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

This is a fascinating book. It is dealing with how trust is established and broken in a society. It talks about the fight for dominance in society, and the principle of those who break the rules, and those who submit to the rules. He uses the terms of dove and eagles. One groups lives at peace with each other, while the other takes advantage of the group. The problem is that if everyone is taking advantage, and breaking the system of trust, them it is worst for all parties involved. It will destroy society. But for those who break the rules, this is immediately good for the rule breaker. There is always this balancing in society. There is even a good discussion on the value systems that humans use to break the rules of society. Some of the most famous people in history were rule breakers. Often these people are doing good, but there is a different value system in place, which causes them to not follow society. It is interesting that they break the trust in the system because of a different ethic. You see this is church some times. An eldership will not take a stand, or one elder will go with the rest, even though he feels that the rest of the elders are wrong on a certain doctrinal issues, because to him, the value of unity is over the value of doctrinal purity. We break trust when we have different systems in place. There are some good lines in this, like we all cooperate when we all understand what cooperation means. You will enjoy this book, as the insights are really fascinating. The only bad part of it, is that it is longer, and more in-depth than I really wanted. I loved the insights, but it seemed that it was a little too deep for me. Too much reading, for the level of knowledge I was looking to gain. It would have been better if the author made it shorter for people like me. Not that it is a bad book, but it was the first introduction into this area, so my level of knowledge was weak, and I wished it was more of an introduction to the topic, not a treatise on it. Overall, though, a thought provoking book.

This is a superb book.First, it's immensely readable and filled with an incredible amount of information about how societies evolved and work (and why not).More importantly, however, Bruce has identified what is probably the most important issue facing all of us today. Trust. Without trust, society doesn't work. But look around: we don't trust the government, we don't trust big business, and we don't trust banks or anyone on Wall Street. (There's a much longer list, but you get the idea.)Our existing models of trust and mechanisms for dealing with defectors don't scale to either the size of the Internet or the flood of information that's so readily available. Once upon a time, perhaps in a fairy tale, we actually knew our elected representatives, and they counted on us to fund their election campaigns. Now it's PACs and SuperPACs and we're irrelevant. If your elected representative parties a bit too much while away from home, or too obviously is influenced by the hordes of lobbyists, or actually admits their ignorance in a committee meeting, you'll know about it instantly. Once upon a time, we were "protected" from that knowledge because it simply didn't deserve space in the newspaper and wasn't entertaining enough to for the local TV news. Otto von Bismarck observed that "laws are like sausages; it's better not to see them made." That sentiment also applies to lawmakers.In that same fairy tale, you worked your entire life for one company, then took your gold watch and retired to a life of leisure, supported by a retirement fund almost wholly funded by your employer. That is, unless your employer repaid your loyalty by "riffing" you or was so ineptly managed that the company eventually went bankrupt, taking your retirement income with it. Or perhaps you worked your entire life for a local government that "promised" generous pension benefits and lifetime healthcare. Unfortunately, the people who made those promises were never required to figure out how to pay for them, and the day of reckoning is now very near.And then there's the marvelous fantasy about how the equity in your home will eventually fund your move to a tropical island. The folks on Wall Street have already spent your home equity on yachts and ski chalets and putting their kids through expensive colleges.I'd sure like to see the Presidential candidates debate this topic. Unfortunately, none of them would be the least bit credible.Read Bruce's book to find out whether our society can survive.

Before I started reading "Liars and Outliars" I had never given much thought to the topic of trust in society. Of course, I had thought about security, but mainly from a technical standpoint: how to use it to secure myself and ourselves against threats from the outside. This book has taugt me how trust and security belong together and how the latter can be used to fill up the gaps that result from lacking the former. This book stands out, because both of its well-researched models and theories and because of its practicality: each of the main ideas is larded with examples that make understanding the presented ideas really easy.This book is divided in four parts. In the first part Schneier brings the reader up to par with the current state of the 'science of trust', as he calls it. In these chapters he talks about the way human beings and some animals cooperate, how cooperation developed in their respective species, what altruism is, and what a society is. This first section of the book ends with an interesting set of societal dilemmas and - most importantly - a framework by which each of these dilemmas can be understood. In this framework Schneier puts the societal (or group) interest over against the interest of the party (or person) that wants to defect.Part two of the book presents four pressures influencing every societal dilemma, namely societal, moral, reputational and institutional. Each one of these parts of this model of trust is described in detail and explained through examples. This part of the book ends with an overview of the topic of security and how it relates towards these pressures. In this chapter, Schneier shows once again how good and well-balanced security is necessary to counterbalance the different forms of trust. He also describes how security influences each of the four pressures.The first two parts of the book are quite theoretical and systemic, but legible and understandable nevertheless. In the third section Schneier takes his models into the real world, to see how they fit in. He does so from the perspective of competing interests within organizations (each group of people), corporations (different from individual people because they're no people with personal interests), and institutions (governmental groups, with their particular interests). What has kept with me after reading these chapters is that each 'society' has its own interests and that these interests do not always fit in with the interests of others. I believe that dissecting societal dilemmas through Schneier's model of trust really helps to gain a fuller understanding of the weight and content of the forces at work.The fourth and final part of the book contains three chapters with conclusions. For some part, these chapters are a repetition of the previous chapters. They contain, however, a kind of counterbalance to the well-reasoned and rational model of trust Schneier presented, because of the concept of the human psychology that sometimes gives us the desire to do things that are not so reasonable. Moreover, he describes some of the technological advances that have been made and will be made, and - more importantly - how both cooperators and defectors make use of technology. This section also holds a fiery speech in favor of well-reasoned, community-based, transparant, and general forms of security technology.In his last chapter Schneier once again makes sure that we understand that security is not something do once and then forget, it's a process that needs to be readjusted all the time. It's also important to keep in mind that society both needs cooperators and defectors (or outliers), since the latter group is able to foster innovation, that can be used to improve society for all of us.

I've followed Bruce's work for many years, so I had a good idea of what to expect from his latest work.It does not disappoint. Covering the evolution of security mechanisms, from the very small scale of a few personal friends up to the global institutions to which we trust much of our lives, Bruce examines in depth how we choose whether to trust or distrust other people and organisations, and how we decide how much regulation and technology is required to keep enough of them trustworthy enough for our societies to function.As a reader of Bruce's blog on schneier,com, I thought I would be reading things I'd already learnt, but I was wrong. There's a lot of new stuff here, and perhaps the best and most-lasting aspect is the presentation of a structure and language for talking about trust - I find I'm using the terms from Liars and Outliers intuitively any time I think about security.There's a good exposition of how our security systems fail, and what must be done to avoid such failures, which I think makes it essential reading for any company director or politician.You need two copies of this book - one to keep on your shelf to read, and re-read, and one to give to your (least-) favourite policymaker.

the way Bruce presents the dilemmas that lie behind every single aspect of our lives is just brilliant. Quite cold and rational writing style -but still way more readable than what one gets often to read in the security spheres.Recommended for pretty much anyone willing to kill a few thousand neurons trying to understand why people act like they do, instead of just defaulting to black-and-white, good-and-bad-guy answer

This book is recommended for anyone who wants to understand how society depends upon trust. Bruce Schneier once again brings his insight to the over-arching basis of security - what it means, and how it can be abused - in his usual clear style.

For the sake of full disclosure, I should acknowledge that I'm a big fan of Bruce Schneier; I think  Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World  is one of the best books that I've ever read and I also subscribe to Schneier's Cryto-Gram newsletter. I must also concede that I've an interest in the topics of altruism, cooperation, and trust in society as will many who have been exposed to the works of luminaries such as Richard Dawkins and Robert Trivers. So, I had great expectations for Liars & Outliers.However, Schneier's exposition on "the trust that society needs to thrive" left me a little disappointed. My problem with this book is that it is a straightforward (albeit, excellent) exposition on trust & cooperation; nothing more. There is no radical manifesto describing how society might better blend its cooperative instinct with technology to achieve the optimum balance of cooperation and defection; thus, it's not clear what this work adds to the subject's body of knowledge.This shortcoming is redeemed by Schneier's easy style and comprehensive coverage of the topics one expects (The Prisoner's Dilemma, The Hawk/Dove Model, and The Red Queen Effect). Moreover, Schneier explores in some depth the societal pressures that help to maintain defection at tolerable levels and considers how technology both helps and hinders society's effort to maintain cooperation. It is this, perhaps, that differentiates this book from others that address the same issues and makes it worth reading. Furthermore, the material is well researched and comprehensively referenced throughout and delivered with Schneier's trademark clarity. Whilst it may lack a certain novelty, the subject is lucidly presented and accessible: I can think of no more comprehensive introduction to the subject than Liars & Outliers - certainly, a good place to start. Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World