?
Some of you reading this know me, most of you do not. But even for those who do, I ask the question again, why would you trust me? You read my musings, you see me at events, you know what I do here at CSO, but that’s about it. Hey, I could just be making all this stuff up!
Now I’m not saying that you shouldn’t trust me (I don’t make it up). I am, as it happens, a very trustworthy person, and if you do trust me, then that probably means that you are a very trusting person.
The point I’m making is that we live in a society where trust is very often given without warrant. If you compare that attitude with the one that inspires the hurdles we necessarily put in place to establish electronic or business trust, I think you would agree that we set up very different standards for trusting someone depending on what we’re trusting them with. That’s a risk…
Society’s Dependence on Trust and Security
Just today, a stranger came to my door claiming he was here to unclog a bathroom drain. I let him into my house without verifying his identity, and not only did he repair the drain, he also took off his shoes so he wouldn’t track mud on my floors. When he was done, I gave him a piece of paper that asked my bank to give him some money. He accepted it without a second glance. At no point did he attempt to take my possessions, and at no point did I attempt the same of him. In fact, neither of us worried that the other would. My wife was also home, but it never occurred to me that he was a sexual rival and I should kill him…
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.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.