Glen -
I'd say stability and trustworthiness are different things. Stability
arises almost necessarily because there are different individuals
competing for power within the organization. [...]
Once a structure like this becomes stable, the the organization can
become immune from the truth. No one in the lower ranks has an
incentive any more to rock the boat -- everything becomes about internal
political signaling. There is no reason to be trustworthy in any
universal sense because the incentives for survival within the
organization follow a different set of rules.
I'm not convinced of the difference between stability and
trustworthiness. I suppose it depends on what one means by "trust". I
trust people like Penrose to behave in Penrosian ways. And I trust the
Washington Post to behave in Wapovian ways. That's what I mean by
trust. The point being that if I hear something from, say Rush
Limbaugh, I should be able to make a fast estimation of that thing. I
expect it to be Limbaugh-like. So, to me, trust is less about some
universal Truth according to a grand unified theory of the universe.
It's more about model-ability.
My strong-libertarian personality (one of several seen here) agrees with
this in the extreme. I don't give a flying flip what someone elses'
propensities and proclivities are, as long as I have a good model of
them, even if my model is that they are total whack-jobs (high variance
in their behaviour).
However, my humanist personality (yet another, which seems to be
somewhat at odds with the libertarian one) wants to narrow the model of
human behaviour down to include a measure of empathic response. I would
say I "trust" people more who I believe to have an empathic response to
me, and in general I believe that this is a resonant phenomena, that
those whom I am empathetic with, are also more empathetic with me,
etc. So a strong empathetic bond with someone leads me to "trust" them
in a different way than I trust Rush Limbaugh (or Roger Penrose). My
wife, my children, even Steve Guerin (when we are drinking together anyway).
- Steve
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