Trust - well do ya?

[andrewducker]

Fill this out now. Then read the post. Then fill out the one at the bottom.

[Poll #351987]

Brad - omnipotent owner of LJ - recently posted here saying that he didn't trust the LJ_Abuse team. He then went on to clarify that he respected them greatly, but that he constantly heard complaints about them making the wrong decisions and despite the fact that those decisions might be correct he had to place some kind of oversight over them and introduce some transparency in order to bring back trust in their workings.

This caused some of the abuse team to get awfully upset - because if Brad didn't trust them, how on earth could they do their job? They were slogging out their guts for LJ and they weren't even trusted?

What's interesting to me is that the abuse team members have two ways of reading the statement and some of them seem to be choosing the nastiest one possible.

They felt Brad had just said "I don't trust you at all and so want to watch your every move." - in which case, yes, there's no social contract remaining - time to pick up your toys and go home.

But the way I think Brad meant it was "I don't trust you 100% and so in order to deal with the occasional glitch or untrustworthy person/incident I need to be able to check up on you." Which seems self-evident to me - no person is 100% trustworthy and certainly no police system is 100% trustworthy. You need transparency and oversight or it all falls apart.

The problem being that Brad isn't even slightly a diplomat. And stated it in true Geek fashion - bluntly and using the actual meaning of the word, rather than thinking about what any non-geek would read into it. But from his point of view, how could he mean "I don't trust you at all."? If that was the case, he'd have sacked them all long ago!

So, having read my reasoning through it all -

[Poll #351988]

Comments

[avatar.livejournal.com]

I think the problem is the context it was used in.

If you told me you didn't trust me, and nothing else, I don't know you well enough to think maybe you just want to check up on what's going on. You are far more likely to just pack up your toys and go home.

Brad's situation is different and I can understand what you're saying, and I agree with you. If I was in the LJ abuse team, and he told me he didn't trust me, I would question his motives because I would be upset about it, but if you were around to give me your logic of the situation, I would probably be inclined to agree with you. Or be paranoid that Brad doesn't really know what he's doing and is probably ready to sack me.

[ladysisyphus.livejournal.com]

Sorry -- if you tell me flat-out you don't trust me, and it's not either in a joking manner or specifically spoken in relation to a single concept or incident, I'm going to take it to mean that you just flat-out don't trust me. If you tell me you don't trust what I'm doing, or some of the decisions I've made, that's one thing; just to say flat-out that you don't trust me, though, is not only quite another thing, it is also (to me) a direct insult. In fact, even if it's couched in a larger context of explaination, 'I don't trust you' still has implications of large-scale flat-out mistrust; 'I don't trust what you're doing' is still insulting, but does not imply unaccountability across the board.

That, and the fact that Brad might well likely sack the whole of the abuse team in two seconds if he didn't think things might well start falling apart without them, leads me to choose 'at all.'

[andrewducker]

Both interpretations seem like valid ways of interpreting the words. I don't understand why people are taking it as only possibly being interpretable in one way.

[darkoshi]

Can't answer the poll. Would depend on the context. And I'm not personally involved in that particular LJ-abuse context, so couldn't really respond based on it either. Also, too hard determining the difference between not trusting someone at all, and not trusting them 100%. Because a lot of people, I don't necessarily trust at all, yet that doesn't mean I trust them 0%. In other words, I trust that there's a good probability that people aren't trying to deceive me, even though I don't necessarily trust that that's definitely the case.

[kimberly-a.livejournal.com]

I find "I don't trust you" to be such a global statement as to be not particularly useful, unless it is indeed intended to be global. Such statements are only useful if they are elaborated. "I don't trust you to be impartial" or "I don't trust you to see all sides of the issue" or "I don't trust you to always treat users with respect" ... all of those would be offensive, but less so than the global statement "I don't trust you." If you state where exactly the lack of trust is coming from, then the people being mistrusted can at least have some sense of whether they or others have indeed behaved in ways to cause that mistrust. The global statement puts my back up, and most likely always will. It's poor communication, flat out.

It would be far more useful to avoid such a loaded wording. But Brad isn't the best communicator in the world.

[derumi.livejournal.com]

Though, if Mr. Fitz said it, I'd think he meant he didn't trust me at all (which would be fair - I like his product, but I think he's a doof).