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. ( )

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. ( )

I'm a fan of Bruce Schneier, I've followed his blog for years, and I enjoy his moderate and practical approach to various security issues. So when he offered signed copies of his latest book at a discounted price in exchange for a review, I jumped at the opportunity.

Overall, I quite enjoyed this book. Perhaps because I'm already familiar, and agree, with many of his ideas, I didn't find too many surprising ideas here. Nonetheless, Schneier does a great job of laying out a broad, fairly consistent framework for looking at how people cooperate and, if the title is meant to indicate a theme, "defect" from various forms of pressure meant to induce that cooperation.

From a wide-angle view, the only book-wide criticism I have is with terminology. For example, Schneier uses the word "defect" (and its variants) to indicate someone who goes against a particular type of pressure meant to induce cooperation. In this taxonomy, both airplane hijackers and people who hid their Jewish neighbors from Nazi soldiers are considered "defectors." I don't think it's a major detraction from the ideas he presents, but in a few cases it requires a moment to suss out how the actor is defecting. Schneier even makes a few comments about the oddity of the terminology, such as in Chapter 14 where he writes, "The police...implement societal pressures against a broad array of competing norms. (Okay, I admit it. That's an odd way to describe arresting people who commit crimes against people and propety.)" That said, Schneier is certainly no [a:James Carse|54828|James P. Carse|http://www.goodreads.com/assets/nophoto/nophoto-M-50x66-e07624dc012f2cce49c7d9aa6500c6c0.jpg], whose propensity to redefine terms is distracting at best.

Actually, not to contradict the paragraph above, where I think Schneier excels is in his ability to simplify concepts and demonstrate their applicability without stripping away too much of their complexity. He shows common links across a broad range of topics — from interpersonal interactions to business transactions to governmental regulation to the spread of religious ideas. He examines each of these by look at each idea from a host of angles, relying on everything from the evolution, psychology, economics, game theory and, of course, his own background as a security expert.

It's relatively quick read (I read it in three sittings), and certainly worth taking the time for anyone who spends any time thinking critically about how and why people choose whether to cooperate. ( )

The chapters of this book progresses nicely through various levels of organizational complexity and the various pressures that cause people to either cooperate or defect. From the way that he builds his thesis, it shows that his background in security gives him a perspective that most of us have not through through to the extent detailed in this book.

Some statements that caught my interest:

The human brain has a neocortex that four times the size of its nearest evolutionary relative. 80% of our brain is neocortex, compared to 50% in our nearest existing relative and 10% to 40% in non-primate mammals. (Page 23)

The main human group size is 150. This is the Dunbar number: the number of people with whom we can have explicit and personal encounters, who's history we can remember, and with whom we can experience some level of intimacy. (Page 24)

"Actually, Dunbar proposed several natural human group sizes that increased by a factor of approximately 3 ... The smallest, 3 to 5 is a clique, the number of people from whom you would seek help in times of severe emotional distress the 12 to 20 person group is the sympathy group: people with whom you have a particularly close relationship. After that, 30 to 50 is the typical size of hunter gatherer overnight camps, generally drawn from a single pool of 150 people. The 500-person group is the megaband, and the 1500 person group is the tribe;" (Page 46)

tragedy of the commons, and was first described by the ecologist Garrett Hardin in 1968. (Page 55)

What I got out of this book:

The larger the group size, the more pressures are needed to encourage conformity (trust) and discourage defection (lying, cheating,...).
Moral pressure works at the personal, local and small levels.
Reputational pressure works at the local, small, and medium levels.
Institutional pressure works at the large to very large levels.
Security pressure works from local through very large levels.
But All of these are more or less weak at the global level.

There will always be defectors. We can't eliminate them totally, only get them to a tolerable level. Getting the pressures right is something that societies are continually adjusting.
( )

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. ( )

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. ( )

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. ( )

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. ( )

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. ( )

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.) ( )

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..... ( )

You can see more info about this book on its webpage on the author's blog.