Venkatesh Rao

In any attempt to get to a “new normal” it would be a mistake to lower reliance on norms. When you trust norms, you risk the occasional metastasized cheater mega-event, but your average trust stays high and the average cost of governance stays low.

Norms-based trust, as opposed to trustless verification, catalyzes positive-sum relationships. It’s like free weights over machine. How are you going to learn to trust others and not overreact to cheaters if you never give yourself the chance to learn positive trust patterns?

It’s actually analogous to the core of religious faith. To demand proof of god is to lack faith. To verify everything in society is to trust nothing in society. It’s healthy to have a sort of religious faith in society, where you risk the occasional Trump by trusting by default.

There’s better ways to signal your lack of gullibility and exploitability than bringing a hostile suspicion to all situations where there’s uncertainty and giving yourself all the benefit of doubt because “everybody is out to get you.”

It’s okay to sometimes give the benefit of doubt to parties besides yourself, *even if they get things wrong often* — bureaucracies, politicians, obtuse customer-service reps, people who think DC is better than Marvel, someone who may have already had a first slice of cake...

It’s okay to be the sucker once in a while so long as you don’t develop a persistent reputation as a sucker (harder than you think). It’s okay to occasionally pay for others’ mistakes. And it’s dumb to think *you* behave with 100% honesty and intelligence when people trust *you*

The astounding thing about modern civilization is that small-to-medium mistakes and cheats generally don’t kill you or even significantly worsen your life. The only thing that’s easy to damage is your sense of dignity. The main cost of most cheating is the outraged overreaction.

Dignity protection instincts are flip side of over-developed cheater detection cognition. When your entire existence can be put at risk by a small cheat in a scarcity-shaped environment, of course you’ll be primed to kill over small threats to dignity. Reputation is everything.