full meta-trust = a relaxed ease about the possibility of sorting out any conflicts that might arise, in a way where the process feels to everybody like it’s respecting their sense of things the whole time
this enables talking about anything, synthesizing group wisdom, & learning well together
start by recognizing the trust & distrust of the current situation, & being exquisitely honest about both
so if we consider a group of people trying to:
make sense of a big hairy problem
live together or be a healthy, supportive community
“boundaries”: the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously (Prentis Hemphill)
if we get too close, we’re demanding of ourselves and each other that we trust each other more than we do, which messes with our ability to non-naively listen to our trust functions
if we’re too far away, we’re not making contact with the actual trust challenges that we have, which means we aren’t encountering the real chasm between us
either of these results in bullshit and makes the key learning harder to do
there’s a zone of proximal development edge to surf here
“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” (M. Aurelius)
respecting others’ distrust of you can be hard because it can be hard to get shared reality with them while maintaining contact with your own trust of yourself
respecting your distrust of others can be hard because it can be discouraging to realize that you can’t rely on them in some way that you’d like to… and that therefore you need to:
step back from the relationship
or manage the interface more proactively yourself
however! in general, respecting distrust is a form of accepting that reality is as it is
but my distrust and your distrust are different, and so they can coexist
me trusting me doesn’t mean you should trust me, and vice versa
we have different trust systems, trust functions, and also different values/careabouts
solve via induction1 (n ➔ n+1)
consider a group of people with full meta-trust of each other: all conflicts seem workable
how do you add another person to that group, while keeping that property of full meta-trust?
it can’t happen all at once; it requires trust-dancing
it’s not just about the new person learning that they can trust the group
but also about learning whether and how to create such an interface that’s actually trustable
and the new person might need something that the existing people didn’t need with each other
eg for a woman joining a group of men: there might be aspects of trust (social or biological) that the men just haven’t had to sort out between them yet! but they do in order to include her!
solve via induction 2 (increasing trust within a group)
okay but how do you bootstrap to a full meta-trust group in the first place?
same method, except with existing group rather than between group & newcomer
own the distrusts, and respect them—particularly whatever is relevant to the group being able to speak honestly with itself about the relevant issues (whether technical problems or the dishes)
and have humility about where the possibility of a solution might lie… who has the opportunity to make what changes?
and be creative! try things, see what effects it has. make sense of it together
the meta-protocol: there are some general principles that groups/people can align with that make trust-dancing work better, including recognizing (ironically) that there’s no right way to do things, only ways that work in a given situation! also transcending shame/guilt/blame, reward/punishment
My friend Visa challenged his friends to explain their thing rapid-fire style, and specifically DM’d me to ask me to do one on my Non-Naive Trust Dance framework. So I’ll write a 6th introduction or whatever this is now, and try to get all the way through the basics to the depths in about 15 minutes of nonstop writing.
trust sure is important. it would be nice* if we knew the laws of trust-physics: in general what works and what doesn’t work for building trust. (* tbh it might be necessary for humanity’s survival)
it’s tempting to try to build perpetual motion machines w/ trust (assuming trust in order to build trust) but this is impossible with the laws of trust-physics. but it seems possible (& awesome) to build engines!
obviously trust-building is contextual. eg, in a tense meeting in Dune, a desert-dweller spits as a sign of respect (releasing precious water) and nearly gets killed when that’s interpreted as a sign of disrespect.
so what can be said about trust-building in general? well, one of the most important things that CAN be said is that it’s extremely contextual!! and a remarkable amount follows from this, eg:
the only way to build trust with someone is by doing something that builds trust with them. however, they may seem to want you to do something that’s abhorrent or senseless to you, which you refuse to do. somehow what needs to be found is something that works for both/all parties. there is a remarkable open space of possibilities here if we can get out of the trap of being frustrated that our first attempts didn’t work as we’d hoped
notice that the bolded line above is a self-evident statement; a tautology; something that’s true by definition. this is not a coincidence, because self-evident statements are another basis for building trust since anyone can confirm them for themselves (although of course we may have different interpretations of what the implications are, and that can get tricky)
the central tautology to NNTD is “you can’t trust what you can’t trust” (this is kind of the same one as the previous). inherent to this idea is the reality, not quite a tautology but also pretty self-evident once you consider it, that different people trust differently. (different parts of people trust differently too).
thus [me trusting something] and [you not trusting something] is not a contradiction in the slightest.
what do I even mean by trust? a few lenses:
trust as an unquestioning attitude (from C. Thi Nguyen’s paper of that title)
trust as “what truth feels like in first person”
we could describe naive trust as being an unquestioning attitude that comes from ignoring some sort of warning signs in order to deliberately adopt an unquestioning stance, and non-naive trust as an unquestioning attitude that comes from an absence of any warning signs, or having investigated the warning signs and discerned to one’s own integrated relaxed satisfaction that they’re not a big deal (or that one could handle the situation if the issue did occur)
when I use “trust” I’m generally referring to non-naive trust, since naive trust is fake & flimsy
I generally think in terms of trusting situations more than trusting “people”
there is a logic to (non-naive) trust and how it scales up:
if I trust a situation (eg this salesperson to not be scamming us) and you don’t trust it, then we don’t trust it
if I trust it and you trust it, but we don’t trust that each other trusts it, then we still don’t trust it
if we have common-knowledge of our trust, then we trust it
there’s a thing it feels like for this sync-up to occur
as an example, have you ever made a decision and there’s a clear sense of “yes this is obviously what we want”?
by contrast, have you ever made a decision and you’re left feeling either that something you care about wasn’t adequately incorporated into the tradeoff process, OR you feel like someone else isn’t actually totally satisfied with it?
in general, trust-building works via respecting that distrust contains the wisdom that allows trust to be non-naive (ie sane & robust) and finding a way to respect & dance with it, vs trying to bypass it. quoth Aurelius: “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”
since trust ~= subjective truth, this process is literally perceiving the world together
Whew! Not quite one breath or one foot, but it was all in one go and it did fit on one page. It took more like 20 minutes though.
For slightly more uhhh edited introductions to NNTD or elaborations, you can check out these posts:
or any others under the NNTD category (which is most of my blog posts these days tbh)
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