I’ve been so busy lately that I just could not get
out a review. I finally was jolted back
to reality when I read a sentence in my newspaper containing words I just never
would have suspected belonged together: “Twinkies, Ho Ho’s, Ding Dongs, and
Panic Buying.”
Bruce Schnieir, “Liars & Outliers: Enabling The Trust
That Society Needs To Thrive” John
Wiley & Sons, 2012, 248 pps plus 98
pgs. notes and references
BRUCE SCHNEIER is an internationally
renowned security technologist who studies the human side of security. He is
the author of eleven books; and hundreds of articles, essays, and academic
papers. He has testified before Congress, is a frequent guest on television and
radio, and is regularly quoted in the press. His blog and monthly newsletter at
www.schneier.com reach over devoted 250,000 devoted readers world-wide.
This book is more about trust in terms of groups
than individuals. Trust, as used in this
book, is best captured by Francis Fukuyama’s definition: “Trust is the
expectation that arises within a community of regular, honest, and cooperative
behavior, based on commonly shared norms, on the part of other members of that
community.”(p. 6). However as each society’s
population and complexity increase to sizes larger than villages, each society is forced
to shift from trust and trustworthiness based on personal relationships to
impersonal trust mechanisms; these impersonal mechanisms are needed to enhance
the now diluted social pressures of morals and reputation that exist in a
village. These additional mechanisms
involve institutional pressure and security systems. Also, in our pursuit of trust and security,
we can go too far. The cost isn’t just
money, its freedom, liberty, individualism, time, and convenience (think
airport security).
My notes:
Pg. 2: Society runs on trust. We all need to trust that the random people
we interact with will cooperate. We need
to be reasonably sure that our trust is well-founded and others will be
trust-worthy in return. This is
vital. If the number of parasites gets
too large, society no longer works.
Pg. 8: There
are four basic categories of societal pressure that can induce cooperation in
societal dilemmas:
·
Moral
pressure.
A lot of societal pressure comes from inside our own heads. Most of us don’t steal even in the absence of
armed guards.
·
Reputational
pressure. This
is our sensitivity to how others respond to our actions. Both individuals and organizations feel a lot
of pressure to follow the group norms because they don’t want a bad reputation.
·
Institutional
pressure. Institutions have rules and laws and
impose sanctions on those who don’t conform as well as rewards for those who
do.
·
Security
systems.
These systems induce cooperation, prevent defection, induce trust, and
compel compliance. These are very necessary in larger societies.
Pg. 21: No
one has a date, but vertebrates first appeared about 525 million years ago—and
continued to improve on various branches of the tree of life: mammals (215
million years ago), birds (75 million years ago), primates (60 million years
ago), the genus Homo (2.5 million
years ago), and then humans (somewhere between 200,000 and 450,000 years ago).
Pg. 22:
Humans take their intelligence seriously. The brain only represents 3% of total body
mass, but uses 20% of the body’s total blood supply and 25% of its oxygen. Also, in primates the frequency of deception
is directly proportional to the size of a species’ neocortex: the “thinking”
part of the mammalian brain. The human
brain has a neocortex that’s four times the size of its nearest evolutionary
relative. Eighty percent of our brain is
neocortex, compared to 50% in our nearest existing relative and 10% to 40% in non-primate
mammals.
Pg. 24: The
Dunbar number. Dunbar established that
the mean human group size is 150. This
is the Dunbar number: the number of people with whom we can have explicit and
personal encounters, whose history we can remember, and with whom we can
experience some level of intimacy. Of
course, it’s an average; some people can handle more, some less. This number appears regularly in human
society: it’s the estimated size of a Neolithic farming village, the size at
which Hittite settlements split; and it’s a basic unit in professional
armies. Chimpanzees, on the other hand,
live in communities of 60 individuals.
There is a lot of evidence that humans are innately
quite violent, and that intertribal warfare was endemic in primitive society. Several studies estimate that 15-25% of
prehistoric males died in warfare. It
appears that intelligence and murderousness are mutually reinforcing.
Pg. 27: Two
of the most successful species on the planet are humans and leafcutter ants of
Brazil. The ants’ success is attributed
to their division of labor. There are
four different kinds of leafcutter workers: gardeners, defenders, foragers, and
soldiers. Each type of ant is
specialized to its task, and together the colony does much better than colonies
of non-specialized ant species. Humans
specialize and—even better— can adapt their specialization to the
situation. A leafcutter ant is born to a
particular role; humans get to decide where to apply specialization in both the
long and short term, and change it if it’s not working out.
Pg. 33: Archaeologists have a four-stage model of
the human trusting process. Stage one
happened 6 million years ago, when empathy
and a motivation to help others developed in a common ancestor of humans and
chimpanzees. Stage two began 1.8 million years ago; compassion can be seen in both short-term caring for sick
individuals and special treatment for the dead.
Stage three is much more recent; around 500,000 or 400,000 years ago,
humans became dependent on group hunting,
and started exhibiting long-term care for the injured and the infirm. Stage four occurred in modern humans starting
120,000 years ago, when compassion
extended to strangers, animals, and sometimes even objects: religious
objects, antiques, family heirlooms etc.
It probably didn’t extend much past groups bigger than the Dunbar number
of 150 until the invention of agriculture,
about 10,000 years ago (which is probably the fifth stage).
Pg. 42:
Inside our skulls is a brain designed to exploit the conditions of an
African savanna between 3 million and 100,000 years ago. Such evolutionary
novelties as agriculture, metal, and writing arrived less than three hundred
generations ago, far too recent to have left much imprint on our minds. It is the disconnect between the speed of
cultural evolution and memes—intragenerationally fast—and the speed of genetic
evolution—glacially slow—that makes trust and security hard. We’ve evolved for the trust problem endemic
to living in small family groups prevalent in 100,000 BC. Its 21st century New York City
that gives us problems. Our brains are
sufficiently neuroplastic that we can adapt to today’s world, but vestiges of
our evolutionary past remain. These
cognitive biases affect how we respond to fear, how we perceive risks, and how
we weigh short-term versus long-term costs and benefits.
Pg. 57: Whooping cough (pertussis) is a good example
of the free-rider problem. It’s both
almost entirely preventable and almost entirely untreatable. Early in the 20th century, before
the establishment of widespread vaccination programs, it was one of the most
feared illnesses, and it remains a significant cause of death in developing
countries. Compared to other vaccines,
the pertussis vaccine isn’t actually very effective at conferring immunity to
any one individual. The standard infant
schedule calls for four shots. After the
first shot, about 30% become immune; after two, 50%; and even after all four
shots have been administered, only about 90% of individuals have enough
antibodies to fight off the disease. As
with all vaccines, a minuscule risk of adverse reactions still persists. Because of fears of vaccination in Sweden
where vaccination rates dropped from 90% to 12%, the incidence of whooping
cough in children under four skyrocketed from 0.05% in 1975 to 4% by 1983 (from
practically zero to 1 in 30 infected).
Pg. 60: The
fundamental problem with cooperation is that trust is unnatural, and it’s not
in the individual’s short-term self interest.
This is why cooperation is so rare in the natural world, why it took so
long to develop in humans, and why we have developed societal pressures as a
way to enforce cooperation and hold society together.
Pg. 77: In 2010 the murder rate in the U.S. was 5.0
per 100,000 people. Elsewhere it ranges from 0.39% per 100,000 in Singapore, to
an astonishing 58 per 100,000 in El Salvador.
Pg. 79: Psychologists believe humans have specific
brain functions for morals, similar to our language centers. Jonathan Haidt (I previously reviewed his
book) proposes five fundamental systems that underlie human morality. Each of us exhibits each of these, but to
varying degrees.
·
Harm/care
systems.
We are naturally predisposed to care for others. From mirror neurons and empathy to oxytocin,
our brains have evolved to exhibit altruism.
·
Fairness/reciprocity
systems.
We have natural notions of fairness and reciprocity.
·
In-group/loyalty
systems.
Humans have a strong tendency to divide people into two categories: us
and them.
·
Authority/respect
systems.
Humans have a tendency to defer to authority and will follow orders
simply because they’re told to by an authority.
·
Purity/sanctity
systems.
This is probably the aspect of morality that has the least to do with
security, although patriarchal societies have used it to police all sorts of
female behaviors.
Pg. 92: Political scientist Robert Putnam has argued
that mistrust increases in a community as ethnic diversity increases. Even worse, this inherent mistrust of those
in other ethnic groups isn’t offset by an increase in trust of those in one’s
own ethnic group; trust across the board weakens in more ethnically diverse
communities.
Pg. 167:
Organizations can muster considerable societal pressures to prevent and
punish whistle-blowing:
·
The 1962 Vatican Instruction “Crimen Sollicitationis” prescribed
excommunication of those who violated the oath of secrecy imposed on parties to
investigations of sexual misconduct by priests.
Pg. 178:
During the early years of Prohibition, there was an epidemic of
paralysis in the American South and Midwest, caused by about 500,000 bottles of
Jamaica Ginger laced with what turned out to be a nerve poison. This incident led to the passage of the 1938
Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.
Pg. 207:
According to the IRS, in 2001 the difference between total taxes owed
and total taxes paid was $345 billion; about 19% of the total taxes due. A 2008
estimate yields the same 19% estimate.
Despite all of this, the U.S. government collects 81% of all taxes owed,
which is pretty impressive compared to some countries.
Pg. 215:
Until 2001, far fewer Americans were killed in any grouping of years by
all forms of international terrorism than were killed by lightning and almost
none of those terrorist deaths occurred within the United States. Even with the September 11 attacks included
in the count, the number of Americans killed by international terrorism since
the late 1960s (which is when the State Dept. began counting) is about the same
as the number of American killed over the same period by lightning.
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