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Liars And Outliers: Enabling The Trust That Society Needs To Thrive (2012)

by Bruce Schneier(Favorite Author)

3.73 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

1118143302 (ISBN13: 9781118143308)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

John Wiley & Sons

review 1: A very good book on the basic social challenge of security, which provides a basic framework for thinking through the various "pressures" that are available for preventing people from "defecting" into anti-social behavior. There are basically four: moral pressures, reputational pressures, institutional pressures, and technological pressures. These work at different scales, with the former working better at smaller group scales, and the latter being generally more effective at bigger scales.The book has two great virtues. First, it provides a general framework for assessing all manner of efforts at behavioral shaping, not just with respect to security-related matters. These four levers are, in essence, the four that are ever available for any purpose. Second, it implicitly ... morecritiques the techno-centricity of much discussion of security (and behavioral modification) programs. Indeed, Schneier implies that recourse to technological solutions is really best seen as a form of (or reaction to) social failures at normative control. Technological fixes are thus revealed as at best admissions of social failure, but more commonly a way to avoid having the harder discussion about other forms of social control and behavior modification. This applies not just to security matters, of course, but to all sorts of other kinds of behavior. (Consider, for example, climate change: the focus on technical solutions is a way of avoiding having to make politically hard choices about personal behavior modification.) The truth is that in many cases moral, reputational, or institutional interventions may be more effective at driving behavioral change than are technological solutions, which may simply deflect the untoward behavior onto those who cannot afford the technology in question.
review 2: I enjoyed this book. Its style was conversational and friendly as it discussed the broad and complicated topic of trust among people, corporations, cultures, and countries. This book was my first introduction to many of these ideas, so the examples and entry level discussion kept the material in reach and interesting. After laying the groundwork, many of the ideas received more attention and detail. This was engaging and kept my attention. There have been many reviews that have done a good job of summarizing the structure of the book and its primary discussions - I will focus on a couple specific things that I liked and disliked about the book.To me, the most interesting part of this book was the discussion of defectors and defection. The book illustrates that although perfect cooperation might seem like an ideal end, perfect cooperation is ultimately unstable and undesirable. This instability is the result of multiple issues. For instance, when the number of defectors becomes sufficiently low, the value and reward of defecting can begin to outweigh the risks of defection. Additionally, it is argued that the pressure required to ensure perfect cooperation will lead to a loss of freedom, a loss of privacy, and a loss of individuality. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the book makes the point that defection plays a crucial role in advancements of all kinds. By using well known examples such as Rosa Parks, it is clearly illustrated that defection is a primary initiator of social equality. Likewise, with examples such as Napster, we see how defection drives innovation in industry and technology.One of the more interesting aspects of defection that the book discussed was how the decision to defect is influenced by the four major pressures discussed in the book. A person might have a personal preference or conviction regarding an issue. That person might be encouraged to go against their conviction at their place of employment, but might be punished for ignoring their conviction by society as a whole - if they are caught. These decisions are rarely easy, are often multi-faceted, and occur frequently.It was also interesting to think about the enormous amount we must trust various actors throughout each day. Some examples I had thought about before, such as trusting that a box I buy from a store contains what it claims to contain. Some examples initially seemed absurd to me - such as trusting that every man I come into contact with on a given day won't see me as a sexual rival that must be killed. However, each example is grounded in the four pressures to cooperate, and when considered on a macro level, it's clear that this trust has been built up slowly and incrementally as society has grown.Finally, I liked the discussion of how the four pressures to cooperate scale, and the brief glimpse at the difficulty these pressures are having in adapting to the rapid advances in technology. As the world becomes more connected, more automated, and more reliant on technology, a few defectors can now have a much larger impact. When this is coupled with the fact that an act is often no longer tied to its physical location, many of the existing pressures begin to fail. My primary complaint about the book was the footnotes. Nearly the entire last third of the book was footnotes. As I began reading the book, I flipped to the back of the book once or twice a page to read the footnotes for that page. They were often very interesting and illuminating, but flipping back and forth really broke the flow of the book. I eventually quit reading the footnotes altogether because it was just too cumbersome - but it aggravated me the entire time. Whenever I saw a footnote, I felt like there was some interesting tidbit Schneier wanted to share, but I was going to miss it because it was just too awkward to go back and forth. I wish he'd either just put the notes directly in the text and entirely removed those that didn't make the cut, or put the footnotes at the bottom of every page. less

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