The Seven Rules of Trust by Jimmy Wales

Addendum: I'm practicing some writing on the fly among other things lately, so if some of the language or grammar is messy, I've tried not to reread, rehash, restructure repeatedly.  I'm trying to get to a place where I can write without constant revision and formulate a thought on the first try.  Some anti-AI mindset.

On to the book...

I tend to read a combination of tech and management books for my career. I’d claim the tech books tend to be management level, because I’m after a high-level idea of the chunks I might use in my ecosystem, but that probably doesn’t explain Fluent Python, the Python Crash Course, of some of the hands on ML/AI courses. The management books, however, can get a little fuzzy for day-to-day use, and I try to make sure I’m getting a broad swath of ideas because a.) you might never know where there’s a gem buried that’s useful as an overall theme for handling work interactions, and b.) about 70% of them I really dislike on the whole.

That said, I think “The Seven Rules of Trust: A Blueprint for Building Things that Last” by Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia) and Dan Gardner falls mainly into the second bucket. Trust has long been one of the primary themes managers should embrace. And it’s one I see ignored most often. Managers don’t trust. They build tracking, strange metrics, complicated gates, weird feedback systems and show an inordinate amount of distrust for teams of highly paid, highly competent, highly motivated team mates. The rule should be trust first – no matter how many times you get burned – and allow people to earn your distrust. Experience tends to prove that the lack of trust works or fails both ways as well. Managers that don’t trust earn their employees that don’t trust them to manage, lead, or have a vision. No matter the level of the management. Weird obfuscation of trust in those cases definitely falls into the distrust space. If that’s a strange statement, I can clarify by saying there are upper managers who say, “we need to focus on execution and not compensation” or “we need to focus on delivery, and not work-life balance” or “our north star means we all have to step up” (even though we all agree that north star is aspirational and most-probably impossible) are clearly not being inspirational. They’re pushing distrust wrapped in another form of distrust (goals wrapped in words).

It is an interesting history and analysis of Wikipedia. How it stays fairly isolated from political struggles, or at least makes them transparent within the context of articles. How other actors want to compromise it as a consensus-driven source of fact, particularly in the current environment where it can stand alone. Although browsers pushing AI-results to the top of their search results potentially tanks Wikipedia as a fact-first result. So bravo for a workaround ya dicks. We all know “but that information is part of the top-level AI response” doesn’t make it any less intercepted, less modified, and more conducive to bad actors including the browser owners (Google, MS) themselves.

Wales lays out some of the basics of trust analysis: authenticity, empathy, logic (action) and goes on to talk about a crisis in trust everywhere: software, government, between people. But I don’t think his answers, where he holds up a Wikipedia + AI style consensus-driven democracy at the individual level solution is compelling. That particular path is where you see Dan Gardner’s voice start to make itself felt, as he wrote the book Super Forecasting with Phil Tetlock which I read back in 2016 (wow...I suppose it was around then as it was recommended by a TR architect who’d moved on to other pastures). You can see a bit of Corey Doctorow’s Enshittification between the lines as well, and the thanks at the end of the book clearly highlights that he and Wales talk frequently. Perhaps there would have been a more interesting book here if everything wasn’t filtered through Wales, but was more of a high level discussion between those three actors. I picture Gardner saying, “Add consensus as a core aspect”, Wales saying “and add AI to make it more transparent beyond what Wikipedia provides”, and Doctorow saying, “and what are the implications for misuse and enshittification that can cause more damage than the current situation?”

If you’re a “newer” manager, there’s some good advice here about trust, action, transparency. If you’re reading it right now, there’s some amusing parallels to how absolutely **** the current administration is when it comes to all of these things (you only have to look as far as all those redacted files and searches). From a higher level, there’s a little bit of valid advice buried in the end about whose trust do you value, why, and how do you maintain it as an ongoing day-to-day value (if your company is changing aspects of their model and the Reddit threads related to it tend to highlight a bit of outrage, are you targeting the trust you care about, or has it shifted from the front lines to those in acquisition and enterprise spaces – but perhaps that’s just my personal situation and example).

End summary: don’t read. I think a good HBR summary would cover about 99% of it in a few paragraphs. The history is interesting. The recommendations don’t seem well fleshed out (I was going to say naive, but maybe “wishful” is more accurate). Some of the observations seem rooted in a fairly rosy view of the world while only momentarily dipping a toe into how many forces are arrayed against common sense (Wales now and then addresses Musk, other actors who want to frame the truth, and issues where consensus seems to completely break down and even good systems give up).