Trust

A couple of situations lately have spawned one of those internal conversations I mentioned in the “about this site” page, this one about trust: what kinds there are, why you need it, and how to get it. It’s not intended as a lecture – more like a reflection on why I can’t deliver all the lectures I’d like to. Or something. So here it is, so I don’t have to mentally explain this again.

Sometimes people assume that they’ve been insulted if someone doesn’t trust them. This might in fact be the case, but the question “don’t you trust me?” may be pretty presumptuous, depending on the context. First of all, there are two different kinds of trust – character trust, where you believe a person will do the right thing in a given situation, and competency trust, where you believe that a person can accomplish a particular task. The concepts are orthogonal; for instance, you might trust your nephew to babysit your kids, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to let him drive your car.

The level of either type of trust that you give someone is based on circumstances and experience. Let’s consider the character type. Some people are more trusting than others by default, but everyone has a certain level of trust that they give random people in a given situation. This trust level could range from trusting someone to not attack you to trusting them with your social security number – or trusting them to help raise your family. (Or, like in the case of God, to override your personal preferences in how you live your life. If we all trusted God that much all the time, most of our problems would go away. But that’s a different topic.) The situation is important, because when you pass a stranger in a dark alley, you might not trust them to not attack you, whereas if you pass the same person in a grocery store, you probably trust them at least enough to not sabotage the groceries in your cart when you turn your back. After you start spending time with someone, the trust level goes up or down as people confirm or deny the assumptions you have made about them, and as you give them a chance to “try out” at a higher level of trust. But the important thing here is that it takes time.

It especially takes time to reverse the effect of broken trust. The gospel teaches that we should forgive everyone, but it doesn’t say that we should withhold consequences, and I think that a lack of trust is a legitimate consequence for some things. Like if someone robs a bank and later repents (and gets out of jail), you may be able to befriend them, but you probably won’t let them housesit for you. It doesn’t mean you hate them or don’t forgive them; it just means that they haven’t earned that level of trust with you. There’s nothing wrong with that. Of course, there’s also nothing wrong with not trusting someone with your home if they haven’t done anything particularly wrong, which again is the point: trust has to be earned – and proven.

So, some implications:

• Delivering constructive criticism: If someone doesn’t trust your motive, you can’t really help them by pointing out something they could improve. If they think you’re just being a jerk (even if you’re trying to be polite), or if they’re so embarrassed that they can’t imagine that you still respect them, they might just end up focusing on being mad or offended or hurt or apologetic instead of making the needed improvement.
• Fake relationships: I’m thinking online stuff and text-messaging-intensive friendships here. If you don’t interact enough to prove reliability (both in what you do and how you react to what others do), you can’t really develop the trust that it takes to form a deep relationship.
• Teasing/Sarcasm/In-jokes: Lots of relationships use this kind of thing as an expression of closeness, but if you try to pull it off with someone who doesn’t feel close to you, it will probably come across as offensive.

… to name a few. I guess the corollary of all this is that it can be important to develop trust broadly, so that you can say what you need to say when the need arises. And that could mean going out of your way to be helpful, compliment people, and just being friendly in general. And of course learning skills and finding ways to use them, so you can have the competency kind of trust too.

Flick’s Great Idea

[Spoiler alert for The Sword of Shannara]

I recently wondered whether the Mythbusters might have a problem with a scene in The Sword of Shannara. The scene is this: The company from Cullhaven have been traveling through the Wolfsktaag Mountains, and a group of Gnomes has spotted them and set fire to the forest. The group hurries forward and makes it out of the trees, but the path behind is cut off, and the Gnomes are presumably not far behind. They make their way to the Pass of Noose, where they expect to cross a rope bridge, which they could then cut and leave pursuit behind. But when they get to the pass, they find that the bridge has already been cut, on their side. It dangles from the cliff face on the far edge of a (relatively small) canyon. It looks like they’re trapped.

Suddenly, Flick has an idea – one of them can fire an arrow with a rope attached to it into the wooden planks (or ropes, or whatever) of the bridge on the far side, then haul it back into place so the group can cross. Fortunately, the shot is successful, and they haul the bridge into place, just in time to tie it off, cross, and cut the ropes on the other side.

So here are the issues that have me a little worried:

1. The rope would add weight, causing the arrow to lose altitude. In theory, you could compensate for this by aiming higher.
2. The rope would have to be fed out pretty fast, or it would pull back on the arrow as soon as the slack was gone. I supposed you could toss the coil over the edge before firing, so there would be nothing to unwind.
3. The rope would prevent the arrow from spinning, which would make it very hard to aim, not to mention the additional drag from air resistance that you’d get the moment it stopped pointing straight forward.

#3 seems like a big problem. I don’t remember exactly how wide this gap was, and I guess you might not have to be super precise – if the barbs on the arrowhead could be made to catch among some rope, that might be enough to let you pull it back up on the other side. And if the rope were thin and light enough, maybe the arrow could even spin for a while before the rope became over-wound. Let’s just tell ourselves that and call it good. After all, the group made it through, so it must be possible, somehow.

Morph Ball & Subspace

I have a theory about how Samus’s Morph Ball works. First of all, I don’t think she actually rolls around inside a metal sphere – that would be crazy. I think the Morph Ball exists completely separately from Samus’s armor and is stored in some parallel plane of existence. When you activate it, Samus switches places with it and observes it from “subspace”, or whatever. So in the Prime games, when you are in Morph Ball mode, the game is still in first-person view; you’re seeing what Samus sees as she steers the ball around. And of course, because the Morph Ball shares whatever shielding protects Samus’s normal armor, damage to one damages the other.
Now about how she steers while doing repeated somersault jumps… I don’t have an answer for that.

Laser Rooms and Password Screens

I’m a big fan of lasers. They look cool, they do cool stuff, and the word even sounds cool. (Did you know it’s an acronym?) Maybe that’s why it kind of bugs me when they are misused in supposedly-realistic fiction. Like in movies and TV shows, where there’s a room full of lasers protecting a room or a vault or something. Here are my complaints about that:

1. Lasers are light beams, so you can’t see them unless they hit something. If you could, you’d see sunlight coming out of the air, and you couldn’t see anything at all because of the glare. So unless there’s dust in the room, if you can see the lasers in one of those laser rooms, you already know that the movie or TV show has screwed up. (And if you can see dust without the intruders putting it there, that’s fake too – why would you want the lasers to be visible if you’re the one they’re protecting?)
2. There’s always a path through them, for someone athletic enough. Why? Given the number of lasers in these rooms, you could easily just make a dense grid, instead of spreading them out across a wide area, creating person-sized gaps.
3. When they move, that looks like added security, but it’s also totally fake. Laser sensors work because a sensor in the wall is continuously picking up the laser light. When you step in the way, the signal stops, and the alarm goes off. If the laser is moving around the room, you’d have to have the sensor moving around the room too, which you couldn’t do (and which is clearly not happening in shows that do this).
4. When the lasers cut stuff, that also feels a little off. Of course lasers can cut things, but it would take a lot of power to have them on, and of course the “sensor” on the other end would have to be absorbing the laser energy somehow. It would be a lot more efficient to have the lasers just be sensors, and then have guns mounted in the wall that fire when the sensor goes off.
5. In movies and TV, these elaborate security devices never, ever work. Have you ever seen a laser room in a show that the person trying to break in didn’t get past? I didn’t think so.

Speaking of things that never work, I just remembered something else that always happens in fiction that bugs me so much that I added it to the title: People logging on to other people’s computers. I’m not talking about someone’s house, where there’s no password at all. I’m talking about folks guessing a one-word password, or just glancing over at the screen of some employee who has been lured away from his or her desk. No self-respecting corporation lets its employees leave computers unlocked or pick passwords that are a single word from a dictionary. Sure, you could probably crack most people’s passwords with brute force software (that is, guessing thousands of times in quick succession). But a human guessing words? Not a chance. But it happens all the time in even the most “serious” tech-fiction.

There. I’ve said it. I feel better now.

“Pro” Singers in Congregations

We do a lot of singing in church. Abilities range widely, and of course that’s not an issue at all. I figure the main value from hymns is the message behind them, plus the sense of unity that comes from singing them together. And it invites the Spirit.

There’s one thing that bugs me though. It’s when someone feels like they’re so talented at singing that they need to belt the hymn out so loudly that you can’t focus on anything but them, and – this is the worst part – when they add that operatic pitch-fluxuating “flair” to their voice. I’m sure works fine on a stage, when the audience is supposed to be listening to one person (or a group singing in a predetermined harmony). But when you throw that kind of thing in with a hundred other voices, it just sounds bad. I’m sure the people who do this aren’t consciously trying to draw attention; they probably just think they need to put their “best” into it because after all it’s sort of a prayer. But come on, “best” doesn’t always mean “most elaborate.” I learned this in eighth grade choir – when you’re singing in a group, your goal is to blend in with the group so that no one notices your individual voice. You just hit the note and call it good.

So let the reader beware, lest you inadvertently drive the folks around you crazy next time you’re sitting in church. Thank you.

Blood Donations

It was a long time before I started giving blood. I had convenience as an excuse, and of course the idea of being stabbed and feeling the life drained out of me wasn’t exactly inviting. But they have blood drives at work, so when it’s like a five minute walk and I can be done before most people even show up at work, I figured I was out of excuses. The first time, I nearly passed out when I sat up. I think it was because I hadn’t eaten recently or something, though. When I’ve had enough to eat and drink, it usually goes okay, after the initial stabbing and after I manage to distract myself from the feeling that my life is draining out of my arm. (This last time, they got the needle set up wrong, and I ended up with a nice bump which has since gone down and been replaced with a huge bruise that’s the size of my hand and has icky lines crisscrossing it, showing [I guess] where the wrinkles of my sheets are when I sleep. But I digress.)

So, the following isn’t intended as a public service announcement or a moral discourse or anything; it’s just the thought process I use to make myself go and get stabbed, etc.

There are soldiers out there, fighting to keep the country free and safe. Some of them end up being killed for it, and others are severely injured. Imagine you were given the option of taking a bullet for a soldier, with the condition that after a few hours, you will have no lasting injuries. If you refuse, the soldier will die. Would you take it? Of course you would. You’d pretty much have to, seeing that you already owe him or her your safety. The pain wouldn’t even be a consideration because you’d see it as paying a debt.

Now, repeat that question, but not with a soldier this time. Just a regular person. You’d still probably accept the offer. Maybe you don’t owe a debt, but the tradeoff is obviously a good one. (And of course, you’d want someone else to make the decision if you were the one who were at risk.)

Okay, so lest this sound preachy, I have to admit that on the before-mentioned, most recent donation attempt, while I was lying on the table with my blood leaking not into a needle but into my arm, while I could feel my pulse in my elbow and my consciousness slipping away, burning with fever and a little nauseous, the above argument lost all weight and I was having a really hard time wanting to go back to my office and set up another appointment. All of a sudden the no-consequences clause in that hypothetical agreement seemed a little shaky. But, while I still have an impressive bruise, I guess the life-draining-out experience was still just an hour or so, so I guess I’d better go set up that appointment. Sigh.

The Hunger Games

I wasn’t really interested in The Hunger Games, mainly because I find the whole gladiator motif very unappealing. But I figured it’s a useful thing to be able to talk about, so I read it. (Plus my wife said I should, and she is very wise.) So here’s what I thought about it.

Stuff I liked:

• Surprisingly, the book doesn’t go into what turns me off most about gladiator stuff – the idea of turning basically good people into murderers by threatening them. It happens in the real world, like in gangs and terrorist groups and stuff. But it’s a very distasteful topic in fiction. In this book, all of the good people who die are killed by bad people (that is, by people who are okay with killing innocent people). So you don’t have to worry too much about the moral corruption of the “heroes”.
• It presents an interesting world, and it’s interesting to see the main character’s impression of her fate unfolding, mostly beyond her control. (The book is told in first person, present tense – unusual for an action-y story, but it works here.) In particular, it’s interesting how the author throws out a lot of science-fiction ideas in a very casual, matter-of-fact way. They’re not novelties; they’re just there. (Not that the opposite is bad, but this way is unique.)
• It’s pretty fast-paced, engaging and all that.

Stuff I disliked:

• While the descriptions of violence are not overly graphic, there’s some pretty gory stuff going on, especially near the end. The whole torture and mutilation thing puts a dark cast over the story. (Not surprising, but also not exactly uplifting.)
• While again it’s not described in detail, the author makes sure you know each time Katniss isn’t fully clothed, which is quite often and usually in front of men and/or a camera. So you kind of have to keep your mental camera averted.
• The end isn’t very satisfying. This is understandable since it’s part of a series, but from what I hear, the series goes downhill from here, so it would be nice if the first book gave you more closure.