[dnautics]

> Institutional trust has eroded. I think the biggest problem is social media.

Why do you jump straight to social media?

Why wouldn't the fault lay with the authority figures themselves? For decades we have authority figures saying "the science says X therefore you must Y" while at the same time we have an educational system that (correctly) says "science is not authoritative".

Maybe if we had leaders that were less hubristic and lead with uncertainty on scientific matters and are careful to get buy in on nonscientific (i.e. ethical or self-serving) grounds this would happen less.

[helen___keller]

> Why do you jump straight to social media?

Social media is literally the catalyst for the loss of institutional trust. Maybe in the long run this is a good thing, and we will rebuild our institutions in a way that we can trust them in a hyper-shared hyper-aware world, but currently i just see no way that it can possibly work out.

> Maybe if we had leaders that were less hubristic and lead with uncertainty on scientific matters and are careful to get buy in on nonscientific (i.e. ethical or self-serving) grounds this would happen less.

In all honesty, I don't believe this is possible. It's the same problem as how people end up cancelled on twitter for the smallest reasons: humans are flawed, and in our hyper-shared hyper-aware world a single human flaw (or a single systemic flaw in our instutitions) becomes a gigantic crack that makes everyone outraged.

While outrage culture exists I don't think it is possible to have high-trust institutions that are run by human. Period.

And I don't know if it's possible to get rid of outrage culture, any suggestions are welcome.

(NOTE: just to be clear, I'm not saying our institutions are in the right. they are frequently wrong. But any wrongness you find, as in your example the way we communicate science as a closed book done deal, is one single flaw in a massive sprawling institution. I'm saying that statistically any large institution WILL have flaws, no matter what, thus in our new world we CANNOT have trust in these institutions the way things are now because any flaws will get blown up into a full model of distrust by social media. That's simply the new world we live in.)

[anm89]

I disagree that social media is the problem but even if we assume it is, then what?

Ban social media? Should we make a government review board for all social media posts to make sure people don't think the bad things?

Even if social media were the problem, I'd start thinking about other places to solve it because social media isn't going anywhere.

We've got a better shot at finding less hubristic leaders all though those odds aren't great either

[helen___keller]

> I disagree that social media is the problem but even if we assume it is, then what?

Just to be clear, I didn't mean to say social media is "a problem" or "the problem", but rather the catalyst of the modern status quo. I should have worded my original post better. Specifically, social media (and I suppose the internet in large) allowed us to much easily share information in a way that sidesteps those institutions. This allows us to easily share information that's negative about those institutions, whereas before we could not. Thus, it was the catalyst towards the modern avalanche of distrust towards once-venerated institutions.

> then what

> Ban social media? Should we make a government review board for all social media posts to make sure people don't think the bad things?

> Even if social media were the problem, I'd start thinking about other places to solve it because social media isn't going anywhere.

I generally agree with what you're saying, I don't have an answer. Pandora's box is open, and from now on it seems impossible to have a big monolithic organization and not have a high level of public distrust (both grassroots and organized by that organizations' opposition).

Ironically you even see this effect for large tech companies. There was a time when people really trusted and loved brands like Google, Apple, Amazon, even Facebook. Nowadays it feels hopeless naive, and the newest cohorts of top startups are often viewed even worse (the Ubers of the world)

I certainly hope the answer isn't an authoritarian control of discourse, because that's probably the only thing worse than having institutions of low trust.

But what is the solution? Heck if I know.

[mistermann]

> While outrage culture exists I don't think it is possible to have high-trust institutions that are run by human. Period.

I would say that before forming such conclusions, we should actually try to do it first.

> And I don't know if it's possible to get rid of outrage culture, any suggestions are welcome.

I suggest treating it like an engineering problem, something humans are quite good at. Analyze it as a behavior exhibited by systems, in this case, roughly:

- People (the human mind)

- Society (a set of networked human minds, networked via a variety of flawed communication mediums, some of which have human minds filtering and transforming what passes through them).

This is an extremely high level perspective, there is obviously a ton of important complexity (of varying importance) here and there within the system, but a high level perspective like this seems like where an engineer would start when analyzing a misbehaving system.