When To Trust Someone
Asking Aristotle, Dostoyevsky, and a sci-fi book for an answer
How do I know who to trust, and who to distrust?
Whilst this is a question that should primarily be asked on a case by case basis, I think there are some general themes of broad applicability. Here are some thoughts, from selected texts and philosophies that I have been thinking about this past week.
Aristotle’s virtue ethics → epistemic effort and mental strain is inevitable in deciding who to trust. Making systematic rules is impossible. And so expect mental effort
A scene in Dostoyevsky’s “The Brothers’ Karamazov” → beware of poor reasons to distrust people, those reasons might be mythical, and you are probably stressing for no reason.
My own personal experiences in trust becoming fragile → Fragility of trust can come when one accumulates resources
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes → trust borne from ignorance is morally muddy, but probably harmful. The phrase ‘whatever you did, I don’t want to know’ should be used extremely sparingly, if at all.
Trust from Aristotle’s Virtue Ethics
Deciding to trust is a question I have to ask myself repeatedly of different people, and of different systems.
Should I trust this doctor and their treatment of me?
Should I trust my friends to do the right thing?
Should I trust this school I’m sending my child to?
One of the tenets of Aristotle’s virtue ethics that I found useful is this:
Systematic rules of virtuous behaviour probably do not exist.
That is painful for a mathematician like me to hear. So unfortunately, the most effective process is the most boring one, which is to exercise judgement on a case by case basis by gathering evidence. Impossible to have any formulae here.
And so, mental energy spent on determining the trustworthiness of people is inevitable. And I don’t think I need to feel guilty about that. I have spent around four hours of effort drafting this essay, and countless more hours compiling thoughts on the trustworthiness of the people close to me. It can be exhausting, especially if your life has many moving parts, but there seems to be no such a way around this exhaustion, through the route of a systematic logical system anyways.
In other words, rules like ‘this person has shown me good will X amount of times’ don’t exist. That is obvious. But it also means that we should review and break down our own internal ‘rules’ to determine trust, and question whether they should be held as rules at all. Here are some things that I think people have as ‘rules’, which they should question about having
If the person has different political views, does that make them less trustworthy? Probably not…
If the person is wealthier and speaks in a fancy demeanor, does it make them more trustworthy? Probably not…
If they subscribe to a certain religion X, does that make them more trustworthy? Probably not…
And so here comes a hard conclusion: if someone has broken my trust once, then it is not necessarily a given to stop trusting them. Because then that turns it into a systematic rule, and so I have denied myself the opportunity to exercise judgement.
The next less obvious application is in the amount of trust. Here, Aristotle’s philosophy offers a handy cop-out, default option. The virtue ethics state that a personal characteristic is virtuous if only held in moderation. One must neither do X too little, nor too much.
Whilst this principle can seem vague and overly simplistic, it is a holds up as a decent default response when the virtue of something is unclear. If a judgement proves too complicated to reason from first principles, then the approach of moderation is probably the least bad choice. It is, at the very least, a good enough answer when one is anxious to find such an answer.
And so the virtue ethics of moderation has, so far, been my best compass when it comes to the complicated issue of trusting others.
By default - neither trust too much nor trust too little. Stay within the 25-75th percentile of what you observe is average trusting behaviour.
Again, the reasons why we shouldn’t trust others too much are clear and obvious. That’s how you prevent getting scammed.
And there are also strong reasons for the harms of excessive distrust too. If we don’t trust doctors, like in vaccine skepticism, we get those painful issues like in what happened during covid, where no one trusted anyone (especially on the masking front), and so a unified response to the disease was out of our grasp.
Dostoyevksy shows that distrust can be borne out of bad reasons.
I am not a literary critic, nor an expert in Russian literature. But one scene in particular, in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers’ Karamazov’, has stuck with me. Because it’s about poor reasons to distrust someone.
And that has made me reflect on the fragility of my own trust in others. Despite my faith in the scientific method, there have been times where I have been excessively skeptical about teachers and doctors, only to be proved otherwise.
In ‘The Brothers’ Karamazov’, there is a priest named Father Zossima. He is the senior figure in the town’s monastery, and is respected for his piety.
The monks in the monastery believe that when someone saintly their body shouldn’t decompose. And miraculously, although no one experienced it first hand, this has held true for the all of the most pious priests preceding Zossima.
If the body does decompose, it is said that the dead priest has succumbed to the ‘stench of corruption’. To the living, It is a signal that the priest has sinned in his life.
So when the respected Zossima dies, and then inevitably starts to rot, as all humans do, the monastery is shocked. Monks who were vying for the senior position, and those in competition with Zossima, use the rotting as an opportunity to show off their saintliness, and attack his legacy.
Zossima was a good person. He was kind to others. And the narrator of the book clearly hints that he was. The reader also has no reason to believe otherwise.
And then something natural and inevitable happens - his death and rotting - and the trust in him by the other monks is shattered, because they believed that he had fallen to the stench of corruption. The reader also questions the trust they had in Zossima too.
The lens has been shattered because of a flimsy, supernatural myth. The trust is broken for an invalid reason. What is more disappointing is that, since death is the only inevitable thing to happen to a human, Dostoyevsky then suggests that the death of trust is also an inevitability.
Trust becomes fragile when you have more to lose
Until recently, I haven’t had to experience the fragility of this trust. But now, I feel it. I feel like my trust is scarce. And my mind keeps going back to my interpretation of this vivid scene by Dostoyevsky.
When one has more, there is a feeling of having more to lose. And so trust becomes fragile, as a protective mechanism to make sure you don’t lose it. I will describe what I think it a pretty average experience, but it’s a meaningful point. Four years ago, I had just graduated. Now I have worked a bit, built relationships, and have some savings. After putting effort into these things, there is a psychological element of fear of it being taken away. Because of this, I trust the world less somehow - I find myself reading the insurance documents to make sure I get my money back if my bank becomes insolvent.
And so, I feel afflicted, in a small way, from a paradox that has haunted kings and queens of old. This paradox that affects all who obsess over their land; as one accumulates capital, the pressure to keep it increases with it.
And yet, I do not feel like I am justified in having this mistrust. Like the flimsy reasons for the myth of corruption in Dostoyevsky’s novel I wonder if my own reasons are flimsy
Or maybe it is some weird, irrational bias, like Daniel Kahnemann’s theory of loss aversion - humans attribute higher weights to loss than they do to possible gain.
Beyond myself, I see this crisis of trust more and more. Maybe I see it more because I have become sympathetic. People trust doctors less. Or policy makers. I’m not saying that this is fact, but maybe this is just loss aversion since we live in a more abundant world. We live in a world where infant mortality for most of the world is basically solved, so people live better and there is less necessity to trust.
I, myself, am guilty of maybe excessively trying to find as many reasons as I can to trust my doctors before proceeding. Like scouring over their google reviews.
I see posts by the Bay Area rationalist community looking for alternatives to to regular schools, and I think about distrust. Some of their arguments make sense, like schools starting too early and so preventing kids getting sleep. But I can’t help thinking that there is also an element to just pain old mistrust of teachers.
I find this in great contrast to the trust amongst impoverished migrant workers, portrayed in Steinbeck’s novels. In ‘Grapes of Wrath’, after delivering a stillborn baby, Rose Of Sharon feeds her breast milk to a starving man.
“If you're in trouble or hurt or need–go to poor people. They're the only ones that'll help–the only ones.”
But then again, that doesn’t feel like the whole story either.
Nowadays, it feels like trust is a by product of leverage. Where if someone acts adversely, they will at least have to pay a consequence. If you doubt the altruistic claims of a doctor, you can at least have some reassurance that they have medical licensing requirements .
I wonder if this is why I probably don’t take as seriously as I think I should. Because they have no incentives to get things right, as a human does.
And so, is there a way to relieve this trust anxiety? Well, I think a quick solve would just be to place one’s self in a situation where one just has to trust themselves, and not others. Whilst this is next to impossible in today’s society, I think this is one of the reasons why you see wealthy people building bunkers. Or this weird ‘off-grid’ phenomena that we’ve started to see on YouTube.
People are starved of self-reliance, exhausted from the decision fatigue of having to trust people.
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes - Do not use ignorance as a way to protect yourself from the loss of Trust
Flowers for Algernon is one of the best books I have ever read. It describes a man with a low IQ undergoing surgery that boosts him to an intellectual genius. In addition to the narrator (who is the man undergoing the operation) talking about his intellectual pursuits, most of the text is touchingly introspective.
Here, he realises that his mother never actually loved him, and that those who thought were his friends were actually making fun of him the whole time.
What is interesting is that the book is morally ambiguous about whether it’s better to turn a dumb eye to people close to you, even if you have reasons to distrust them. After all, isn’t ignorance bliss? If you can’t tell that people are laughing at you (as opposed to with you), and you’re happy, what’s the issue?
I for one, have decided that this is probably bad. Trust borne from ignorance is morally muddy, but probably harmful. The phrase ‘whatever you did, I don’t want to know’ should be used extremely sparingly, if at all.
My reason for this is simple. The truth is the most trustworthy thing of all, and I don’t think that humans like being intentionally kept in the dark. And so, it is inevitable that one will be curious to learn the truth. And if it hurts to hear it, you should review how much you trust those around you.
Trust is hard man!