Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive
    Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive
    Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive
    Audiobook10 hours

    Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive

    Written by Bruce Schneier

    Narrated by Reese Emery

    4/5

    ()

    Switch to ebook

    About this audiobook

    We don’t demand a background check on the plumber who shows up to fix the leaky sink. We don’t do a chemical analysis on food we eat.

    Trust and cooperation are the first problems we had to solve before we could become a social species. In the 21st century, they have become the most important problems we need to solve—again. Our global society has become so large
    and complex that our traditional trust mechanisms no longer work.

    Bruce Schneier, world-renowned for his level-headed thinking on security and technology, tackles this complex subject head-on. Society can’t function without trust, and yet must function even when people are untrustworthy.

    Liars and Outliers reaches across academic disciplines to develop an understanding of trust, cooperation, and social stability. From the subtle social cues we use to recognize trustworthy people to the laws that punish the noncompliant,
    from the way our brains reward our honesty to the bank vaults that keep out the dishonest, keeping people cooperative is a delicate balance of rewards and punishments. It’s a series of evolutionary tricks, social pressures, legal mechanisms, and physical barriers.

    In the absence of personal relationships, we have no choice but to substitute security for trust, compliance for trustworthiness. This progression has enabled society to scale to unprecedented complexity, but has also permitted massive global failures.

    At the same time, too much cooperation is bad. Without some level of rule-breaking, innovation and social progress become impossible. Society stagnates.

    Today’s problems require new thinking, and Liars and Outliers provides that. It is essential that we learn to think clearly about trust. Our future depends on it.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateSep 3, 2020
    ISBN9781705007938

    More audiobooks from Bruce Schneier

    Related to Liars and Outliers

    Related audiobooks

    Security For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      In Cyberwar There Are No Rules

      Sep 10, 2018

      In Cyberwar There Are No Rules
      13 min read

    • Article

      Leonard Pitts Jr.: The Social Covenant Has Shattered

      Dec 1, 2021

      Why would they do this? That question rises inevitably from a new wave of so-called flash-mob robberies, thieves by the dozens invading retail stores to simply take what they want. It’s happened in California, Illinois, Minnesota and Maryland. Retail

      2 min read

    • Article

      Human Trafficking

      Aug 11, 2020

      Human Trafficking
      17 min read

    • Article

      Pay Attention! Think!

      Mar 17, 2021

      Viktor Frankl penned this line after being released from Nazi concentration camps where he’d endured three years of hard labour. Some of you might know he wrote the book Man’s Search for Meaning in just nine days after being released. He argued that

      7 min read

    • Article

      Does Metals Market Manipulation Equal Conspiracy?

      Aug 19, 2022

      Gold and silver have taken quite a beating this summer. Typically, these two metals don’t do much during these “summer doldrums” but, at a time when the inflation rate is closing in on double digits, shouldn’t they be moving in the opposite direction

      6 min read

    • Article

      Is Pornography Immoral?

      Jan 19, 2024

      Is Pornography Immoral?
      5 min read

    • Article

      Bird’s Words

      Dec 12, 2022

      I often wonder if the reason the world is too complex and difficult to handle is that we spend so much time blaming it for things that we dislike, but which we are part of. It might be a realisation that hit me because of a discussion I had last week

      3 min read

    • Article

      Cancelling Cancel Culture

      Mar 25, 2021

      Cancelling Cancel Culture
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Price Is Not Right

      Jun 26, 2019

      The Price Is Not Right
      6 min read

    • Article

      Social Credit Rating Citizen

      Apr 22, 2019

      Social Credit Rating Citizen
      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Liars and Outliers

    4/5

    68 ratings10 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Brilliant introduction as to how we arrived at this mess
    • 3/5


      Some good stuff, but the writing and editing left something to be desired. Not a long book, but could have been half the size and still conveyed the same info - especially if you got rid of the repetitive charts.
    • 4/5
      Really informative look at the what helps members of society act rationally and allows society to function. Schneier explains many of the commons models of trust that exist at different layers of society and provides examples of each. I would have preferred to have the examples be a little more in depth and most of them were covered at a very high level. I guess that would make this a good jumping off point to other books which go in depth on any of the failures mentioned in the book. Overall I really enjoyed the book it was a very easy read and I recommend it.
    • 3/5
      Sort of interesting book, but with some significant problems. First of all the book is a very academic study of trust in relationship to society. And while the author attempts to make it occasionally entertaining, it mostly ends up as dry as your average text book. Second, the author attempts to make a case for rational "goodness" without really making his case. Finally and maybe most troubling, there is nothing actionable in this book. This book makes a case that trust is both necessary and pretty much automatic in any sort of functional society. Yeah for us and yeah for trust, but maybe just write a short paper the next time.
    • 3/5
      A slight preface: When Scott Adams left his job, and decided to write Dilbert full time, he quit being funny. It didn't even take that long. I still have some of the old strips, and they're still funny.Bruce seems to have fallen into that path, a bit. I've bought several of his books, and while I'd never EVER give up either edition of Applied Cryptography, I think I'll be content from here on to just read his newsletter, and not buy more books. He's a brilliant cryptographer, and a decent human being. I'd trust him in almost any situation.You'd think I'd have learned my lesson with Secrets and Lies. Nope. I finally gave up on this, skimmed to the end, and set it aside.
    • 3/5
      Schneier is a smart man, but this isn’t his most engaging work. It’s basically a series of schemas about what factors make people cooperate or defect, looking at the multiple communities/pressures/morals/interests/technologies etc. that affect such decisions. Big takeaway: societies that don’t have many defections (however defined—defections from a bad rule can be good, too) tend to be highly unfree; the key is to have a balance of deterrents and acknowledge the costs of various constraints. Otherwise you end up with the TSA, expensive and not very worthwhile.
    • 3/5
      Subpar when compared to the author's track-record.

      Early on In the book he makes the academically uncontroversial claim that society embodies conflicts of interest as modelled by the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. Then he spends the next ninety percent of the text reiterating the point with various illustrations and anecdotes.

      By the end of it, the main point is so far recessed in one's mind one can hardly call what the main thesis was.
    • 3/5
      2 stars for most of it, 3 for the end notes, which in the best sections were longer (and invariably more interesting) than the actual text.
    • 3/5
      Having read his blog off and on for a number of years, a lot of it felt familiar...and I was surprised at how dry it was. (This is my vague recollection 6 months later.)
    • 4/5
      Bruce Schneier lives in a very different world. His specialty has long been IT security, and he has drilled so deep, no one can compare. This book is about trust and security, using history, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and especially philosophy, to trace their development and deployment. He not only divines the if, but the how and when that people, and their societies, confer trust. He slices and dices his topic in every conceivable way. It is a fascinating process to watch.And yet, it doesn't always ring true. Schneier spends many pages extolling the virtues of society and how an optimal mix of co-operative elements keeps the liars, cheaters and criminals in check. There are whole chapters on societal, moral and reputational pressures. But we have only to look to our own reality to see it isn't so.At the corporate level, for example, individual companies do not always work to keep the bad seeds out. Entire industries are crooked, criminal affairs that exist purely to suck the lifeblood out of their customers. There isn't a bank in the United States that we can take pride in. They don't talk about customer loyalty; they plot lock-in. They are universally loathed and despised, and they continue to treat their customers worse and worse, to reinforce it. Airlines should be prosecuted for the obvious collusion in the bizarre fee structures, penalties and restrictions they all magically decided to impose on the public a few years back. Health insurers have one overriding goal - to deny health services to their customers and let them fight to get reimbursed. There isn't one of them anyone loves. If they all disappeared tomorrow, no one would mourn for the good old days.There isn't one participant in any of these entire industries that we trust. There isn't one participant in these industries who take your side or come to your defense. We don't trust them to do what they say, we don't trust them to be honest and forthright, and we don't trust them with our personal data. We don't trust entire sectors of the economy. We have zero faith in any of them. And that goes for every level of government, too, whether it's $100,000 in pork to a brother-in-law, to selling the entire state to gas frackers. The NYPD is seen as an army of occupation. Congress rates well below used car salesmen in confidence and trust.That's not how Schneier describes it. So by page 100 I was looking at Liars and Outliers differently.Meanwhile, the book races through internet security and the false confidence everyone has in posting personal photos and messages. Schneier rightly points out there can be too much security, and cutting our trillion dollar security expenditure in half will not double our risk for terrorism. We are not safer for that level of spending, he says, and spending ten times as much will not make us ten times safer.Another excellent chapter, Institutions, uses the TSA as model of conflicting needs and perceptions to describe how this one agency performs its mandate. Schneier was was on the plaintiffs' bench when TSA, reacting to the underwear bomber, suddenly and massively deployed full body scanners, which among other faults, could not detect an underwear bomb. Pointless security, at huge expense. A poster child for this book.In conclusion Schneier point out comprehensively that we constantly look in the wrong place, overreact to squeaky wheels and ignore the smaller problems that can have greater impact. Doesn't matter that more Americans die from exposure to peanuts than to terrorists that we spend trillions on terrorists and nothing on allergies.The prognosis is for more of the same; it's the nature of the beast, unfortunately. Schneier lays out the parameters for making it work better. But we all know, plus ca change.....