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Thoughts on trust

I always find it frustrating to realize that our civilization is based on many very important concepts such as respect, love, trust, justice, honesty and truth, which are most of the time and by most people misunderstood, misused or even unknown. Most people uses them in their daily lives but have never stopped to question them, this post is about one of them, Trust.

After reading for a while on the web, I finally reached a definition that seems to be good enough, at least for the moment, to start with. I think it may change the more I understand about it, but lets keep it simple for now.

Trust (Definition). The ability of a person to predict the future behavior of another person, or object. 

I now analyze the logical implications of this definition. First, trust is not something that we can give to another person or object, it is something we develop by improving our ability of predicting 

future behaviors.

How we gain trust 

Trust can be increased by experience. This is done by a series of experiments in which have a set the initial conditions and try to predict the outcome, if it fits your expectations, then you gain trust in that person or object. The better you are able to predict the more confident you feel about the person or object. 

In the case of predicting the behavior of people, experience may give us unrealistic ideas about our ability to predict future behaviors. Predicting another person’s actions is rather difficult, that’s why for some people it’s so hard to trust someone.  

Explicit and implicit trust agreements

I want to analyze two scenarios in which is common the misuse of the concept of trust. For example, take two persons, they met, start getting along, and after a while they start to share with each other all sorts of information, personal, shameful, funny, confidential, etc.

The first scenario is when there’s not an explicit consensus about what is implied when trusting someone. Depending on their background, they may have different views, for example, about which information is confidential. Thus it may happen that one of the persons shares confidential information with a third person, which may be regarded as a betrayal. 

The second scenario is when there is an explicit contract in which one of the persons asks the other to not share a given information with other persons, then if that person still shares that information then it could be seen as a betrayal on purpose. 

In any case, the person that feels betrayed has no right to blame the other. You cannot blame other persons because you weren’t able to predict his behavior. No one is to blame. It’s not the betrayed person's fault that he cannot predict the other persons behavior. And it’s not the betraying person’s fault that the betrayed person wasn’t able to predict his behavior. 

Self-confidence 

It’s also possible for a person to not be able to predict his own behavior. We know our abilities, but we also tend to overestimate our strengths, and underestimate our weaknesses. It is very common for humans to fail at trying something because we had unrealistic expectations 

about ourselves. 

We gain self-confidence in the same way as we gain trust in other persons or objects, by experience. The best way to know our limits is to put them to test many times, and have the honesty to accept when your performance matched your expectations when it didn’t. Keeping track of this may help us plan strategies to carry out bigger projects each time, since we’ll have the hindsight of knowing which mistakes we made, and try to correct as many of them as possible.

Conclusions 

If you agree with this way of seeing trust and try to be honest with yourself, you should never blame other for betraying your trust, ever. This is the most important consequence of this view of trust, and the most hard to accept given that most of us has used the term trust in a not well-defined manner for a long time. 

You cannot blame other people for your inability to predict their behavior. Even when it comes to the expectations about ourselves. 

We shouldn’t dive into desperation when failing to predict, one way to improve our ability to predict our behavior or performance is by carrying out lots and lots of experiments and analyze with the benefit of hindsight what actually happened. 

Even though we can conceptually accept these ideas about trust, it’s easy to feel down because we feel betrayed, even if we are able to rationalize it. That, I haven’t been able to find a way to counteract, but I 

think rationalization and the  study of depression of this kind may actually help overcome it, or at least 

transcend it while you’re are analyzing it. 

Why we don´t need democracy. What we need is Science.

Democracy: a form of government where all the people have equal say in the decisions that affect their lives.

The world is full of all kinds of people, all kinds of ideas, beliefs, superstitions, prejudices and more...
If we were ever to implement a democracy we would have to accept and respect ideas that are direct in opposition with our own.

We would have to give equal validity, for example, to the ideas of people proposing to use science as a tool to improve our lives and to those who want to take decisions based on the readings of the testicles of a goat.

We don´t need a democracy because not all ideas have the same validity.

Furthermore we should not be shy when declaring that someone else´s ideas are wrong,  as long as we have the proper evidence to prove such an affirmation.

A natural approach to a form of government would be one that takes the evidence into account for any kind of decision making process, for example the one proposed in the Zeitgeist III movie, part 3 (1:29:20):

Method of government

I say government but what I mean is not a group of people creating and enforcing rules. I mean a global management system which is able to determine the best course of action given the current information about the issue it is to decide about.

Now, the method is simple and we have used is for a little more than three centuries with awesome results (unfortunately not as a form of government); its name Science. 

Science offers many desirable features of any type of government, it is open, self-correcting, free, evidence-based, testable, reproducible, and its finding are free from opinion and bias towards any special group of people, and even when an advantage is sought by fallible humans, it is openly exposed for everyone to see and challenge.

RFC: The venus project

It's been a couple of months since I've been wondering:
What do people think about the ideas proposed by The Venus Project?


It is possible that people may have never heard of it,
in that case here's the link to it's site but don't worry the premise is very simple:
The objective of the Venus Project is to use the scientific method
with social concern.


What they propose is rather simple to state:
to actually use evidence as the basis for our decisions.


Now there are many views out there, many opposing the ideas
put forward by TVP, unfortunately many of them are uninformed.


I can identify mainly the following arguments:

• It is not possible. We'll never be able to get along.
• It is not worth the effort. 
• What we have works good enough.
• I won't be around to see the results
• It doesn't make any sense.
• Their premises are flawed and thus their conclusions are false.
• It is not necessary to do anything, we'll get there anyway, its' the only choice we have, .... that or extinction.

The more I think about it the more convinced I am that I'm in the last category.
I will email this post to some people and see what happen, hopefully someone
will comment. Although my personal experience tells me that most people are
too lazy to read something they are note interested in, and unfortunately most people
are so busy living their lives that they're note interested in improving the world they live in.


Anyway I would like to know what you believe. Let me know with your comments.