Thanks for this, but I don't think it applies very well to the vast majority of my contacts with other people. First, trust isn't a binary - it's highly variable across domain and risk level. Not "do I trust you", but "do I trust you to X or at least not Y for stakes Z".
And I have not found most people to be quite as meta about signaling, and those that ARE tend to curry less trust than those that aren't (or don't appear to be). folk models of each other are mostly about "things they do naturally, and don't choose for legible (contingent) reasons".
Finally, your thesis is based on a falsehood.
And that's why honest people are never touchy about the matter of being trusted.
In my experience many honest people are VERY touchy about being trusted. This has more to do with their formative experiences and worldview about status, honor, and respect than about a directed intent.
And dishonest-but-reflective people can just as easily show indifference to examination as can honest people. The signal itself isn't expensive/difficult. The ACTUAL object-level inspection (are the trains running, have you followed up on THIS promise) is difficult.
Summary: talk remains cheap, including non-talk casualness. Trust comes from many sources which are NOT intentional/legible signals - social webs, ability to punish/recover defection/failure, estimates of constraints on the behavior of the trustee.
I think that changing the first clause repairs the moral of this post.
Skilled operators in adversarial environments are never touchy about the matter of being trusted.
Dagny and Wyatt have common knowledge that it's not possible for Wyatt to trust Dagny in that moment. Dagny is a skilled operator. She recognizes that the thing to salvage isn't trust. It's politeness and calm. That would be true whether she was planning on screwing over Wyatt or making his trains run on time.
Similarly, I don't think Sam Altman is touchy about not being trusted. He's the CEO of a high-profile tech company that's producing some extremely controversial technology. There might be actions he could take to earn trust from specific subsets of the population. Daniel Kokotajlo implicitly claims it would have bought more trust with him if OpenAI had given more unfettered access to investigate the HuggingFace hacking incident.
But Altman doesn't seem to care about gaining the trust of Daniel or people like him. So he's not going to be touchy about seeing posts like this from Daniel. He will be taking it for granted that he'll not be trusted, due to his role at OpenAI. No point in being touchy about it. That would just waste energy and look weak.
By contrast, honest people can absolutely be touchy about being distrusted in a high-trust environment.
As a personal example, when my sister-in-law was late in pregnancy, she requested that her whole family submit documentation to her proving they were up-to-date on their vaccines to see the baby. Everyone in the family is honest, and all are in the medical field and pro-vaccine. My wife, who is an honest person, was deeply offended. Her rationale was that her sister was treating her close family, which is a high-trust group, as if they were untrustworthy.
Furthermore, complying with that demand for documentation might invite similar demands in the future, undermining the value of the high-trust family dynamic. So she openly expressed her frustration to her sister, as a way of punishing the defection. My wife is not a rationalist, but she is socially astute, and I'm not inferring her motivations here -- this is a faithful account of the rationale she described to me, though it's in my words, not hers.
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1Similarly, I don't think Sam Altman is touchy about not being trusted.
He was touchy about it in those early-day OpenAI emails to Sutskever and Brockman that came out, where Sutskever had voiced some concerns about Altman maybe having too much power with their intended company structure.
Hiatus: Sam told Greg and Ilya he needs to step away for 10 days to think. Needs to figure out how much he can trust them and how much he wants to work with them. Said he will come back after that and figure out how much time he wants to spend.
To me, Sutskever seems susceptible to social pressure and guilt tripping, so I think this is Altman's Machiavellianism at work, which would support the point of the OP. Particularly: if someone is in many contexts capable of acting calm-headed and strategic and showing an understanding for other viewpoints, meaning they act UNLIKE someone who was brought up in an honor culture, but then they throw a tantrum when they are around individuals who are likely to feel a lot of guilt for having accused them (or are around 3rd parties siding with someone who presents themselves as the victim), then the behavior is incongruous, which should raise suspicions.
Sure, if someone always throws a tantrum because they grew up in an honor culture, that's consistent too. But there are certain contexts where you cannot rise through the ranks with this mentality (maybe you can make it far within the Mafia but not in the Silicon Valley startup scene).
if someone is in many contexts capable of acting calm-headed and strategic and showing an understanding for other viewpoints, meaning they act UNLIKE someone who was brought up in an honor culture, but then they throw a tantrum when they are around individuals who are likely to feel a lot of guilt for having accused them (or are around 3rd parties siding with someone who presents themselves as the victim), then the behavior is incongruous, which should raise suspicions.
Sure, if someone always throws a tantrum because they grew up in an honor culture, that's consistent too. But there are certain contexts where you cannot rise through the ranks with this mentality (maybe you can make it far within the Mafia but not in the Silicon Valley startup scene).
People usually seem to hate it when negotiating counterparties try to create a pretense of a high-trust, non-adversarial setting. In fact, Wyatt's behavior in the story could be interpreted not simply as a frustrated outburst, but as calculated. He is announcing a "grim trigger" policy: defect on me, and I commit to defecting on you indefinitely. If credible, that would enable Dagny, even if she'd prefer to defect on a cooperating, to cooperate, and it thereby enables Wyatt to cooperate as well.
By contrast, if one negotiating partner acts as if they're being "naively high trust," as Dagny wishes she could do, it in turn sets up their opponent to defect, no matter what. If the commitment is credible, then they are telling their counterparty it's safe to defect. If not, then the counterparty needs to defect anyway.
In an adversarial, potentially exploitative setting, where agents can read each other's policies, it's necessary for self-defense to be able to defect. Since human counterparties can't read each other's minds, displays of aggressively threatening behavior is a small costly signal that they're capable of reciprocating in bigger ways should their counterparty defect. So precisely the opposite behavior of what is necessary to sustain a high-trust environment.
One read on Altman might be that he is privately consistently adversarial, and he's reading his counterparties (Ilya in this case) and trying to figure out if they think he's high-trust or adversarial. If they read him as high-trust, then Altman will give high-trust signals, like being touchy about being distrusted, because that buys him the cooperation he needs to set up his defections. If they don't read him as high-trust, then he gives them the adversarial signals that show he's capable of defecting back.
Allowing the Potemkin safety inspection may be seen as perfectly ambiguous: see him as high-trust, and you can offer the evidence of the inspection. See him as a capable adversary, and you can read the calculated meaninglessness of it as a sign of strength.
Finally, your thesis is based on a falsehood.
And that's why honest people are never touchy about the matter of being trusted.
In my experience many honest people are VERY touchy about being trusted.
This can be true from a very low resolution view, but this low resolution obscures the dynamics that matter here.
The behavior itself, on the face of it, is 1) an attempt to get people to view them as honest and 2) an attempt to do so without engaging with the possibility that they might not be. It comes up when the other person has reason to view them as not honest. "No, we shouldn't think that. It doesn't matter the evidence, I don't want to see it. You should just use my preferred conclusion". It's not exactly an act of honesty.
Perfect honesty is hard. In order to be honest all the time, you have to see through the lies you tell yourself, which you expect to be able to get others to buy into. This same drive to "be honest" becomes a drive to be dishonest the moment perfect honesty becomes harder to achieve than "people [myself included] accept the claim that I'm honest" -- because it can only ever be implemented as the control of perception, and if your ability to see through the deceptions lags your ability to create them then Goodhart happens and honesty fails.
So this defensive behavior might correlate with honesty in other cases, if there's more variance in drive to be seen as honest than there is in ability to see through self deceptions. But it also might not. It's an empirical question.
What looking closely gets you either way, is a recognition that regardless whether "I'm honest in all these other cases!" is true, the "therefore you shouldn't look at the evidence on this case!" is itself an example of dishonesty.
So are honest people ever touchy about their honesty? Depends on how strict you're being about giving them the badge of "honest". You might want the bar to be low enough to give them a pass, and many might not clear the bar if you don't. But people that are being honest don't. And honesty at the point where honesty is questioned is necessary for limiting the Goodhart leakage.
In my experience many honest people are VERY touchy about being trusted
Sidenote that Claude Fable's interpretation of the existing research on this topic supports Dagon's experience.
In my experience many honest people are VERY touchy about being trusted. This has more to do with their formative experiences and worldview about status, honor, and respect than about a directed intent.
The entire idea of honor/prestige is that you spend decades providing evidence that you are trustworthy. It is a costly signal, that can be ruined by violating the rules once -- that's exactly what makes it so reliable: if you are interacting with a person who haven't violated a rule even once during many years, it seems unlikely that the person would violate the rule now (that would be a too long con, and you are probably not worth it).
However, this costly signal can also be ruined by someone spreading an unsubstantiated rumor. Which is why people who value their honor react to such situations with offense.
There are cultural differences about the importance of honor. A lot of that depends on whether you have decades of repeated experience with the same people, or you mostly interact with strangers... compared to the traditional cultures we are more in the latter extreme, especially those of us who live in big cities. Caring too much about your honor may seem silly in our environment, like "you boast of something that none of us can verify", but the idea is that in other environments those claims would be verifiable.
Actually, even LessWrong has reinvented some aspects of honor in its karma system. The rule that only people with sufficient karma can vote on certain things, and that votes of people with much karma matter more... yeah, that is "karma" playing the role of (some aspects of) honor. These people are trusted to be rationalists in good standing - as judged by other rationalists in good standing - and therefore they get some privileges, over a rando who create an account yesterday. (From that perspective, attacking someone's trustworthiness is analogical do mass downvoting their comments to reduce their karma. That is a serious breach of rules, which has historically brought LessWrong down on its knees.)
Other situations where people reinvent honor is asking employees for references from their former jobs or their criminal record, or people who date someone investigating their potential partner's social background.
In other words, honor is more important than it is fashionable to admit in our culture. Smart people keep discovering or reinventing it, naive people ignore it and then probabilistically pay the price.
Strong agree.
I have an intuition that sometimes gets me in trouble, that's sort of like "well, from your point of view there's nothing to distinguish me from someone much worse, so you may as well round me down."
Like, if I feel like I have some special talent deep inside me, but I haven't demonstrated it legibly, then as far as you're concerned, you ought to think of me as no better than what I've proven. If I went around asking people to believe me that I have a special hidden talent, I'd sort of be asking for unearned trust, or asking people to make an exception for me that they rationally shouldn't from their point of view.
Another example is, if you are typically skeptical that people "really care" about some ideal, and if I don't think I can prove to you that I "really care" (or don't want to make the effort to prove it to you), then I may as well let you round me down to someone who doesn't really care. I don't want to bend over backwards to prove myself to you, so it's "only fair" that you consider me venal, lazy, intellectually dishonest, or whatever. It's not exactly true, but it's "true as far as you're concerned".
you may as well round me down
A state of uncertainty (on whatever priors) is more accurate though; insisting that you ought to be rounded down is as unfounded as insisting on recognition of illegible talents.
+1, the reasonable demand isn't to be rounded down, but to be represented as part of the distribution and let someone acquire increasingly more info over time to place you more precisely. Their uncertainty should include believing you might be incredibly cool and often worth some time seeing if that's actually the case.
This, coupled with long tails, explains why being willing to spend a few mins of time with unknown folk is often EV positive (eg. reading some personal cold email outreach), even if 99% of those occurrences were small losses. (If one is not careful or has good judgement, it's possible for some meetings to be more than a small loss, but training judgement is useful anyway and broadly it is best to expose oneself to the world to get better at navigating it overtime, as the high upsides really exist out there and are worth the journey)
Most people trust others more than it might seem deserved by the provided evidence.
And if you make unsubstantiated claims, yes, many people will take them at face value, as long as they are plausible and compatible with other signals you are sending. (Hard to believe that you are a millionaire if you look like homeless. Hard to believe that you are powerful if your body language contradicts it.) They may be more careful when money is at stake, but you can get a lot of social benefits from mere role playing.
So if you walk around loudly announcing "hey, I am a nobody... at least, as far as legible evidence is concerned", you are probably just needlessly hurting yourself.
If I went around asking people to believe me that I have a special hidden talent, I'd sort of be asking for unearned trust, or asking people to make an exception for me that they rationally shouldn't from their point of view.
Yeah, that totally works, because most people are not rational. Next time you will wonder why a random homeopathy seller makes more money than someone who spends their all time contributing to humanity's scientific knowledge, this is the answer.
Strong upvote, I agree that merely protesting your supposed untrustworthiness is a signal without a signal, and I would go further to say it is virtuous to support people around you investigating your trustworthiness even if you worry they will come to negative conclusions about your reputation or character.
I want to push back on an associated claim (not sure if it was implied) that it doesn't make sense to defend yourself against any accusations of untrustworthiness e.g. I think it would make sense for many individuals under McCarthyism to present evidence defending themselves against the accusation of being a Communist spy.
Anyone interested in a deeper dive into separating equilibria (including the math!) would do well to read "The Art of Strategy" by Avinash Dixit and Barry Nalebuff. I found the book to be a highly accessible introduction to a wide variety of game theoretic concepts; detailed enough to establish a solid foundation without getting quagmired in opaque technical proofs.
And that’s why honest people are never touchy about the matter of being trusted. They know that in order to distinguish themselves from dishonest people, they have to pay a price that’s too expensive for dishonest people to pay.
Never, really? What a miracle that no honest person fails to understand pooling equilibria!
The discussion of pooling equilibria is intended as a reduction of a generalization that Rand (and thus her character Cherryl) noticed intuitively. (In the context of the novel and a blog post analyzing the passage from the novel, I think it's natural to read "never" as a defensible rhetorical exaggeration; I don't think you're actually confused about what I meant.)
"Never" doesn't read as defensible exaggeration because what would it be an exaggeration of? "Honest people almost never fail to understand pooling equilibria" remains miraculous, and "Well maybe half of them get it" is beyond the bounds of reasonable hyperbole. I figured that you were impugning the character of real people who get touchy about being trusted, rather than presenting an "in-universe" explanation of Rand's asserted social dynamics. The closing sentence in particular does not feel like a reduction.
I guess I was confused.
Yes but even worse, this is mostly not even a problem of "understanding".
A newly gained intellectual understanding of why X is good actually is insufficient to get someone with years of touchiness about X to not be touchy. There are lots of "unprocessed" heuristics (~maladaptive behavior/instincts), and it takes time/effort to change them quickly, or sometimes at all (for trapped priors).
It might not be the best someone to work on that particular heuristic at that time. A human following optimal human protocol will probably be carrying lots of unprocessed heuristics, that are mostly worth quick verbal acknowledgement and acceptance "I'm touchy about X" than deep change (tho someone at that level will probably have change happen over time)
Interestingly, most times one wants to oppose the wisdom of their emotions, there's a wrinkle to look out for. If someone new to human relations read this post and decided they'd distrust people who are touchy about honesty, they'd probably correctly be filtered out by touchy honest people. Honest people do have benefit of having and presenting raw edges to learn others' skill levels at judgement and fluidity. Someone with rigid beliefs about "how other people should be" is probably not great to work with!
In practice, I find posts like the above a good contribution to someone learning human socializing, it's good to know about implicit signals and equilibriums, but it's easy to go overboard and forget the dozen other factors that complicate what actual best behavior is for real situations. I do recommend learning theory (for people like me). If one learns theory both for why X and why not X (eg. why gender norms are good, and why gender norms are bad), one can recognize the specifics faster and more fluidly navigate actual situations.
A reader asks: if not being touchy is a slight sign of honesty, then why would a dishonest person be touchy? How would that benefit them?
This was actually a part where I wasn't sure how to translate psychology to math. The thing James Taggart is doing in the novel passage isn't smart given that Cherryl takes it as evidence that he's fake (which makes it hard to express as equilibrium math), but it seems like he was hoping that she would be successfully intimidated (to say, "Oh, no, honey, of course I trust you; I'm sorry" and mostly believe it).
I'd say it's not actually about trust, it's reframing it to be about loyalty. See point 7 in my handy list of heuristics for doing anti-epistemology, "Reframe their behavior as about your relationship".
You could try telling them, "Hey, you can trust me," but that doesn't work if a dishonest person could just as easily say the same thing.
Surprisingly, some untrustworthy people say "you shouldn't trust me". Not sure if they enjoy playing on the hard mode, or are preparing a way to blame you after they stab you in the back.
Saying "you can trust me" thus provides weak but nonzero evidence that you can be trusted.
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Another important thing: people often project. If someone unexpectedly says "I don't trust you, what if you are just trying to scam me?", you should seriously consider the possibility that in fact this person is trying to scam you, and their next request to do something that gains their trust may be a part of that scam.
(Another trap that our natural instinct to get angry at unfounded accusations may protect us from.)
Surprisingly, some untrustworthy people say "you shouldn't trust me". Not sure if they enjoy playing on the hard mode, or are preparing a way to blame you after they stab you in the back.
my understanding is that it is a filter for people who are difficult to con. same reason the "you have inherited $1 million, send bank details" emails don't even try to be convincing. helps the con-artist discover easy marks.
Related:
"The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons." — Emerson
"When you see a man with a great deal of religion displayed in his shop window, you may depend upon it he keeps a very small stock of it within." — Spurgeon
"All hat and no knickers." — traditional saying with many variations
Turns out that if you find an area of morality on which two thinkers as radically different as Ayn Rand and Jesus Christ agree, you may be looking at a human universal. (See Matthew 5:33-37: don't make dramatic oaths to assert your trustworthiness; just say "yes" or "no" truthfully and leave it at that.)
This is an interesting idea, and I appreciate the Biblical reference, but I think there are too many dimensions along which important people could agree (or disagree) for agreement along one dimension to be good evidence of human universality.
Suppose that there are three thinkers (representing three worldviews) and one binary issue. It's mathematically certain that at least 2 thinkers will agree about the issue, yet it doesn't seem especially likely that all 3 would.
Hey OP I thought I try to respond to the book's text then respond to you.
She had learned, in the slums of her childhood, that honest people were never touchy about the matter of being trusted.
So what Cherryl learned is that honest people were never touchy about the matter of them being trusted. Is that a fact? Does that apply to real life? It's in a fiction book, but it could still apply to life.
If it is a fact then you should see honest people are never touchy about the matter of being trusted. Also, what is an honest person? I think that helps to understand what kind of people are touchy or not. If you're being touchy then you're not an honest person. If the part of the story is realistic then you should expect everyone who is touchy to not be honest people.
I would ask why does being honest not make you touchy about the matter? That and why are people who are not honest touchy? How does being touchy have to do with being honest? I think if you answer that then you'll understand the fact or see that Rand is wrong.
Now to look at Op's response:
It was his sudden, angry "so you don't trust me?" snapped in answer to her first, innocent questions that made her realize she did not—when the doubt had not yet formed in her mind and she had fully expected that the answers would reassure her. She had learned, in the slums of her childhood, that honest people were never touchy about the matter of being trusted.
The logic here might be worth explaining in case it's not obvious. One might object: if you're honest (and therefore deserve to be trusted), shouldn't you be touchy about people incorrectly not trusting you?
Why does being honest mean that you deserve to be trusted? How does trust relate to being an honest person? How does this relate to people being touchy when they're dishonest? Sorry, im not an expert on this topic.
I think it would be good to know why people are touchy or not about the matter. That's cuz there's a reason for it. I think dishonest people want to be believed. It makes them offended when they're not believed.
I saw on Merriam Webster that, to paraphrase, touchy means readily to take offense to something. That something is slightly provoking. Idk what provoking means but I saw the definition that it's something that's trying to stir something up in someone. Not too sure really. But I would think that maybe Cherryl's questions are provoking Taggart to think that she is saying she doesnt trust him. He's touchy about it so he was easily offended by anything that was related to not trusting him. Why would a dishonest person be like that? I think for Taggart, he's like that cuz maybe he finds it hard to deal with people believing him. He doesnt want to deal with that so he's touchy about it. That or he doesnt like when people dont believe him. It's happened before. He's touchy about people not believing him. He's given people reason to not trust him.
People in general I think have given reason to others to not trust them. That's because they're dishonest people. They don't like when they're not trusted. They have probably lied to others and have found that people don't trust them.
My question is that what about people who are not trusted but have something real to speak about? Like, Gallileo? He had a theory did people not trust him or his theory? I don't know if this is the same matter.
Also, why are people honest about something but touchy about not being trusted? They probably dealt with people not believing them in the past. Sometimes, one can tell the truth but because there's rumors about them, there are others that don't believe them. I think tho that if one knew that honest people aren't touchy then it'll dispel the rumor to them. But it only works if one knows that someone is an honest person.
Is being an honest person more about being honest in one situation or as a pattern in life? I think one may not be an honest person but honest in one situation. That doesnt make you an honest person. What makes someone an honest person? Not too sure. It's mostly intuitive to me. However, I think that's a judgement one can be wrong about. It's a claim about how the person is like. You could be wrong about that.
Do people get touchy about the matter of being trusted for other reasons than being dishonest people? Are they honest people even if they're touchy for a different reason? Does it always come to being honest or dishonest as the cause?
I wonder if there isn't an aspect of the how to, of if one should, answer leading compound questions. The old "Have you stopped beating your wife?" type questions. It's not that one cannot answer but in answering there is the risk of indicating the unasked question/unstated assumption is in fact true (The person has beaten his wife in the past.)
I'm not sure just how the situation might fit into the separating-pooling equilibria framing but seems to have some similarities. For someone to say they cannot trust me I think two extremes might be, making the assumption I am honest and trustworthy, they know nothing about me or they think something false about me. In the first case being offended by someone saying they cannot trust me. Caution is reasonable here.
In the other case, arguing that I am trustworthy is not the right approach and before ever making such a claim identifying why the person thinks there are reasons not to trust should be identified and cleared up -- at which point might feel slighted if all the reasons they were not viewed as trustworthy were should to be false and they may well be justified in protesting further statements of untrustworthiness.
Without knowing the math, it seems unlikely to me that the math will be practically useful without knowing what people know, because you also need to consider the mental capacity of each participant and the knowledge about their counterparts' mental capacity in such a situation:
A) Being touchy in public could be a very costly signal in a group where everbody thinks that honest people are never touchy about the matter of being trusted. So if people know that you are smart enough to know that you shouldn't act touchy, acting touchy will be a signal of you really being upset with people distrusting you. In this sense, knowledge builds trust.
B) If I know my counterpart distrusts me a priori and I know that I am smarter than they, I can try to use the floor effect and just output lots of noise to dilute their prior and effectively increase their trust estimate.
If I distrust my opponent and know that they are smarter than me, so they might implement any game-theoretically optimal signallng strategy at level N+1 of ToM unavailable to me to outsmart me, my best strategy is to not listen to anything they tell me.
So if I know my counterpart distrusts me and I know that they are smart enough to know that they should definitely not listen to me, because we both know that I am smarter, I should just shut up and give them a costly signal like A. Wait...
Alternatively I could use sandbagging to make my counterpart beliefe that I am in fact not very smart, so they do listen to the noise I produce, giving me a chance to sway them.
Can we solve this by assuming that everybody is just very smart in all respects, which is obviously a false belief that can be used against you? Would be funny if this were true.
Generic comment that I find it a pity when sociological/psychological topics get one-sided treatment "And that's why honest people are never touchy about the matter of being trusted" (tho it's so extreme as to potentially be satirical/explicitly asking for commenters correct you, so that the piece with comments is good on the whole for average readers).
In that place I might have written an imo more truthful, if less punchy, "And that's one aspect that knowledgeable social people take into account when being distrusted, such that they can temper their touchiness or grow out of it. If it were absolute it could also be abused, so in practice they navigate according to mutually how much trust they put in the other, and specifics about that person's culture and epistemic habits. Most people are not "knowledgeable social people", so how trustworthy they are can even less be assessed by their touchiness on the subject"
I don't think the world would be better if only my kind of writing was allowed to exist, so I'm not asking for norm changes. Mostly sharing because I guess others will resonate.
There are two fundamentally different things someone might tell you:
- "I don't trust you, because I don't do this 'trust' thing in general; if you want to convince me, show me the evidence"
- "people should trust each other and I trust most people... but I don't trust you, Zack, specifically"
You seem to treat everything the former way, which sounds like an error someone on the autistic spectrum would make. (That means, LessWrong population is vulnerable to taking this kind of wrong advice.)
If it indeed is the former situation, even the Bible agrees with you: "Let your yes mean yes, and your no mean no. Anything more than this comes from the evil one." (Matthew 5:37)
In that case, you should respond with: Okay, let's discuss evidence. Are there certificates and references I could show you? Contracts I should sign? Generate some new legible evidence for the future?
(Depends on the specific thing you don't trust me about. If it is a business deal, let's sign a contract with specific penalties. If you are afraid that I will murder you if you meet me, tell your friends where you are going, and make a photo of us two and upload it to the cloud when we meet.)
If you are too paranoid and nothing can convince you... well, sounds like your problem not mine, you are locking yourself out of many potentially beneficial human interactions. And you are free to do so!
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This all is different from when you live in a society where generally almost everyone trusts everyone, and suddenly someone comes with "Zack, I don't trust you". At least, you should be curious why, because the consequences are potentially dangerous, if more people start doing this. You might get locked out of the mutually beneficial network of trust, and lose all the associated advantages. Depending on circumstances, this might even be worse than living in a society where no one trusts no one, because it will be hard to compete with your neighbors if they are trusted but you are not.
If you did something wrong that has reduced the person's trust in you, you should know what specifically. Maybe it is that person's quirk (they simply don't like your face because it reminds them of someone they met a decade ago), then you can probably do nothing about it, you lost this one person. It still might make sense to threaten consequences lest they spread this attitude to others.
But if there is some character assassination going on, some campaign to reduce everyone's trust in you specifically, then you definitely want to know about that, the sooner the better. Feeling offended may be the nature's way to say "give me all the fucking evidence against my trustworthiness you have, so that I can challenge it in open". It also signals that you disagree, which is not strong evidence, but I'd say it is a kind of weak evidence -- at least it signals that it is not the kind of situation where everyone distrusts you for "everyone knows" reasons that even you are not trying to challenge (so if someone happens to claim that this is such situation, you have put doubt to that statement).
A Vulcan rationalist might argue that even these statements and inquiries could be made with a calm face, but on planet Earth, emotions are a signal (even if not 100% reliable) of sincerity.
Counterpoint: if you know that you are not in a pooling equilibrium and a pooling equilibrium is unfeasible, it makes no sense to not fight as hard as you can. Your signal may be uncredible but what can you do? You have to send what signals you can. In fact, the smart defector will be more likely to not defend themselves, because they're more likely to be aware of the first-order countersignaling effect and try to go for a second-order play. In other words, fraudsters or honest, the heuristic of "distrust people with ineffective denials" screens out the inept and little else.
This is a neat concept, but I don't think it applies to many interpersonal situations. For example, if your partner suddenly asks if you're cheating on them, you shouldn't necessarily just set your jaw and reply "No, I'm not cheating on you." It would be totally reasonable to react negatively to this question, because if your partner knows you and thinks highly of you, they should trust you not to do that. Now that they've expressed suspicion, you might need to do costly things like letting them go through your phone or performing grand romantic gestures to make them trust you.
Agree to first part "doesn't apply to many interpersonal situations", but the last part "you might need to do [insane actions]" imo explains the disagree votes you're receiving. No, you don't have to do insane actions*. Letting someone go through your phone or performing grand romantic gestures are generally not valid ways to regain trust, so even if you desperately want trust you shouldn't be doing those compulsively.
For normies, going to a good couples therapist, or talking to trusted mutual friends, and figuring out the underlying issue of where lack of trust comes from seems more important. Instant evidence of "no weird messages in phone" are mostly irrelevant to longterm trust building.
*people who are very trustworthy are notably so because they can keep secrets, and letting someone go through your phone in a bid to gain trust makes you untrustworthy - what about all the other people you're now revealing private information of!
Honestly, I agree. When I wrote that, I guess I was imagining insane things that a partner who randomly accuses you of infidelity would demand from you, but I didn't communicate that, nor was it relevant to my point.
For example, if your partner suddenly asks if you're cheating on them, you shouldn't necessarily just set your jaw and
My immediate response is "Wait, what? Why are you asking that?". That would be very surprising to me. It wouldn't make sense. If we flip it around, depending on how I ask I expect her to respond similarly or to laugh because she knows I can't be serious.
It would be totally reasonable to react negatively to this question, because if your partner knows you and thinks highly of you, they should trust you not to do that.
If your partner knows you, and you aren't the type that might cheat, then they will trust you to not do that. Just like how if you drop a ball you don't need to say it "should" fall because it will fall -- unless something weird happens, like it's an alien tech antigravity ball, someone normally trustworthy has been making up lies about you, etc.
Turning it into a normative thing blocks the curiosity. "The ball should fall! Humph!". It's very odd to see something so supposedly unexpected, and then to not be curious what's going on. Especially when the declaration doesn't cause the ball to fall as it "should".
Now that they've expressed suspicion, you might need to do costly things like letting them go through your phone or performing grand romantic gestures to make them trust you.
I don't see that as costly at all. I don't care if my wife goes through my phone. There's nothing in there I need to hide from her. She doesn't care if I go through hers either.
What about "letting them go through your phone" feels costly to you? What do you lose, that you had the moment before you hand over the phone? It's not "her trust in me", since you already don't have that.
If your partner isn't surprised when you suspect them of cheating, and they're not curious where that came from because according to them you shouldn't even be entertaining it... regardless of who told you they're cheating or how much evidence you have... what does that suggest?
The particular answers don't matter much, and maybe the answers to the first questions don't highlight anything interesting. People often do things for reasons that don't make much sense in a larger picture, because people don't always remember to look at the big picture. When you do though, these things aren't going to hold up. You're only ever going to find "Yeah, I guess I didn't have anything to get defensive about" or "I did".
One of my favorite passages from Atlas Shrugged is this one, when Cherryl is beginning to have second thoughts about her marriage to James Taggart:
The logic here might be worth explaining in case it's not obvious. One might object: if you're honest (and therefore deserve to be trusted), shouldn't you be touchy about people incorrectly not trusting you? Not trusting you is a mistake that harms your interests and the other's. That's terrible! Why wouldn't you be touchy about it?
The problem is that in order to be trusted, it's not enough to be trustworthy; the other needs to know that you're trustworthy. You could try telling them, "Hey, you can trust me," but that doesn't work if a dishonest person could just as easily say the same thing.
A solution, if there is one, has to take the form of saying something that a dishonest person couldn't just as easily say.
Economists call the kind of situation in which it's possible for one type of agent to say something that a different type couldn't just as easily say a separating equilibrium. To understand separating equilibria, imagine two types of owners of spherical cats shopping for cat insurance on a frictionless plane: those with healthy cats, and those with sick cats. Insurance companies on the frictionless plane can't tell the difference between healthy and sick cats, and therefore face an adverse selection problem where the very fact that someone is willing to buy insurance implies that they're less profitable to insure in expectation (because sick cats are in more need of cat insurance).
Depending on some math that we don't have time for, there can be situations in which the adverse selection problem is solved by the different types of cat owners having incentives to buy different policies. Sick cats face a greater fraction of possible worlds in which they file a claim than healthy cats, so making those worlds worse for the policyholder by decreasing the policy benefit payout decreases the expected value of the policy more for sick cats than healthy cats.
As a corollary, the owners of healthy cats are willing to accept a smaller discount on premium to take out a smaller-benefit policy rather than a larger-benefit one. We end up in a situation where the healthy-cat owners pay a lower premium for a lower-benefit policy and the sick-cat owners pay a higher premium for a higher-benefit policy. The choice of policy becomes a signal that distinguishes the cats. There's nothing technically stopping the owners of sick cats from buying the lower-benefit policy—but it's not worth their while; they need the comprehensive coverage for their sick cat. That's our separating equilibrium.
But depending on some more math that we don't have time for, there are other situations in which we instead get a pooling equilibrium in which everyone buys the same policy. The insurance company treating everyone in a pooling equilibrium the same amounts to treating healthy cats quantitatively more like sick cats and vice versa, because the company has no way to tell the difference. All the cats are mixed together and can't be distinguished in the fog of the market.
There is a crucial asymmetry. Owners of sick cats would prefer that the insurance company falsely believe that their cats are healthy, whereas owners of healthy cats want their cats to be seen as they are. Pooling equilibria generally benefit the former at the expense of the latter. The existence of sick cats makes healthy cats shoulder the burden of more risk: the healthy-cat owners would prefer to transfer more risk to the insurance company by buying a policy with higher benefits, but the insurance company can't sell it to them, because then the sick-cat owners would buy it, too.
(As it turns out, there can be pooling equilibria that are better for the owners of healthy cats than some separating equilibria—but that's only because the cost they'd pay in reduced benefits-per-unit-premium to separate themselves from the owners of sick cats isn't worth it. They'd be even better off if cats never got sick.)
Sometimes, there's nothing you can say. Earlier in Atlas Shrugged, Ellis Wyatt confronts Dagny Taggart, Operating Vice-President of the Taggart Transcontinental railroad. A competing railroad that Wyatt's oil business depends upon has just been strangled by anti-competitive regulation, and Wyatt has come to Dagny (as "the only one who's got any brains in this rotten outfit") to deliver an "ultimatum." If Taggart Transcontinental expects to profit from the lack of competition without providing reliable transportation, Wyatt will exact revenge: "it is now in your power to destroy me; I may have to go; but if I go, I'll make sure that I take all the rest of you along with me." Dagny is pained to be so distrusted by Wyatt—the regulatory capture wasn't her doing—but knows better than to object:
The reason Dagny can't plead innocence or take offense is because, as an honest businessperson trapped in a pooling equilibrium with corrupt ones, she can see that the words of someone in her position are cheap talk that isn't credible to Wyatt. Not getting defensive about the accusation isn't much evidence—a corrupt executive with acting skills could maintain the same composure—but being touchy about it would be discrediting, because only a corrupt executive has an incentive to try to discourage the scrutiny that would separate the types. Dagny's non-defensiveness can't itself win Wyatt's trust, but it's enough to slightly soften Wyatt's aggression, because it at least clarifies that she knows that she'll be judged on whether the trains actually run.
And that's why honest people are never touchy about the matter of being trusted. They know that in order to distinguish themselves from dishonest people, they have to pay a price that's too expensive for dishonest people to pay. Sometimes the price might be very expensive (Dagny didn't deserve to be treated that way; the healthy cat owners are bearing more risk than they should have to), but it's the only way things could be; the hidden Bayesian structure of the universe is not kind. Those who try to wriggle out of paying the price should understand what signal they're sending.