> I trust my doctor and my doctor trusts their sibling, but I don't necessarily trust their sibling.

Sure, but let's get back to the use case we are exploring here: Do you trust your doctor's contact info for their sibling? Could it provide you utility? What about your doctor's contact info for the front desk of their practice?

What's important here is that the subject of trust is explicit to whoever attests that trust. If your doctor intentionally publishes a list of known contacts, then it can be reasonably presumed that they know those contacts. This, along with the ability to attest falsehood, should be enough to replace traditional authority and moderation.

I get into this more in my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42238201

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woodruffw 8 months ago | parent [-]

> Sure, but let's get back to the use case we are exploring here: Do you trust your doctor's contact info for their sibling? Could it provide you utility? What about your doctor's contact info for the front desk of their practice?

Not inherently: for all I know, my doctor is technically illiterate and their contact book is thoroughly padded with spam.

The problem of trust is that trust isn't a boolean; it's a set of policies that vary by principal and action. It's very hard to encode that in a truly general way, which is why modern cryptographic application design orthodoxy dictates that applications should try to solve exactly one kind of trust at a time.

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thomastjeffery 8 months ago | parent [-]

> Not inherently: for all I know, my doctor is technically illiterate and their contact book is thoroughly padded with spam.

Sure, but that leads us to the next question: Could it provide you utility?

> The problem of trust is that trust isn't a boolean

That's also the utility of trust. Most of the information we want to reason about is not context-free. So far, no one has figured out a reliable way to offload context-sensitive work to computation. The next best thing is to offload as much context-free work as possible, and provide the user a direct interface to the remaining context-sensitive work.

By organizing our social networks as attestations of [dis]trust, we can deliver the uncomputable question of trustworthiness closer to the user. By delivering that question to many users, we can collaborate efficiently on that work.

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woodruffw 8 months ago | parent [-]

It could provide me utility, and it could get me scammed. That’s the double bind.

(I don’t think delivering the question of trust closer to the user has worked all that well, historically. Why do we expect inexperienced users - who should not have to understand anything technical! - to do better rather than worse when they’re given large numbers of datapoints about a principal’s trustworthiness? The default hypothesis should be that the average user is more susceptible to information fatigue than a technically savvy one.)

	▲	thomastjeffery 8 months ago \| parent [-]
		I would argue that the technological aspect isn't the most significant. Average people put too much faith into authoritative sources, even in person. People know what it means to trust and distrust each other without authority. That's the way everyone interacts with everyone else on a regular basis. It's not a new dynamic: it's the most familiar one. All we need to do is communicate the lack of authority, and the rest will be obvious.