Audiobook10 hours
Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive
Written by Bruce Schneier
Narrated by Reese Emery
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
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About this audiobook
We don’t demand a background check on the plumber who shows up to fix the leaky sink. We don’t do a chemical analysis on food we eat.
Trust and cooperation are the first problems we had to solve before we could become a social species. In the 21st century, they have become the most important problems we need to solve—again. Our global society has become so large
and complex that our traditional trust mechanisms no longer work.
Bruce Schneier, world-renowned for his level-headed thinking on security and technology, tackles this complex subject head-on. Society can’t function without trust, and yet must function even when people are untrustworthy.
Liars and Outliers reaches across academic disciplines to develop an understanding of trust, cooperation, and social stability. From the subtle social cues we use to recognize trustworthy people to the laws that punish the noncompliant,
from the way our brains reward our honesty to the bank vaults that keep out the dishonest, keeping people cooperative is a delicate balance of rewards and punishments. It’s a series of evolutionary tricks, social pressures, legal mechanisms, and physical barriers.
In the absence of personal relationships, we have no choice but to substitute security for trust, compliance for trustworthiness. This progression has enabled society to scale to unprecedented complexity, but has also permitted massive global failures.
At the same time, too much cooperation is bad. Without some level of rule-breaking, innovation and social progress become impossible. Society stagnates.
Today’s problems require new thinking, and Liars and Outliers provides that. It is essential that we learn to think clearly about trust. Our future depends on it.
Trust and cooperation are the first problems we had to solve before we could become a social species. In the 21st century, they have become the most important problems we need to solve—again. Our global society has become so large
and complex that our traditional trust mechanisms no longer work.
Bruce Schneier, world-renowned for his level-headed thinking on security and technology, tackles this complex subject head-on. Society can’t function without trust, and yet must function even when people are untrustworthy.
Liars and Outliers reaches across academic disciplines to develop an understanding of trust, cooperation, and social stability. From the subtle social cues we use to recognize trustworthy people to the laws that punish the noncompliant,
from the way our brains reward our honesty to the bank vaults that keep out the dishonest, keeping people cooperative is a delicate balance of rewards and punishments. It’s a series of evolutionary tricks, social pressures, legal mechanisms, and physical barriers.
In the absence of personal relationships, we have no choice but to substitute security for trust, compliance for trustworthiness. This progression has enabled society to scale to unprecedented complexity, but has also permitted massive global failures.
At the same time, too much cooperation is bad. Without some level of rule-breaking, innovation and social progress become impossible. Society stagnates.
Today’s problems require new thinking, and Liars and Outliers provides that. It is essential that we learn to think clearly about trust. Our future depends on it.
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Reviews for Liars and Outliers
Rating: 3.7867647352941174 out of 5 stars
4/5
68 ratings10 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Brilliant introduction as to how we arrived at this mess
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5
Some good stuff, but the writing and editing left something to be desired. Not a long book, but could have been half the size and still conveyed the same info - especially if you got rid of the repetitive charts. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Really informative look at the what helps members of society act rationally and allows society to function. Schneier explains many of the commons models of trust that exist at different layers of society and provides examples of each. I would have preferred to have the examples be a little more in depth and most of them were covered at a very high level. I guess that would make this a good jumping off point to other books which go in depth on any of the failures mentioned in the book. Overall I really enjoyed the book it was a very easy read and I recommend it.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Sort of interesting book, but with some significant problems. First of all the book is a very academic study of trust in relationship to society. And while the author attempts to make it occasionally entertaining, it mostly ends up as dry as your average text book. Second, the author attempts to make a case for rational "goodness" without really making his case. Finally and maybe most troubling, there is nothing actionable in this book. This book makes a case that trust is both necessary and pretty much automatic in any sort of functional society. Yeah for us and yeah for trust, but maybe just write a short paper the next time.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A slight preface: When Scott Adams left his job, and decided to write Dilbert full time, he quit being funny. It didn't even take that long. I still have some of the old strips, and they're still funny.Bruce seems to have fallen into that path, a bit. I've bought several of his books, and while I'd never EVER give up either edition of Applied Cryptography, I think I'll be content from here on to just read his newsletter, and not buy more books. He's a brilliant cryptographer, and a decent human being. I'd trust him in almost any situation.You'd think I'd have learned my lesson with Secrets and Lies. Nope. I finally gave up on this, skimmed to the end, and set it aside.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Schneier is a smart man, but this isn’t his most engaging work. It’s basically a series of schemas about what factors make people cooperate or defect, looking at the multiple communities/pressures/morals/interests/technologies etc. that affect such decisions. Big takeaway: societies that don’t have many defections (however defined—defections from a bad rule can be good, too) tend to be highly unfree; the key is to have a balance of deterrents and acknowledge the costs of various constraints. Otherwise you end up with the TSA, expensive and not very worthwhile.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Subpar when compared to the author's track-record.
Early on In the book he makes the academically uncontroversial claim that society embodies conflicts of interest as modelled by the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. Then he spends the next ninety percent of the text reiterating the point with various illustrations and anecdotes.
By the end of it, the main point is so far recessed in one's mind one can hardly call what the main thesis was. - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/52 stars for most of it, 3 for the end notes, which in the best sections were longer (and invariably more interesting) than the actual text.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Having read his blog off and on for a number of years, a lot of it felt familiar...and I was surprised at how dry it was. (This is my vague recollection 6 months later.)
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bruce Schneier lives in a very different world. His specialty has long been IT security, and he has drilled so deep, no one can compare. This book is about trust and security, using history, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and especially philosophy, to trace their development and deployment. He not only divines the if, but the how and when that people, and their societies, confer trust. He slices and dices his topic in every conceivable way. It is a fascinating process to watch.And yet, it doesn't always ring true. Schneier spends many pages extolling the virtues of society and how an optimal mix of co-operative elements keeps the liars, cheaters and criminals in check. There are whole chapters on societal, moral and reputational pressures. But we have only to look to our own reality to see it isn't so.At the corporate level, for example, individual companies do not always work to keep the bad seeds out. Entire industries are crooked, criminal affairs that exist purely to suck the lifeblood out of their customers. There isn't a bank in the United States that we can take pride in. They don't talk about customer loyalty; they plot lock-in. They are universally loathed and despised, and they continue to treat their customers worse and worse, to reinforce it. Airlines should be prosecuted for the obvious collusion in the bizarre fee structures, penalties and restrictions they all magically decided to impose on the public a few years back. Health insurers have one overriding goal - to deny health services to their customers and let them fight to get reimbursed. There isn't one of them anyone loves. If they all disappeared tomorrow, no one would mourn for the good old days.There isn't one participant in any of these entire industries that we trust. There isn't one participant in these industries who take your side or come to your defense. We don't trust them to do what they say, we don't trust them to be honest and forthright, and we don't trust them with our personal data. We don't trust entire sectors of the economy. We have zero faith in any of them. And that goes for every level of government, too, whether it's $100,000 in pork to a brother-in-law, to selling the entire state to gas frackers. The NYPD is seen as an army of occupation. Congress rates well below used car salesmen in confidence and trust.That's not how Schneier describes it. So by page 100 I was looking at Liars and Outliers differently.Meanwhile, the book races through internet security and the false confidence everyone has in posting personal photos and messages. Schneier rightly points out there can be too much security, and cutting our trillion dollar security expenditure in half will not double our risk for terrorism. We are not safer for that level of spending, he says, and spending ten times as much will not make us ten times safer.Another excellent chapter, Institutions, uses the TSA as model of conflicting needs and perceptions to describe how this one agency performs its mandate. Schneier was was on the plaintiffs' bench when TSA, reacting to the underwear bomber, suddenly and massively deployed full body scanners, which among other faults, could not detect an underwear bomb. Pointless security, at huge expense. A poster child for this book.In conclusion Schneier point out comprehensively that we constantly look in the wrong place, overreact to squeaky wheels and ignore the smaller problems that can have greater impact. Doesn't matter that more Americans die from exposure to peanuts than to terrorists that we spend trillions on terrorists and nothing on allergies.The prognosis is for more of the same; it's the nature of the beast, unfortunately. Schneier lays out the parameters for making it work better. But we all know, plus ca change.....