[miroljub]

Nicely put. That's why most of the innovation over the centuries came from the high trust style societies.

With the decline of trust, I fear we as a civilization are going into a long period of stagnation or even regression. Unfortunately, at this point there's no socially acceptable way to reverse the trend of trust destruction.

[vincnetas]

Reputation. Its a good concept. We might need to bring it back and not externalise it to linked-in blindly. Honour is also nice to have.

[mapontosevenths]

I have often thought that there should be a public ledger of some sort for people (powered by vouching), and then immediately forseen the negative externalities and abandoned that idea.

Reputation is as harmful as it is good. Anyone who survived being unpopular in high school, or seen the dummies that can be elected in democracies, should be able to explain how.

No, it is better to judge works by their merits than it is to judge people by their popularity. Though it is far more expensive.

[pibaker]

A public ledger is antithetical to "high trust" anyway. A high trust society is one where you give hitchhikers rides without questioning too much about their motivations. If you have to do a criminal background check — which is just another form of consulting a public ledger of reputations — before letting him in your car, you are by definition not trusting him.

[thwarted]

Popularity and reputation are not the exact same thing. Reputation is about trust and predictability, while popularity is about awareness of the person and/or their reputation.

But your points largely stands. However, reputation is one of many tools that can be used to assess the worthiness of giving some work attention, but should be given a relatively low weight compared to other tools. Giving reputation a low, but non-zero weight allows bad actors to be rightfully put in their place and allows someone the ability and chance to "clean up" their reputation with effort.

[mapontosevenths]

When I first considered this in the late 90's I was inspired by Google's Page Rank algorithm, and wanted something akin to that for humans in a social network.

My core idea (back in the early 00's when I cam up with it originally) was to identify a small cadre of trustworthy individuals in various sectors - lets say finance, computing, healthcare, etc (but more granular) and give them high trust (maybe a manual score of 10). Then let who they score, and who those people score "trickle down" as it does in Googles page rank. It was a variation on what Google later called trust rank, I suppose.

It would have either failed to launch completely or turned into a dystopian nightmare akin to China's Social Credit System. It may have even turned out worse than China's system because the goals of finance do not always align with the goals of humanity.

A more modern implementation could be built on the block chain and be made very profitable... while it crushes us all.

[miroljub]

To bring the honor system back, we need to value honor again as a society. Doing honorable things should be compensated in some tangible way, as well as doing dishonorable things should be punished by society.

PS: I'm not talking about fake "honor" based power systems.

[inglor_cz]

I am not sure whether we can call Ancient Athens or Early Modern Italy "high trust". Both were pretty warlike, though - another source of innovations.

The fact that wars tend to result in extremely quick innovation cycles (both out of fear of losing and from usual bureaucracy being shoved away) is quite nasty ethically, but cannot be wished away.

Neither Ukraine nor Russia are high-trust societies, but they have done more drone development in four years than the entire world together in forty.

[miroljub]

> I am not sure whether we can call Ancient Athens or Early Modern Italy "high trust". Both were pretty warlike, though - another source of innovations.

The class that brought most of the innovations, citizens of Rome or Athens, a privileged ruling class, had a strong in-group honor system. The rest of the society was not so, but they were so divided that those other parts didn't even count.

[inglor_cz]

Pashtuns in Afghan mountains have a strong in-group honor system and they are one of the least technologically developed societies in the world. So were many Early Medieval societies, where honor was the only valuable quality a noble person could possess.

Meanwhile, Early Modern Italy (Renaissance) was notoriously treacherous and, at the same time, very mentally productive.

When I skim across societies and ages, that correlation does not seem to be there.