A brief essay in defense of the essentialist model of trust
Really smart people (whose writings are definitely worth reading) can sometimes succumb to ideas that aren't the product of their best mental capacities.
For the $350 (maximum) that Freddie Deboer might have overspent on a single, primitive Freewrite Alpha device, he could've purchased at least 5 certified-refurbished 11.6inch Chromebooks from Ebay -- and please keep in mind that these laptops come with 1-to-2 year warranties.
Chromebooks are simultaneously more capable and socially acceptable than something like a Freewrite Alpha device, which is ostensibly an overpriced single-tasking tool for somewhat rich people who don't possess the rudimentary self-discipline required to permit them to be highly productive for at least 6-to-12 months using just one previously indicated discount Chromebook. (I don't mean to imply that Freddie isn't disciplined, since he’s clearly absurdly disciplined and productive in comparison to the average online blogger -- but the Alpha device itself seems tailored to someone who doesn't prove capable of merely keeping open very few strictly work-relevant internet or application windows on their laptop screens while they need to complete an important major task).
Please, for the love of the Gods, if you are interested in a highly worthwhile contemporary left-wing writer's subtle cultural commentaries and sublimest decoupling feats, keep up with Freddie DeBoer's Substack. The $5/month that I intend to pay to persistently read the subscriber-exclusive posts on his Substack are probably going to be way more enjoyable to me than spending many more monthly dollars on new on-sale video games which will only marginally enhance my perceptiveness regarding anything relevant to game development.
Before I had a chance to really give Kaj Sotala's essay "Don't trust people, trust their components" any serious thought, I uncritically endorsed its deployment mainly in the case of abused people who found that their abusers were physically inescapable for the time being.
Now I believe that the simplistic essentialist model of trust which Kaj's essay is critical of is actually immensely more functional and worth spreading among smart, normal and cognitively under-gifted people -- but especially non-smart people -- because it is more likely to prevent people in a given social collective from becoming complacent moral actors.
If you constantly remain aware that making a single wrong move or executing a single bad choice may get you permanently ostracized (whether online today or -- in an unrealistically ghastly scenario -- a scarlet letter society), you'll behave a lot more cautiously toward others and more vigilantly toward yourself than you would if you insist that everyone who learns of your bad choice(s) just shifts their attention to your more virtuous components. The more permissive a given social demographic becomes toward moral failures, the less it becomes safe to live within that demographic.
It is completely defensible and arguably morally correct to essentialize an entire human being into single actions if those actions happen to be bad enough or good enough to make them worthy of lifelong ostracization or extolling.
To treat a couple extreme examples that are relevant to this idea, consider what you would do if a repeat violent offender ended up moving into your neighborhood.
I don't believe that you or others around you would be well off trying to discern that person's internal components -- their "desires, drives, beliefs, habits, memories, and so on" -- rather than just avoiding them as assertively as you could while collectively keeping yourselves well-armed and internally collaborating on knowing each other's freshest whereabouts throughout the neighborhood, so that none of you become a victim of that offender's potentially impulsive feats of hostility over clearly trivial moral offenses.
And suppose that some other person under the age of 30 created a single-user cancer vaccine and a single-use lifelong preventative vaccine against the common cold, but at the age of 31, while they worked on some new super-genius invention that only they-in-particular could create with a competitive degree of financial parsimony, they ended up randomly going out in the street and punching an old lady in the face.
In the case of this brilliant inventor, extra compassion and empathy would be worth giving to him, because his moral track record indicates that he's internally made of much better stuff than the great majority of people who go out and randomly assault innocent people who might be particularly vulnerable in comparison to other members of the general population. He's arguably even made of better stuff than the average non-inventive co-citizen who hasn't randomly or impulsively assaulted others just once in a lifetime (so far).
Through a certain minimum dose of empathy and compassion, you might learn about this genius contributor's desires, drives, beliefs, habits, memories and so on in something like a protracted talk therapy relationship while administering necessary psychiatric medications and inpatient stays so that he could rehabilitate himself of any suddenly emerging mental ailments while still being able to come up with his next seismically important contributions to humanity.
You absolutely need to treat everyone you meet as though they're either trustworthy or untrustworthy, except in rare instances wherein you might be forced to empathize with someone you're really close with, like an intermittently abusive long-term loved one who always ensured that you were never homeless even following a couple decades of unimpeachable unemployment and unemployability in your adult life.
The higher are our expectations for one another's moral behaviors and self-care behaviors, the better off we'll be as a society.
As I've mentioned in a previous text, I generally believe that it's better to offer most occasionally injustice-manufacturing wrong-doers a chance at a redemption arc rather than turning them into oft-resented and emotionally tortured people (like certain hated internet micro-celebrities who I won't specify in this text), but there's a certain vaguely ominous level of moral permissiveness that'll begin to corrode interpersonal well-being, trust, and a sense of personal safety (that every individual needs to function well) if we begin to come up with progressively more self-excusing rationalizations for misbehavior that originates often in things like voluntary non-sobriety, or myopic and callous selfishness, or senselessly succumbed to peer pressure, or other forces that shouldn't perturb the moral composure of a practicing Stoic (or any number of competing and seriously virtuous other types of humans).
The so-called component model of trust is prohibitively cognitively expensive for any busy, highly ambitious or cognitively under-gifted person to implement in social contexts wherein the total elapsed interaction time between interlocutors is too short to permit all involved communicators from properly understanding one another's moral status.
It's something I'd only endorse for those people who are perpetually incapable of escaping each other's company or thriving in the absence of sustained and combined cooperative actions with each other.
Frankly, I think it's a mostly naive idea that doesn't deserve to be publicly elucidated to anyone other than people who live among unusually civil and trustworthy (and, probably, wealthy) human beings (who aren't e.g. prone to fits of explosive anger in front of arguably trivial moral and/or social-emotional offenses).