[pjc50]

Low trust societies are poorer because everyone has to spend much more effort on verifying everything. People give up business opportunities because they can't trust their partners. It becomes more nepotistic because people trust family over strangers.

Low information trust societies get destroyed by pandemics of both physical viruses (due to anti-vax and medical distrust; we can see this happening again with Ebola) and destructive memetic lies (see 20th century fascism).

[nostrebored]

I've lived in low information trust societies, and they were much intellectually healthier than high trust societies, at least in the white collar communities I was in.

Moving there, I was shocked at how "conspiratorial" everybody seemed about everything. Living there, I was shocked out how often they were right. But it didn't impact people's likelihood to do things. I think they are actually orthogonal in a way that is unintuitive.