Like An Instrument

I can't trust you.

The statement says it all, doesn't it?

Trust is one of those things that I believe people want to have, but most people don't seem to think much about the mechanics of trust. Instead, they blame others when their trust is broken.

How could you?

When we put our trust in another, the burden is on us. Trust is something we give to another person or even, the direction is from the eternal outward. When someone breaks our trust, it isn't that they have done anything wrong per se, they have just acted in a way we hadn't thought they would. What they have broken is our judgement of their future behavior, which means our ability to accurately evaluate. It is not their issue, they are just doing what they do, like the Scorpion and the Frog.

While they might have failed to keep a promise, that is something they have to come to terms with themselves. But what actually hurts is that it is us who has failed. We have failed to judge accurately. We have failed to withhold our expectations. And we have failed in not putting our desires on others.

We want them to act how we want them them to act, which is according to our judgement, expectations and desires. Putting trust in someone is a selfish act, isn't it? After all, it is about what we want out of them and the relationship, not about what they want from us.

Looking at the definition, it is easier to see what I am talking about here perhaps.

Do you see what I mean?

The onus isn't on the person who is being trusted, it is on the person doing the trusting. It is a belief, not a truth, and each of those definitions, the word "confidence" arises.

Which doubles-down in the "belief" aspect of trust. Essentially, that confidence is a probability scoring method that says "Based on my assessment, I think this person will act this way". And often when we want something from that person, or we see benefit from a certain behavior of that person, our evaluative skills go down and we can misplace our trust, meaning we ascribe an unrealistic confidence score to a particular outcome.

So, the real problem is not people breaking our trust, it is our decision making criteria required for where we place our trust. And this is something that I think has been disrupted through the changes in technology, where people who have not had a large amount of face to face experience, are more gullible than those who have. And what I mean by this is, if someone spends the majority of their time on screens, they do not learn about the micro expressions that indicate truth or lie.

But obviously, it goes beyond this, as there is more than just visual indicators, there are a host of other things too, like the tone of voice, or timing of action to words. When we are watching screens that have content edited to fit the presentation, these cues are engineered, not natural, and therefore do not accurately train the internal algorithms.

Because rather than real world interaction we are surrounded by designed experience, our wiring is conditioned in the same way it would have been, just with a different outcome. For instance, there are videos shared of people "doing good deeds" and people put their faith in them, without recognizing that they are doing it for clicks, because that "random" act of kindness, had a camera present, the right lighting, and audio. It was scripted, not random at all.

However, real life is far more random and in order to navigate it successfully, we have to be able to make judgements on the fly about our experiences, including those on who we can trust. To me, it is no wonder that younger generations get themselves into obviously bad situations, because not only do they trust poorly, they are also confident in their judgement abilities - like so many young are.

Trust is vital for human interactions to develop into those lasting relationships we truly value. Blind trust however, is almost always going to end in tears, because that trust isn't built through skilled observation and interaction, it is built on desire and expectations, not factoring in who the other person is, or may be.

I keep hearing of people falling for all kinds of confidence scams, and I think that it is only going to get worse, for anything that is left up to people to make decisions on. They then see themselves as victims of scam, without acknowledging that they were complicit, as it was they who evaluated and placed their trust. They believed.

It takes two for a successful lie.

Obviously, this will push people further into algorithmic suggestions to mitigate risks, which makes the problem increasingly worse, and people more reliant. With all this information at our fingertips, don't you find it strange that we can't trust most of it?

Yet, we sure are confident.

We have tools out our disposal, that can be trained and refined like we are mastering an instrument. Yet for the most part, we are the ones getting played.

Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]