Liars and outliers
In today's hyper-connected society, understanding the mechanisms of trust is crucial. Issues of trust are critical to solving problems as diverse as corporate responsibility, global warming, and the political system. In this insightful and entertaining book, Schneier weaves together ideas from across the social and biological sciences to explain how society induces trust. He shows the unique role of trust in facilitating and stabilizing human society. He discusses why and how trust has evolved, why it works the way it does, and the ways the information society is changing everything. - Publisher.
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What Hacker News says
- This discussion reminds me of a valuable and yet rarely discussed book by Bruce Schneier, Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive.
- The Tragedy of the Commons has long been discredited by the noble winning game theorist Elinor Ostrom and her research of numerous case studies on the commons, and how people coordinate for collective resilence and prosperity (through rules and by auditing and retaliating against abusers and selfish exploiters)
The infamous "tragedy of the commons" rational resource optimization game is often cited as justification for machiavellian exploitation, but humans being social creatures are subject to reputations, and have sophisticated methods of communication, cooperation, reputation, trust, accountability, auditing, and retaliation capabilities. [1] [2]
Elinor Ostrom's "Rules, games, and common-pool resources" and Robert Axelrod's work "The Evolution of Cooperation" both explain game theory in the context of human scale realities. Of particular interest to the hacker community would be Ostrom's Common Pool Resource principles, which are totally applicable to the way we form communities anywhere. Decenteralized or in any form.
At the core of game theory and human civilization is communication and trust. The abuse of mass media to manipulate populations knows the power of communication and cultural narratives, and we're in a new enclosure [3] [4] of the commons and as media communication networks are being used to exploit through "hypernormalization" and "accelerationism" [5][6][7][8]
For a better applicable human scale game theory primer, check out Bruce Schneier's (yes, the same legendary cryptographer Bruce), "Liars and Outliers"
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom#Design_principle...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything
[5] on Cybernetics and the 20th century "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" by Adam Curtis https://thoughtmaybe.com/all-watched-over-by-machines-of-lov...
[6] on propaganda and 20th century culture "The Century of the Self" by Adam Curtis https://thoughtmaybe.com/the-century-of-the-self/
[7] on the hyperreal news and the use of crisis to manipulate populations and normalize a polycrisis - "Hypernormalization" by Adam Curtis https://thoughtmaybe.com/hypernormalisation/
- You might be interested in Bruce Schneier's take on trust and what prevents predatory behaviour. In his book Liars and Outliers he gives a taxonomy of 4 elements: law, reputation, morality, and security.
Reputation and law are similar in that they're imposed by a community, but differ in that law follows a formally codified code, and of course the consequences imposed tend to differ. Morality is the internal motivation not to wrong others. Security describes physical/electronic measures that cause the predatory behaviour not to be practical in the first place, or at least raise the bar.
Schneier's own summary: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/03/liars_and_out...
A review, hosted on Schneier's site: https://www.schneier.com/news/archives/2012/12/liars-and-out...
- You need to think more about your model of trust. You will quickly discover that all security is built on trusting someone, even in the examples you mention above. You can compile your own kernel, but you trust kernel developers to not have put exploits in the source code. You can't audit the source code itself. You also trust your compiler to accurately compile the source code. You also trust compiler developers to not have put exploits into the compiler itself. You also trust the compiler they used to bootstrap their toolchain to compile the compiler.
Fundamentally, all security is based on trusting somebody, understanding their incentives and intentions and weighing risk and reward. An excellent book on the subject is Bruce Schneier's "Liars and Outliers" https://www.schneier.com/books/liars-and-outliers/.
- >Additionally, I think that the existence of an SoC or likewise document is a sign towards outsiders that your community can’t behave itself maturely. They need special rules laid out to them, after all. Like most rules, they are codified because issues have arisen in the past, and keep on arising. I don’t think the Perl community is too immature to behave itself. I trust in the good faith of people, and to me it feels like a SoC does the exact opposite.
Good faith doesn't scale. Any community of sufficient size absolutely requires explicit rules (and plenty of smaller communities need them to, because being small doesn't make you immune to assholes or to excusing their assholishness due to other qualities).
Bruce Schneier goes into this in excruciating novel-length depth with sources and case studies: https://www.schneier.com/books/liars-and-outliers/
- >We are shocked and dismayed by the news regarding FTX and Alameda
The classics never die: https://media.tenor.com/SgK-2pYa_bEAAAAC/casablanca-shocked....
Truly though I have a lot of sympathy for users of these platforms, the portion that thought they were on the ground floor of something that would change how the economy functions, and any speculators who were not simply operating on the "greater fool" theory.
I myself thought "heck, this could work, if institutional money gets involved and the stronger coins find a real economic outlet." After all, pure faith in the entrenched financial systems of the world is a big part of what keeps them going when times get tough too. Though I was still entirely too cynically skeptical to risk my own money, I was cautiously optimistic that some interesting shakeups could be in the works.
As it turns out, crypto was still entirely too much of a closed system to sustain shocks like this, assets entirely too correlated with each other, fraudsters entirely too prevalent, many who were entirely too ready to throw the baby out with the bath water when it came to ignoring lessons learned by traditional finance, and on and on.
I think part of what this all reveals is that blockchain transparency of coin transactions is not enough. The rebuilding phase to come needs to focus on the next level up. A blockchain providing a level of brutally clear transparency into all the layers of their own dealings that operating on top of or along side of or in connection to coins/tokens. This is needed for all of the somewhat centralized entities that are useful (and, IMHO necessary) to reduce friction & increase usability of crypto.
^^Regarding that, maybe it's not even a problem that tech can, by itself, solve. Though often derided, legalese is professional jargon that has developed over the course of centuries in an attempt to minimize ambiguities in transactions between people, and we still need courts with human judgement to sort things out around edge cases, oversights, etc. It may simply be impossible to solve, at least at the level of "code is law", issues like we see with FTX and its contagion to all levels of crypto that were (either deliberately or in good faith) not operating carefully.
I don't know. I'm conflicted on the topic, as perhaps the above rant-ish ramblings show. I was rooting for this generation of crypto tech to take hold as it shook off the scammers and other barnacles of the industry, rooting for it to find a bridge to utility with the actual economy, but even as I rooted for things to go well I am unsurprised by this outcome.
I think what it comes down to is that the folks who really want to make this happen and change the way financial systems run society (rather than only to become rich themselves) need to take a step back reassess their philosophy. They need to determine if technology really can address the goals derived from their philosophy. If it can then they start the hard work of building it. If it can't, then there's the even harder work of pruning away the goals derived from their philosophy that can't be achieved by tech, software, etc.
For myself, the core part of the philosophy that I think is fundamentally flawed is the "trustless" pillar. I think it may be fundamentally impossible to build something systemic to the infrastructure of society that does not, at a fundamental level, also rely on trust to one degree or another. Bruce Schneier's book Liars and Outliers is an excellent exploration on the topic of trust, and it's hard to come away from that book & still believe in the vision of a truly trustless financial system which, at some level, underpins a great majority of our lives.
