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

by Bruce Schneier

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Sociology, Psychology, Science, Technology, Politics, Business

385 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Bruce Schneier is a renowned security technologist, called a “security guru” by the Economist. He has written more than one dozen books, including the New York Times bestseller Data and Goliath (2014) and Click Here to Kill Everybody (2018). He teaches at the Harvard Kennedy School and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Reviews

[สฤณี อาชวานันทกุล · Rating 4 out of 5]

สนุกดี พูดถึงกลไกที่ผลักดันให้คนทำตาม "ผลประโยชน์ของกลุ่ม" (group interest) ว่ามีสี่ประเภท คือ moral, reputational,institutional และ security เช่น ผลประโยชน์ของกลุ่มคือ "ไม่ให้สังคมมีขโมยมากเกินไป" ก็ต้องใช้ทั้งการตอกย้ำว่าการขโมยผิดศีลธรรม (moral), ประณามขโมยให้เสียชื่อเสียง (reputational), ออกกฏหมายและใช้ตำรวจจับขโมย (institutional) และติดตั้งล็อคและสัญญาณกันขโมยตามบ้าน (security)

ในสี่ประเภทนี้ กลไกชนิด moral, reputational "เบสิก" ที่สุด ใช้ได้แต่เฉพาะสังคมที่ยังมีขนาดเล็ก เช่น ระดับหมู่บ้าน เมื่อสังคมใหญ่ขึ้นต้องใช้กลไกเชิงสถาบันและความปลอดภัย (institutional, security) มากขึ้น

ตัวอย่างจากโลกจริงเยอะและชัดเจน ประเด็นที่น่าสนใจมีหลายเรื่อง เช่น

1. "ผลประโยชน์ของกลุ่ม" ทุกอย่างย่อมมี "ผลประโยชน์คัดง้าง" (competing interest) เสมอ เช่น สังคมไม่อยากให้มีขโมยชุกชุม แต่ในสายตาของขโมย อยากขโมยเพราะอยากได้เงิน ฯลฯ

2. "ผลประโยชน์ของกลุ่ม" ไม่ใช่สิ่งที่ "ดีที่สุด" หรือแม้แต่ "ดี" (ทางศีลธรรม) โดยอัตโนมัติ ประวัติศาสตร์มีตัวอย่างมากมาย ตั้งแต่ชาวโรมันโบราณจับคนคริสต์โยนให้สิงโตกิน ประเพณีฆ่าลูกตั้งแต่เกิด ฆ่าล้างเผ่าพันธุ์ ฯลฯ กรณีเหล่านี้ล้วนแต่เดินได้เพราะกลุ่มหรือสังคมนั้นๆ ใช้กลไกสี่ประเภทข้างต้นอย่างได้ผลในการโน้มน้าวให้สมาชิกส่วนใหญ่ทำตาม

3. ด้วยเหตุนี้ การมี "defectors" (คนขัดผลประโยชน์กลุ่ม) จึงสำคัญต่อการสร้างความก้าวหน้าในสังคม เริ่มต้นจากคนคนเดียวหรือกลุ่มเดียวก่อนเสมอ ความท้าทายอยู่ตรงที่การมองให้ออกว่า defectors กรณีไหนก้าวหน้า (เช่น นักรณรงค์สิทธิพลเมืองที่ทำอารยะขัดขืนเรียกร้องสิทธิ) กรณีไหนล้าหลัง (เช่น โจร)

4. ไม่มีทางที่เราจะกำจัด defectors ให้หมดไปจากสังคมได้อย่างราบคาบ เพราะ defectors มีประโยชน์ต่อสังคม (ในร่างกายเราเอง ก็มีปรสิตอาศัยอยู่เต็มไปหมด) ประเด็นสำคัญคือ ต้องจัดกลไกสี่ประเภทให้ดี คุม defectors ไม่ให้มีมากเกินไป

5. หลายกรณีมี competing interest มากกว่าหนึ่งอย่าง หลายอย่างเกิดขึ้นเมื่อองค์กรมีความซับซ้อนมากขึ้น เช่น พนักงานบริษัทมี competing interest กับบริษัท (อยากฉวยโอกาส ใช้ทรัพยากรบริษัท ฯลฯ) เพราะบริษัทสมัยใหม่แบ่งหน้าที่ระหวาง "เจ้าของ" กับ "ผู้จัดการ" กับ "พนักงาน"

6. ประเด็นที่ต้องระวังคือ บางครั้งการมุ่งลดจำนวน defectors อาจทำผิดวิธี ไปสร้างปัญหาใหม่ที่รุนแรงกว่าเดิมก็ได้ และบางคร้ังกลายเป็นสร้าง competing interest ใหม่ๆ เช่น อเมริกาออกกฏหมายแรงๆ หลายฉบับ รัฐอ้างว่าต้องทำเพื่อขจัดการก่อการร้าย แต่กฏหมายกลับละเมิดสิทธิส่วนบุคคลประชาชนเกินเลย

ควรอ่านอย่างยิ่งในสภาวะสังคมไทยแบ่งขั้วและอบอวลไปด้วยการหยิบกลไก moral, reputational มาห้ำหั่นทางการเมือง ในทางที่บั่นทอนกลไก institutional, security ลงทุกขณะ

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bruce Schneier is, according to the quote from the Register on the inside sleeve notes, "The closest thing the security industry has to a Rock Star." And, like the actor Chuck Norris, Schneier is the only other person I'm aware of who has his own 'facts' website. Listing page after page of dubious, but sometimes amusing, facts about Bruce's encryption super-powers. Although jokes about encryption probably have a fairly narrow audience Bruce Schneier Facts gives us my personal favourite: "Bruce Schneier's mail server only sends him the emails' hashes, just to make things a little more interesting for him."

Initially the book appears to be quite a weighty tome, but the tone is light and conversational and the type is certainly not small. As soon as you get started you realise that the last third of the book is just notes and references. I would have preferred to see the notes spread more throughout the book. If the text is so unimportant that it was removed from the original manuscript, why did it need to be in the book at all. If it was important, or interesting, better to have it at the bottom of the page as a footnote. Having to flip back and forwards is annoying – and requires two bookmarks (which luckily I had).

The book is broken down into four parts, across which Schneier breaks down his theory of trust. Each part digs a little deeper than the one before. In the first, he explains what he means by trust and defines his terms. The second expands on this and Schneier explains how his trust works and doesn't within society. The third is the largest and uses uses examples to see how the trust models he's already given us behave. The last is where Schneier places his conclusions and predictions.

The premise is that society consists of people who comply with society's rules, and people who don't – hardly ground-breaking stuff so far. Societies survive by having more people who comply than not. That people comply for a number of reasons (which Schneier explains in part two); however, many of these reasons are becoming less effective as the size and technological levels of our societies change. As our communities increase in size we know the community less well, therefore we are less able to trust individuals and our ability to pressure them to comply decreases as well. As our use of technology increases, many non-complying behaviours become easier or more beneficial at the same time as our ability to secure those systems decreases.

While I did really like the book, and Schneier makes his case persuasively, the book can get a little repetitive at times. There are probably a few too many examples worked through, and too many repetition of Schneier's clarification that not all defectors are necessarily always doing the wrong thing – sometimes people can defect against society's rules because they are bad rules. That said, I was particularly intrigued by the example of professional cyclist Alex Zulle (the eternal second placer). He has since admitted doping, but the quotes in the book describe how he believed that he had to dope just to keep up with the other riders. Schneier gives us a high-level description of the arms-race between the dopers and the testers. All particularly interesting in light of the more recent charges against Lance Armstrong. He does touch upon the interesting point that in sport where the rules are don't have drugs in your system rather than don't take the drugs deliberately, athletes can end up serving bans either as a result of accidents or even deliberate attempts to 'nobble' an athlete.

Ultimately, while fascinating, the book felt like it lacked an ending. It may be more that Schneier had already laid out his conclusions during the book anyway, but it didn't feel like it really offered any solutions or real predictions for where the problems with trust either are now, or are going next.

I did pay for this book with my own good money, but it's only fair to point out that I did receive a very generous discount from the author in exchange for my fairly vague promise to write a review of it somewhere. It would seem perverse to cheat the author of a book on how trust works in society out of that promise. So, some months later, this is that review.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

The human world is strongly conditioned by beliefs, attitudes and cognitive biases that we received from our evolutionary heritage. This topic has been one of the focal points of my reading for several years now, and I can attest that Bruce Schneier’s Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive serves as an excellent overview.

The book’s dust jacket tells us that Schneier is a “security technologist”; his wikipedia page clarifies that he is a cryptographer and computer security consultant. It is important to note that this book has nothing to do with computers or cryptography — it is a somewhat academic treatment of how society relies on trust to facilitate implicit agreements that, effectively, constitute society itself.

One key point is that we evolved with a willingness to trust others under some circumstances, and not in others. The former was aimed more at the narrow world of our relatives, immediate circle of friends and tribe; the latter was aimed primarily at the strangers outside that world. But of course this is fluid; enmity within the tribe or even in a family could trigger a lack of trust, and it is even possible that a stranger could acquire a reputation that permitted trust in some contexts.

Another key is that trust shows up in identifiable patterns, which persist over time. Some of those patterns become formalized, such as the role of “boss”, or even institutionalized, such as the way courts work. Others remain informal, such as tipping, or even remain largely unspoken, such as what duties adult children owe to their parents. Clearly, we rely on each other to respect and follow these patterns — they are actually what constitutes the infrastructure of society at all levels, even within a family or between friends.

Do you see that there are several dimensions and many variables in this? One dimension is the scale of the society involved, which is itself of a fractal nature — the family is to the clan what the neighborhood is to the city, for example. Another dimension is time, since reputations can only be established over time. Among the variables are the types of pressures that guide us when we follow the rules. Do they come from inside us, internalized from childhood observations? Or are they external, such as laws or religious edicts? Or are they actually artificial, such as fences or protection by passwords?

The book’s only real weakness is an unfortunate side effect of its greatest strength. Schneier’s treatment is explicitly academic, and this could make things a bit of a chore for some — but while the author isn’t a storyteller like Malcolm Gladwell, the the text never becomes plodding or too pedantic. (Along the spectrum of academic writers, I’d put him below Dan Ariely, at about the same level as Steven Pinker, a bit above Daniel Kahneman, and far better than George Lakoff.)

But the academic approach emphasizes something that wouldn’t be immediately apparent otherwise, which is that the concepts here are applicable to an astonishingly wide range of situations. Someone already familiar with the basic applications of game theory will immediately recognize the language of “cooperate” or “defect”, for example, and won’t really see anything new in the early chapters.

Once an analytic model has been introduced and terms have been defined, however, they are invoked in the exploration of a very wide variety of instances. In fact, by the time the reader nears the end of the book, they’ll probably start noticing examples of their own in everyday life.

Let me provide an example that occurred to me while I was reading this book.

I live in California, and my primary motorized transportation is a motorcycle. California is unlike every other state in the United States in that lane splitting is not illegal. So in other states, there is an institutional pressure (to use the jargon Schneier provides), in the form of law, to not slip between lanes of traffic and jump ahead.

In California there is, in parallel, a small amount of societal pressure in the form of disapproval of automobile drivers (who believe that the practice is dangerous, although it mostly is the reverse), and even perhaps some moral pressure (arising from the sense that one is unfairly jumping ahead of one’s “rightful” position in a queue). There might even be some reputational pressure from friends that find it objectionable.

But at the same time, there is a mild social pressure in the opposite direction from fellow motorcyclists — if you don’t take advantage of the motorcycle’s strengths, then you’re a sucker for sticking only with its weaknesses. That might also create some reputational pressures in some circles.

This means there is a social dilemma, in which two competing sets of pressures are likely to influence an individual’s behavior. In the terminology of the text, if the motorcyclist stays in the automotive lane, they are cooperating with those who would prohibit lane splitting, otherwise they are defecting.

(Note that even in California, the police can always use “illegal lane change” or simply “reckless driving” to punish those that are acting too wantonly — if they can catch them, of course.)

But among motorcyclists, there are completely unwritten and largely unspoken sets of norms regarding the conditions under which one should or should not split lanes. When I try to explain to my non-motorcyclist friends that lane splitting is quite legal and safe, they invariably cite their horror at being passed even at high relative speeds, maybe even well above the speed limit (typically, in my experience, by young men with idiocy-inducing levels of testosterone on sport bikes, or self-styled “outlaws” on Harleys or Harley-style cruisers).

Well, yes. But those motorcycles are in turn defecting from the norms implicitly agreed to by the overwhelming majority of more sensible motorcyclists. So, for example, if one of my nephews were ever to take up riding, I would explain both the legal and extra-legal norms that I would hope they would follow. As an individual, I could only use societal and reputational pressure and try to invoke moral pressure.

I find something that Schneier notes interesting enough that I want to make it explicit: Laws receive no special treatment in this analytic model. They are merely one form of institutional pressure. Over-reliance on the explicit mechanism of the legal system is one of the problems we run into over and over — if the other pressures are absent, then the law will have very little force. Think, for example, of laws against speeding. Even worse is when countervailing pressures are ignored. Those villains of Wall Street typically have social, reputational and institutional pressures that overwhelm the weak regulations and laws we place in front of them.

Which is precisely the point: if we don’t examine and understand the holistic set of pressures people will be acting under, we won’t get the outcomes we desire. In earlier phases of human civilization, the internalized and intuitive pressures associated with morality and reputation played a dominant role. Today, we rely much more on institutional pressure — especially laws — and security systems. But those simply don’t work very well in comparison. The internalized rules are heuristics which we automatically apply to any situation, while rules and laws must be learned and understood, as well as very explicit and specific.

Think about how much trouble we have with graffiti (ignore for a moment that some people don't think it’s much of problem at all — our society certainly treats it as one!). It isn’t particularly uncommon on a city bus to watch someone climb aboard (inevitably through the rear exit, and so without paying), pull out permanent markers, scrawl a tag and leave the bus. A hundred years ago, we were surrounded by people we knew, and such delinquency would have long-term reputational consequences — so it almost never happened. Society today is largely anonymous, so reputational pressures have collapsed.

Schneier does point out that anonymity has this effect, of course. But he isn’t a social philosopher, so doesn’t spend as much time on this as I would have liked. A pretty clear trend in our world is growing social isolation and consequent anonymity, despite the rise of social sites on the internet (or because of that shift). More careful study of the mechanisms outlined in this book are necessary, but is there some point on the horizon at which they will not be sufficient?

In this and other ways, I often wonder whether the human individual has been programmed (weakly, yet adequately) by evolution in ways that eventually contradict a sufficiently large and anonymous population.

The book is an excellent introduction to a very peculiar way of looking at society, albeit a way that brings into sharp focus the reasons behind many of our contemporary troubles. I highly recommend it.
 

[Scott · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've read Schneier's work online at his blog, so when I saw he was publishing a book, I said "Sure! He writes well, discusses topics relevant to my interests in security and process."

Reading this, I got a wonderful 101 book that collects a wide breadth of theories, generalizations, and examples of how society works and balances the need to create norms, maintain norms, and pervert those norms to innovate, as well as how the parasites who take advantage of those norms exist.

Unfortunately, I was really looking for a 202 or higher level book on this stuff, with more concrete "And here are some ideas on what we can do." Telling me "We need to establish generalized security practices that remove incentives while maintaining an ability to innovate" (paraphrased) does very little good when you were just talking about regulatory capture and how a major issue is that Corporations have a major incentive that is at odds with society's incentives.

Leaving that aside, it is well written, clear, and easy followable by a lay person. However, unfortunately, that's exactly the person who isn't really going to be reading this book unless they are forced to for a class or other authority figure. I figure I'll get a fair bit of use out of using examples and discussions to help me when I'm discussing with my friends/coworkers to try and get them to come around to my point of view.

Oddly enough, the most grating issue I had with the book was the fact that it uses endnotes rather than footnotes, a pet peeve; however, despite the amount of whitespace and page real estate footnotes take up, that makes them easy to reference and review versus endlessly flipping back and forth, especially when you use the endnotes to make parenthetical commentary, versus just referencese to facts and figures.

[Matt Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting read, but nothing ground breaking if you're a following of Bruce Schneier's blog or have read any of his opinion columns regarding trust and security.

The book covers the concepts of trust, and security and examines our natural instincts in relation to these often fail in the face of new technology and the growth of society. Much time is spent examining various difficult to solve social dilemmas in the context of this, and the introduction of background material from the fields of Psychology and Sociology provides interesting (if obvious in hindsight) snippets to demonstrate our typical behaviour in this area.

The biggest downside of the book is simply that it attempts to cover a huge range of material across all these subjects and although it mostly succeeds in presenting a coherent narrative and argument, there is certainly no detailed examination of any of the background material or premises. The text of the book ends at around 60% of the way through the Kindle ebook, the remaining pages taken up by copious indices, references and supporting notes, which I guess is a useful resource if you are fascinated enough by the topic to invest further time in it.

For me personally, I felt that I'd got all I could get from it by this point and wasn't inclined to follow any of the references, but it did leave me feeling like the book was only half finished. If the book instead substituted that space with less direct references and more critical evaluation of how the framework the book explains could be pragmatically applied to future societal problems and situations it would have been much more engaging.

[Michael Burnam-Fink · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I heard that the author of the absolutely brilliant Secrets and Lies was turning his slantwise gaze from computer networks to society as a whole, I was excited. These days, security is a big business, and problems of insecurity bedevil the future. Schneier lays out his framework for how trust is required modern society function, and how the liars and outliers of the title abuse trust for their own advantage.

It is not that this is a bad book, but it is very general. Yes, we use morality, reputation, institutional pressures, and security technology to enforce trust. Yes, multinational corporations are hard to regulate, and accelerating technological change introduces new risks. I get it, but what can we do about security today? How can complex systems be made secure? What is the responsibility of the State in providing security, as opposed to its other duties? Schneier seems to suggest that we devolve power to lower levels, where morality carries more weight (most people are generally nice to people they see every day), but this idea is difficult to combine with the global scale of modern problems.

Along with all the theory, I would have preferred some concrete case studies of security failures, say a clear example of corporate corruption in action, or why the War on Terror is a failure in every way. And for a book which relies so heavily on the Prisoner's Dilemma as a conceptual tool, not mentioning Axelrod's Evolution of Cooperation and the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma is an odd choice.

[Jur · Rating 4 out of 5]

We learn to trust strangers from a very young age. Not just uncles, cousins and neighbours, but also teachers, policemen, doctors and even newsreaders on TV. Compared to our ancestors and other animal species, humans have raised trust to unknown heights. Bruce Schneier , in his new book Liars & Outliers, takes us on a tour of how that trust came to be, how it manages to work in the majority of cases and why it doesn’t work in the rest.

Schneier uses Francis Fukuyama’s definition of trust, which holds that other members of society act in a predictable, honest and co-operative way, based on shared norms. This is enormously helpful for society as a whole, because there are costs and risks involved in dealing with others and establishing their trustworthiness. If society can organise itself so that we can safely trust other members, that save sus a lot of time and money.

Liars & Outliers most pressing question is how society can function based on trust when the short term and selfish interest of it’s members are often contrary to the long term benefit of the group. Put in different terms: people continuously decide whether to co-operate with the group or to defect.

There’s a number of pressures that society exerts to keep its members in the fold. Moral pressure makes us feel good or bad about our choices, reputational pressure makes us worry about the judgement of our peers. In a small group, those pressures are quite powerful and will generally convince us to stick to the norms.

But in bigger groups this no longer works as well, as fewer people know us and not as well. There is also less social control and more alternatives if our peers ostracise us. In these larger groups, the maintenance of the group norms has been delegated institutions: the church, the state, the council, the company.These institutions work with officials and formalised rules like laws, regulations and protocols.

Finally, there are security systems designed to keep you conformant. Locks and keys keep you out, your antivirus software protects your computer and cameras in the public space watch your movement and actions.

All these pressures determine the parameters in the trade off that every member of a group makes dozens if not hundreds of times a day. In simple cases, all these pressures point the same way, but often the pressures compete. You conscience may guide you one way, but the pressure of your peers keeps you from speaking out. You may be desperate to get food for your kids but gates and walls keep you from taking it from others. And group loyalties may conflict. Your membership of a gang may be more important than that of your local community. In some cases this can make decisions to co-operate or defect very difficult.

Societies have built institutions that can set these parameters. It can hire more policemen, set tougher penalties, offer more aid to potential victims (easing your conscience). However, this not easy to get right. First of all, there is delay in adjustment and longer in more complex institutions. Legislation may take years and funds allocated to execute policies take years to get in the budget. The transgressor are ahead of you all this time. Which gets worse if the technological advance is very fast. It takes even longer to measures the effects of new policies, and it´s hard to tell whether the policies were responsible for the observed changes at all. And even if you get the desired result, it may have unwanted side effects that require new policies to deal with.

Also, society sometimes goes after the wrong problems. The fact that we have the illusion that we can actually handle risk, that we can eliminate it, is very dangerous and makes it hard to remain objective. We tend to overstate the risk of catastrophic, singular and unexpected and understate the risk of what is familiar and controlable. That’s why more money is spent on counterterrorism than road safety, although the latter causes more deaths. In fact, the most scary things imaginable are unknown risks.

Therefor it is all the more surprising that most people (to parafrase Lincoln) stick to most of the rules most of the time. The first part of Schneier’s book deals with the theoretical and empirical evidence from evolutionary psychology, (socio)biology, game theory and other fields of science on what makes people so surprisingly co-operative. Especially when you compare it to our cousins, the baboons, who will defect from co-operating midway through a chase for prey. In some way humans have developed a wide array of pressures to get people to put their own short term interests aside and join with others for future benefit.

Schneier uses defection and society in a neutral sense. His view is that nobody sticks to all the rules all the time, and that this is natural. Moreover, some societies, or aspects of societies are bad (or can be seen as bad) and worth changing, and defection thus can be a good thing. This is different from the good/evil dichotomy that some people work by.

The pressures mentioned above are strong positive feedbacks loops to conformity and they tend to stifle societal change. So an important question is whether we should foster non-conformity more? What I missed in Schneier’s book was that long term vision, maybe because I’m a historian and he’s a securitarian. By keeping society abstract, he doesn’t touch the subject whether certain societies have been better at dealing with non-conformity and whether they profited from this. For example democratic societies with free speech and protection from violent and legal repression by other members of society, the church and the state?

Modern societies have developed ways for people to defect without being ostracised from society as a whole. We have since long given artists more room for individual expression and have accepted that they not only break artistic rules but also have looser morals, dress more extravagantly and permit themselves a more critical stance towards authority. More recently we tolerate conscientious objectors, encourage whistleblowers and cheer on noble bandits like Robin Hood.

Has western society struck a balance between individual and collective that is superior to authoritarian societies? Not for nothing do most comparative studies show that western societies are more trusting in general than other societies? So can the lesson be, even if Schneier doesn’t make it explicit, that a society which allows its members to break some of the rules is stronger, as long as they don’t break them all?

Full disclosure: I won a galley copy of this book in a competition.

[Ali Sattari · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good wrap-up on aspects of defection, pressures and various forms of security. Most of the examples are from areas we don't usually consider security or take seriously.
A key takeaway: the cost is defection is often born by all members of the relevant society, but on the other hand eliminating defection is not feasible, a healthy amount of defection in societies is more realistic from cost/freedom perspective and also provides fuel for change.

[Woflmao · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall, I was a bit disappointed with this book. There are a few keen observations here, as you would expect from Bruce Schneier, but the repetitiveness of the book is really tiring. A large part of the text is a list of variations of the Prisoner's Dilemma, and the focus is much more on why people defect from society's rules than on trust itself. Also, I was hoping Schneier would offer some ideas how to increase trust in a modern society, but the book mainly observes and explains.
The book could have been half as long without missing any of its important ideas.

[Eduardo Santiago · Rating 4 out of 5]

It feels slightly disturbing to read this book so soon after Fukuyama's Trust and even more so the same week that This American Life aired episode 459, What Kind of Country, in which they chronicle disturbing societal breakdowns. Schneier covers trust, tradeoffs, more (and more interesting!) Prisoner's Dilemma discussion than any three books on Game Theory, evolutionary theory, economics, politics, current affairs.

What I found most interesting was his frank discussion of scaling problems: Trust and security models that work at a tribal level do not work at a multinational level. I also appreciate his reinforcement that defection can be good and is necessary for a society to work: the people who helped slaves escape the American South in the nineteenth century were defectors.

Solutions? No clean ones. Just lots of material to think about. Unfortunately, policymakers are probably not the kind of people who read Schneier; or, for that matter, who think. So the final few chapters were doubly depressing: because they call for difficult analysis and thinking, and because we know that this thinking will not take place in the current U.S. political climate.

A note about the format: this book does not work on Kindle. Too many tables and diagrams that just don't render well.

[Yune · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think you'll lean toward this one or not depending on how the subject matter interests you: what impetus is there for societies and communities to function together for the common good? What about those (defectors) who don't follow the rules or prefer to pursue their own selfish profit?

Full of bullet points and pro-con charts, this book leans toward pedagogical in tone, although it's fairly approachable. (I'd call it easy to read as opposed to enjoyable.) Its view is a bit self-admittedly simplistic; it's mostly laying out the ground rules for looking at interactions through an economic viewpoint. It introduces the Prisoner's Dilemma and various other hypothetical scenarios where cooperation -- in conjunction with another's, which isn't guaranteed -- offers benefits or disadvantages.

There are lots of interesting examples peppered in here (voting, corporate fraud), but some barely grace a sentence and others get a few paragraphs at most; there's nothing really covered in depth, and there was a humanistic element that I found missing during the discussions of preserving one's reputation or sticking to a moral code.

I'd recommend it to someone who's just learned about the Prisoner's Dilemma and finds it interesting; if you've done any real thought on these types of questions already, you're not going to find much that's new, although it's admirably organized.

[Nilesh Jasani · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book effectively theorizes that almost all real life activities are an expression of "trust" or "security". Adam Smith would claim all real life activities as an effort to further economic interest. Richard Dawkins would make them an evolution thing. Some pope might believe in the religious meanings and some Plato in moral. All these might be valid even if narrow perspectives from particular vantage points, except that trust/security is exceptionally uninteresting, ridiculously narrow and often too obvious.

For most part, the book ends up sub-dividing trust/security features into numerous categories. At every point, dozens of real life interactions are used to make mostly obvious points about these newly defined categories. Nothing wrong with all this, except that the purpose of any frame-work is never made clear. As a result, a lot appear like creation of ever more explanations for fairly straightforward arguments, and without any real purpose.

There are good discussions when the author imports the concepts from the game theory and uses them to explain externalities, tragedies of common and similar real life dilemmas. While all these are also given the "trust" twist and perspectives, they are separate social issues and add to one's learning.

[Anton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just finished it...mmmmmm....not sure. Bruce totally turned into a philosopher and the book is a bit too meandering to my taste. Many times I felt like one can say the same thing with less rigor and with half the page count. In any case, I'd say it was worth reading.

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This may be one of the most important books you'll never read.

In Liars and Outliers, Bruce Schneier (known—and with good reason—to The Register as "The closest thing the security industry has to a rock star") has produced a remarkably clear-eyed and dispassionate assessment of one of the most critical issues facing the human species—the fact that the notions of trust and security that served us well enough when we were scattered tribes of hunters and farmers do not scale up to the numbers and kinds of organizations we have made for ourselves today, nor are they at all adequate for our future. It's all a matter of trust: how (and why) can you trust someone you've never met before and will probably never see again? How can a culture composed almost entirely of strangers to each other even function? Why isn't human society already nothing but a bloody war of all against all?

Schneier describes the manifold societal dilemmas facing us—for numerous different values of who "we" are. But that's not all he does. Pointing out problems is easy, and common, after all. Liars and Outliers is much more than that. Schneier also argues convincingly for the mechanisms by which we can trust each other, and outlines how we can make those mechanisms better. Not perfect—perfection is neither possible nor desirable, it turns out—but better.

And the answers aren't always to pass more laws, either, nor to incarcerate more people, nor to eliminate more and more freedoms until society is totally under control. Absolutist rhetoric is also easy and altogether too common—but it's also corrosive, because even the people spouting it don't really believe in it. Certainly not for themselves, anyway. They're preaching to the rubes. Which isn't a problem unless the rubes have no alternative but to listen. Schneier's book offers an alternative.

Liars and Outliers also brought to my mind an earlier, more limited and pessimistic, but much punchier work, Systemantics, by the (possibly pseudonymous) John Gall. Systemantics, which is subtitled The Underground Text of Systems Lore: How Systems Really Work and How They Fail, is another book not nearly as widely-read as it should have been. I suspect Schneier's read it, though. However, I wasn't able to verify that—Liars and Outliers has a list of bibliographic references at the end, which I did read through, but no alphabetized bibliography.

One of the examples Schneier mentions early in this book does also appear in Systemantics, though: the March of Dimes, originally an anti-polio organization, and its evolution as polio was eventually eliminated (or nearly so) by vaccination—rather than wither away, the March of Dimes simply broadened its focus to research against birth defects, a cause much less likely to encounter any such inconveniently complete solutions. Such system antics are closely tied to mechanisms of trust and security—when an organization behaves as if it were an individual, with its own sense of self-preservation, what can we mere humans do to counteract its reach? If we even should—birth defects are, after all, a harmful thing, and the existence of an organization dedicated to their reduction is therefore self-evidently a good thing. With other organizations, though, and other causes, the proper course is much less clear-cut.

Maybe the problem is that Schneier was too careful. Liars and Outliers is, despite its clever title, a surprisingly sober work, weighty and academic in both tone and presentation. The choice to move all of the Notes and bibliographic references to the end of the book, clearing them away from the flow of Schneier's arguments, was a good one... but it wasn't enough to make this work as lively as I really wanted it to be. I read it; I enjoyed it. But for me, Schneier was preaching to the choir—I was already predisposed to agree with him.

I'm just not so sure that the folks who need to pay attention to him will ever end up doing so...

[Nils · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 critiques 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.

[John Schwabacher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Note: The edition I read has the subtitle Enabling the Trust That Society Needs to Thrive.

My good friend Jim Wiggins recommended this book highly. I found it interesting and very logical, but not earth-shattering. I did find myself wondering if that is because I haven't dealt with the issues involved before and just don't realize the contribution he's making.

Everything is laid out in a very logical structure.
Bruce Schneier discusses trust as a necessary part of society and points out how much we rely upon it. He identifies classes of ways trust is encouraged/enforced: moral, reputational, security, etc. He identifies "societal dilemmas" where the needs and values of groups conflict with those of individuals and other groups.

Along the way he addresses all kinds of issues: crime, oppression, political oppression, computer hacking, when to expect an industry to form cartels, TSA "security theater", the worldwide economic crisis, and much more.

Some interesting bits:

"Defection" (people breaking rules or breaking faith with society) is inevitable. What society can do is decide where the tradeoff between intrusive enforcement and damaging defection lies.

For most of the interesting problems of society that we think of as security related, the security aspects are the least important. Society has to decide what is the right thing to do and what the appropriate tradeoffs are before deciding the appropriate solutions.

[Bryan Murdock · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was excited to read this book by the legend himself (http://www.schneierfacts.com/). The ideas are important, but it felt like death by examples reading this. The whole book is basically this: present a point and then tell 100 different little stories that back up the point and make it more clear, and then, if like me, you can't resist a good footnote you get about 100 more stories for each point. Many of the stories where interesting and did help bring the points home, but man oh man, for me it was overkill.

Despite that, some very good things to think about it. Living and cooperating with a group of people requires trust and sacrificing some of your own personal wants and needs for the benefit of the group. How do we encourage and/or enforce the self-sacrifice for the benefit of the group? How do we know we can trust the others in our group? How do we do those things for different sized groups and for groups of different compositions? What if you throw in corporations, governments, and other institutions? Groups within groups? Groups of people with competing interests? Groups within groups that are have competing interests? He covers it all. Interesting and important stuff. If you want to learn more about it, and you also happen to love random stories about Boston Harbor fishermen, evolutionary psychology, game theory experiments, computer security, Enron, a bagel salesman, and herd immunity, you'll love this book.

[Mitchell Friedman · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointing. I expect more from this author and perhaps when he leaves his field of cryptography and to some extent computer security, I shouldn't. This book did have moments of brilliance - it kind of caught its stride around part 3 - but lost it before getting to the final section. So what was wrong? First of all it was basically a psychology book but written first-person and chatty as though it were a bad high school paper. And I've got a lot of familiarity with a lot of this material - and it came off untrustable - even when I knew or thought I knew it to be true. On the positive side the book shows a way to model the world that a software person could understand. I might be convinced by someone else that I was being unfair - but this book was no fun to read and took way longer than it should have.

[William · Rating 1 out of 5]

I already know a bit about Game Theory, but even if I didn't I believe this book would have still felt extremely slow, simplistic, and general. It added almost nothing to my toolset where Game Theory and security thinking is concerned.

He tells us about all of these burgeoning fields: evolutionary psychology, game theory, computer security, corporate law, voting dynamics—only to apologize that they are all too complex to get into right now! Instead, we get platitudes.

Scheier is an amazing security researcher, but his writing reads poorly—he often says things like "there is so much more to say on such-and-such topic, but I can't talk about that all right now, lets focus on this" or "One may argue or disagree with my point, but..." This is a hallmark of the novice author, who pre-empts himself with imagined objections instead of being confident and well-worded. It's annoying.

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

I chose to read this book because I have been contemplating the interface of trust and justice in my thinking. Schneier is a bit pedantic but the themes are consistent and the last two chapters are worth reading more than once because they get to core concerns about how a society orders itself and how this is changing given our technological innovations. It also points out that in spite of rapid technological advances, the human heart remains remarkable consistent in seeking its own good. Reminds me that I am more surprised by kindness these days than evil.

[Standback · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great vocabulary for talking about social dilemmas and society-wide dynamics, and some sobering observations.

Not nearly enough actual content for this length of a book.

I wish everybody read this book; it explains important things well and clearly. But it's the kind of book I want everybody to have read, more than something I'd actually recommend as an enjoyable and edifying experience.

[Andreas · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolutely amazing book that I recommend everyone reads. It goes into deep detail about why the security structure of society is changing right now, and what we could do against that change.

[YHC · Rating 1 out of 5]

好悶的一本書啊!! 我看的好被催眠啊!

第1章概论
第一部分 /信任的科学
第2章防御的历史
第3章协作的演变
第4章信任的社会历史
第5章社会困境
第二部分 /信任模型
第6章社会压力
第7章道德压力
第8章名誉压力
第9章制度压力
第10章防护机制
第三部分 /现实世界
第11章利益冲突
第12章组织
第13章公司
第14章机构
第四部分 /结论
第15章社会压力是如何失效的
第16章科技进步
第17章未来


-------------------------
--某些科学家认为这种成长的社会化实际上促进了人类智能的发展。11权 术主义智慧理论（有时也被称为社会脑假设）认为我们进化出智慧主要是为 了应对他人的欺骗。尽管“权术主义”一词出现较晚，它是尼古拉斯·汉弗莱 （Nicolas Humphrey）首先提出来的。汉弗莱通过观察发现野生大猩猩的生活 方式十分简单，有着充足而易于获取的食物，几乎没有天敌，每天除了进食、 睡觉和玩耍外几乎无所事事。这与它们在实验室中表现出的惊人的创造性思 维能力不相符合。因此我们不禁要问：如果在野外生存这么简单，那么它们变 得如此智慧和聪明的进化优势又是什么呢？汉弗莱的观点是，灵长类动物变 得智慧而富于创造性的首要原因是需要应付与同类的生活中的各种复杂情 况。换句话说，我们进化出智力不是为了战胜自然，而是为了与同类匹敌。 不仅如此，随着生活变得更加社会化，我们需要学习如何与他人相处：不 仅要配合对方，还要保证别人也会配合自己。这就涉及理解对方，心理学家丹 尼尔·吉尔伯特在这点上进行了详尽的描述： 我们都是社会性的哺乳动物，大脑高度进化从而适于考虑他人。理解他 人的想法（他们知道什么以及想要什么，他们正在做什么以及准备做什么）对 我们的生存变得如此重要，以至于我们的大脑始终脱离不了与人有关的思 考。我们琢磨别人和他们的意图，谈论他们，寻找并记住他们。 这个观点带有进化论的色彩。当你需要面对自然界带来的威胁时，智慧 是一项很有价值的求生专长，但智慧在生存层面更大的价值则体现于面对其 他智慧生物的威胁的时候。一个聪明的对手与愚钝的对手相比，可以说根本 是不同的动物。聪明的攻击者更具适应能力，能够了解它的猎物，并且可以制
定长远的计划。一个聪明的对手可以预测你的抵抗行为，并将它们考虑进自 己的计划中。如果你被一个聪明人攻击，最有用的防御手段就是也成为一个 聪明人。我们祖先的智力不断进化，这是因为他们身边的人逐渐变得聪明，而 他们能够比得上别人的唯一出路就是变得更为聪明。12这就是红皇后效应的 一个实例。 在灵长类动物中，施行欺诈的频繁程度与物种大脑皮层的大小直接相 关，而大脑皮层是哺乳动物大脑中用于“思考”的部位。这就是说，拥有越大的 脑，行骗的才能也就越高。人类大脑的皮层大小是进化学上最相近的物种的4 倍。我们大脑厚度的80%都是皮层，而最接近我们的物种的这一数字是50%， 非灵长类哺乳动物则只有10%〜40%。13 随着我们大脑皮层比例的增长，社交活动的复杂性也越来越高。灵长动 物学家罗宾·邓巴研究了灵长类动物的社群大小。邓巴对38种不同的灵长动 物进行了测试，他发现大脑皮层的大小与动物社群的大小相关。他提出人类 社群的平均大���是150人。14这被称为邓巴数，即我们可以亲自维持关系的人 的数量，这里仅指那些我们可以记住他们的由来，并在某种程度上关系密切 的人。15当然，这仅是一个平均数字。每个人实际能够维持关系的数量或多或 少。这个数字在人类社会中相当常见：它大约是新石器时代一个农业村庄的 人口数；是赫梯族分割聚居点的人数；是从古罗马时代到今天职业军队基本 单位的组成人数；是圣诞节人们寄送卡片列表中的平均人数；还是现代企业 中一个普通部门的人数。
-----这个星球上进化最为成功的两个物种要数人类和生活在巴西的切叶蚁。 进化生物学家爱德华O.威尔逊在其职业生涯中对这种蚂蚁进行了长期研究， 并提出它们的成功应当归功于劳动分工。切叶蚁有四种不同的分工：园丁、 防御者、征粮队和士兵。每种蚂蚁都专门从事各自的工作，它们的协作使蚁群 比其他不进行劳动分工的蚁群发展得更好。 人类也是如此，甚至更进一步，我们可以根据环境调整分工。每只切叶蚁 天生就被指定了固定的工种，而我们可以从长远或短期目标出发，选择自己 的分工，并在工作不合适时进行改变。劳动分工是对信任的考验。充当园丁的切叶蚁必须信任负责征粮的蚂蚁 可以把叶子的碎块运回蚁穴。我此时此刻正在从事写作的专门工作，因此必 须相信我的出版商会印刷出版此书，并相信书店会进行售卖。我还需要相信 有人会种植作物，从而我可以用版税买到吃的。如果我做不到信任数以百万 计不知名、未谋面的陌生人，就没有办法从事专门工作。

---自然界中充斥着动物之间相互信任、帮助以及无私利他的例子。不仅是 蚂蚁，许多昆虫都以生命为代价去保护自己的巢穴。一些群居动物惧怕天敌 的掠食——草原土拨鼠、地松鼠、某些猴子以及其他各式各样的群居动物和 鸟类，它们一旦发现捕食者就会发出警报以警告群组。另一些动物则结队捕 猎，这些例子中的大多数其实都是亲属间的帮助。将这种趋势延伸至非亲缘关系范畴内会变得更加困难。考古学家把人 类的进化模型划分为四个阶段。第一个阶段发生在600万年前，这个阶段中人 类和黑猩猩的共同祖先进化出了情感共鸣和希望帮助他人的动机。第二个阶 段开始于180万年前，这个阶段中在对伤病个体的短期关照和对死者的特殊 对待中都可以发现同情的存在。第三个阶段则与今天更近：大概在40万〜50 万年前，人类开始依赖于群体狩猎，并开始组织对受伤或者体弱的个体的长 期照料。第四个阶段开始于距今12万年前的现代人时期，怜爱的对象扩展到 陌生人、动物、某些时候甚至是没有生命的物体上：宗教信物、古董、家传遗 物，等等。这在最开始也许并没有扩展到规模大大超过150（邓巴数）人的群体 上，而大约1万年前，文明的出现打破了这种状况——我想这应该算是第五个 阶段。

----思考一下我们的祖先以及他们与社群中生活的其他个体之间的关系。欺 诈对个体来说在短时期内是有价值的。但生活在社群中的个体也具有其他不 愿欺诈的动机：如果他行骗了，那么就会丧失未来与被骗对象进行协作的机 会，并危及他在群体中的名声。如果未来协作的收益足够大，那么非亲缘个体 间的相互帮助在保证在未来他们可以理所当然地得到回报的前提下就具有 进化学的意义。 一个显而易见的问题是，纯粹的字面意义上的利他主义是否真的存在？ 或者它们仅是基于预期回报或惩罚而作出的选择。也许特蕾莎修女并非真的 无私利他，而是期望她可以在天堂中获得奖励。也许我们保护自己子女的本 能也并未真的无私利他，而是期望得到他们的反哺，从而老有所终。我们也不 认为吸血蝙蝠是无私利他的，它们只不过是在期望未来可以得到同样的回 报。甚至为了保护孩子而牺牲自己的母亲，也可能是为了确信自己的基因可 以被传递下去。 简而言之，被称为相互作用分析的心理学理论认为人们期望从他们表现 出利他和仁慈的对象那里获得某种感情上的或者物质上的回报。因此我们会
从失火的大楼中救出陌生人是因为期望可以顺利逃生并获得赞扬，而我们向 慈善机构捐款也仅是因为这会使我们觉得自己很高尚。你甚至可以这样说， 在任何时候我们之所以会按照群体利益行事是因为确信这样会在未来得到 更多的回报。 甚至还有另外一种理论，将利他主义行为完全脱离对任何纯洁无私的需 要而进行解释。生物学家阿莫茨·扎哈维的缺陷理论解释了物种代价高昂 的“信号”。如果你是群体中各方面高于平均水平的个体，那么通过发出高代 价而难以模仿的信号来消耗这种特长，从而吸引潜在伴侣的注意就具有其进 化意义。这在孔雀的尾巴和牡鹿的犄角上都可以得到印证，并且同样适用于 表现出无私利他行为的人类。因此在火灾现场救出陌生人的男人只是为了彰 显自己仁慈的心灵和强健的体格，而向慈善机构捐款的女人也不过是为了炫 耀自己的财富。我们当然知道选择配偶时人格魅力会成为一项重要条件，于 是善良的人更有可能进行繁衍。

---科技同样从另一方面改变了社会性压力的效果。由于社会性压力自身的 各类相关体系也需要防护，于是背叛者们就有了可乘之机，他们可以直接攻 击那些防护体系。每种经过技术增强的名誉压力体系本身都需要防护技术的 保护。因此我们需要图章戒指和印蜡来保护介绍信，需要计算机安全手段来 保护安吉清单的数据库免于攻陷。同样，一旦存在司法措施来加强执法，这些 司法措施本身就可能被作为攻击目标。于是窃贼戴上手套以免留下指纹，锉 掉赃车上的车辆识别码以避免被追踪。 社群规模的增加还带来了更大的变化。随着社会从非正式的社会性压力 转向更为正式的社会性压力——无论是机构压力还是安防体系，或是被技术 加强过的道德和名誉压力，信任的本质发生了改变。回想一下我们在第1章给 出的信任的两个定义：对意图的信任和对实际行动的信任。在小型社群中，我 们通常更关心前一种信任的定义。我们熟悉那些正与我们交流的人，并对他 们的意图有明确的预期。社会压力在特定的情况下可以促进协作，但同时也 关心它们所有的意图。随着社群的成长和社会关系的淡化，我们失去了这种 亲密的关系，变得更加在乎第二种定义中的信任。我们不知道自己正在与谁 交互，也不清楚他们的意图，因此只能自己推断它们的实际行动。社会性压力 就变得更加倾向于促进某种特定的行为：顺从。

----道德可以被一个强大的统治者、统治阶级或者神父阶级影响。特别地，当 你可以操纵群内/群外划分时，一些可怕的事情可以打着道德的幌子发生：奴 隶制度与种族灭绝便是两个例子。有意思的是，种族灭绝通常通过传道总 会宣传运动将受害者描述为寄生虫或者下贱人种：不值得人们对其报以对他 人相同的道德倾向。 心理学家西蒙·贝伦·科恩认为精神病患者的残忍与邪恶来源于共情作 用的失效或者缺失。将此观念延伸至我们的模型，人如果感觉到与群体中其 他人有共情作用，会更倾向协作，如果感受不到，则更倾向背叛。一般的道德 规则与特定的道德提示物都可以提醒人们的道德原则与群体利益，进而加强 群体的共情作用。

--。宽恕是一种复杂的情感，并且在宽恕 与易受骗之间以及悔悟与软弱之间都存在一道纤细的界线。刚果民主共和国 东南部的方言奇卢伯语是最不好翻译的语言。“伊隆加”（illuga）的意思是一 个对侮辱在第一次可以原谅，第二次可以容忍，第三次既不原谅也不容忍的 人。英语的说法更为爽快：“欺骗我一次，是你的耻辱；欺骗我两次，是我的耻 辱。”

[Xavier Shay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Insightful book about various tradeoffs between security, cost, and freedom.

"One of the great achievements of our species is our ability to solve societal dilemmas. In a way, we solve them by cheating. That is, we don't solve them within the parameters of the game. Instead, we modify the game to eliminate the dilemma. Recall the two drivers stuck behind a fallen tree that neither one can move by himself. They're not in a Prisoner's Dilemma. They're not even in a Snowdrift Dilemma. In their situation, their selfish interest coincides with the group interest—they're going to move the tree and get on with their lives. The trick to solving societal dilemmas is make them look like that. That's what societal pressures do: they're how society puts its thumb on the scales."

"An increase in the severity of punishment often doesn't translate into a drop in crime; an increase in the probability of punishment often does."

"But we often treat organizations as if they actually were individuals, assuming that societal pressures work on them in the same way they do on individuals. This doesn't work, and results in some pretty bad trust failures, and high scopes of defection. [...] It's only a bit over the top to call corporations “immortal sociopaths,” as attorney and writer Joel Baken did."

"In the real world, the knobs are poorly marked and badly calibrated, there's a delay after you turn one of them before you notice any effects, and there's so much else going on that it's hard to figure out what the effect actually is. Think of a bathtub with leaky unmarked faucets, where you can't directly see the water coming out of the spout…outside, in the rain. You sit in the tub, oscillating back and forth between the water being too hot and too cold, and eventually you give up and take an uncomfortable bath. That's a more accurate metaphor for the degree of control we have with societal pressures"

[Betawolf · Rating 3 out of 5]

Given Schneier's background, I was expecting this book to focus on issues of security, and trust in security contexts. It was something of a pleasant surprise to find that his scope was more general than that: in essence, the book is an introduction to social technologies, how they work, and how they fail.

As such, it's certainly not a bad introduction. Schneier writes engagingly, with each chapter driving a set of loose-but-practical classifications of social activity with the application of some attention-holding explanations and examples. These are both classical examples, like the Hawks and Doves, the Prisoner's Dilemma, and the fisheries of the Common, and more modern and personal examples, like the TSA's anti-terror measures. Elements of psychology, sociology and economics (and what you might term 'decision science') are named and demonstrated.

The treatment was however definitely introductory, with mostly quite lightweight discussion of general problems or categories of problem in social technology. The book's level is very good for framing further exploration of particular problems, but it contains relatively little detail on any of them -- making it less likely to be wrong, and correspondingly less helpful.

[Du · Rating 4 out of 5]

Super interesting book about Trust. Bruce Schneier, who is famous in security circles, has written a book that goes all the way back to the fundamentals, looking at trust and how we humans need it to cooperate and the forces that act on trust. As such this is an incredibly interesting book that made me look at a lot of current problems through the lens of societal pressures that Schneier introduces.
It's a pretty theoretical book, describing the theories around trust and explains how different systems enable trust in order to push humans to cooperation. Schneier also goes into how it fails and other problems and frictions that there are.
I really found the book interesting and perhaps it was a bit wordy in places but the numerous examples really helped me understand the different concepts.

I would highly recommend this, it's a fantastic book that can really provide a lot of perspective in parsing current events and is really useful when working in a field like cybersecurity.

[Amie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Liars and Outliers explores how trust and cooperation function within society, examining the various mechanisms - from morals and reputation to institutions and security systems - that encourage people to act for the common good rather than their own self-interest. Through a multidisciplinary lens, Schneier investigates how societies maintain trust at scale and manage those who break societal rules, whether they're simple cheaters or complex criminal organizations.

While Schneier provides a comprehensive framework for understanding social trust and security, drawing extensively from biology, game theory, and social sciences, much of the material feels like a repackaging of existing ideas rather than groundbreaking new insights. However, the book's strength lies in its thorough research and accessible presentation of complex ideas, making it a solid contribution to the field of security studies.

[Lena · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm a big fan of Schneier's blog, so I was looking forward to reading this. But the book wasn't quite as good as I was hoping.

Things I liked: some of the discussion of how societies work, especially the historical / anthropological parts. The discussions of hawks/doves and how there are real costs to keeping defection low, and at some point it's not worth it. Some of the discussion about trust and how much we have to trust everyone around us for society to work.

Things I didn't like so much: There were so many tables listing the defect/cooperate choices and the pressures. I like systemization but it got to be a bit much, and I started skipping reading them because there wasn't anything surprising in them.

Anyway, I don't regret that I read it, but it wasn't as good as I was expecting.

[Chris Boutté · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a really interesting and unique book about trust. I’ve been really interested in the topic of trust lately, so a lot of the books have been repetitive, but Bruce Scheier takes a totally different perspective. Bruce’s background is in security, and he explains how we function in a society and what leads people to defect from societal norms. What’s interesting is he also discusses why we need people to defect to promote social change, such as historical figures like Rosa Parks who aren’t afraid to break societal norms. Not only does he use philosophical and psychological theory to explain how we trust within societies, but he also covers how trust works within work organizations and why some people may decide to steal or not look out for the best interest of the clients and consumers. It was a really interesting book, and I definitely recommend it.

[Weltengeist · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book contains a number of valuable insights, but they are well hidden in an enormous wall of text that makes it very hard to extract the main messages.

Do you know the scene from Forrest Gump where Bubba goes: "Anyway, like I was sayin', shrimp is the fruit of the sea. You can barbecue it, boil it, broil it, bake it, saute it. Dey's uh, shrimp-kabobs, shrimp creole, shrimp gumbo. Pan fried, deep fried, stir-fried." And he keeps on going like this for days. Which is a lot what this book felt like for me: It piles example on top of example, bullet list on top of bullet list, while I had long since gotten the point and was simply getting bored. At some point, it started to feel like swimming through tar.

So in the end, I rated the book with only two stars ("It was okay"), while it could easily have been a four-star book if it had been more concise and to the point.