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wittenberg's review against another edition
5.0
An important book, particularly in these days when computer security big-wigs are pushing "zero-trust", and various block chains claim that you don't have to trust anybody. In fact, there can be no society without trust. When I go to a restaurant, I trust the proprietor not to poison me, and he trusts me to pay the bill before I leave.
Bruce Schneier writes well for a popular audience, despite being one of the best cryptographers around. He's always worth reading.
Bruce Schneier writes well for a popular audience, despite being one of the best cryptographers around. He's always worth reading.
bootman's review against another edition
5.0
This was a really interesting and unique book about trust. I’ve been really interested in the topic of trust lately, so a lot of the books have been repetitive, but Bruce Scheier takes a totally different perspective. Bruce’s background is in security, and he explains how we function in a society and what leads people to defect from societal norms. What’s interesting is he also discusses why we need people to defect to promote social change, such as historical figures like Rosa Parks who aren’t afraid to break societal norms. Not only does he use philosophical and psychological theory to explain how we trust within societies, but he also covers how trust works within work organizations and why some people may decide to steal or not look out for the best interest of the clients and consumers. It was a really interesting book, and I definitely recommend it.
skybalon's review against another edition
3.0
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.
mjfmjfmjf's review against another edition
2.0
Disappointing. I expect more from this author and perhaps when he leaves his field of cryptography and to some extent computer security, I shouldn't. This book did have moments of brilliance - it kind of caught its stride around part 3 - but lost it before getting to the final section. So what was wrong? First of all it was basically a psychology book but written first-person and chatty as though it were a bad high school paper. And I've got a lot of familiarity with a lot of this material - and it came off untrustable - even when I knew or thought I knew it to be true. On the positive side the book shows a way to model the world that a software person could understand. I might be convinced by someone else that I was being unfair - but this book was no fun to read and took way longer than it should have.
epersonae's review against another edition
3.0
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.)
dunguyen's review against another edition
4.0
Super interesting book about Trust. Bruce Schneier, who is famous in security circles, has written a book that goes all the way back to the fundamentals, looking at trust and how we humans need it to cooperate and the forces that act on trust. As such this is an incredibly interesting book that made me look at a lot of current problems through the lens of societal pressures that Schneier introduces.
It's a pretty theoretical book, describing the theories around trust and explains how different systems enable trust in order to push humans to cooperation. Schneier also goes into how it fails and other problems and frictions that there are.
I really found the book interesting and perhaps it was a bit wordy in places but the numerous examples really helped me understand the different concepts.
I would highly recommend this, it's a fantastic book that can really provide a lot of perspective in parsing current events and is really useful when working in a field like cybersecurity.
It's a pretty theoretical book, describing the theories around trust and explains how different systems enable trust in order to push humans to cooperation. Schneier also goes into how it fails and other problems and frictions that there are.
I really found the book interesting and perhaps it was a bit wordy in places but the numerous examples really helped me understand the different concepts.
I would highly recommend this, it's a fantastic book that can really provide a lot of perspective in parsing current events and is really useful when working in a field like cybersecurity.
shayneh's review against another edition
4.0
Well-thought-out and comprehensive taxonomy for thinking about enforcement of societal issues.
samuelbeer's review against another edition
4.0
Liars and Outliers is most fundamentally a book about trust. It addresses why we want to trust people, how we benefit from trusting people, who we can trust, who we can't trust, and--at greatest length--how societies ensure that enough people can be trusted to make the benefits of trusting people outweigh the risks of trusting people.
After introducing the topic and defining terms, Schneier provides a theoretical account of the forces that prompt cooperative behavior. After introducing the topic and defining terms, Schneier establishes four levels of pressure--moral pressure, reputational pressure, institutional pressure, and security. He then discusses at length both how these levels of pressure bring about cooperation and how these levels of pressure fail to bring about cooperation in societies.
Among the more interesting discussions:
The different levels of pressure scale differently--reputational pressures, for instance, are effective in small societies, but are much less effective in very large societies.
Not all agents are individuals. Different forces are needed to cause a collective agent (like a corporation or an institution) to act cooperatively than to cause an individual agent to act cooperatively.
Perhaps most crucially, no society will ever have cooperation rates of 100%--and it's not clear that such a society would even be desirable. Defection--behavior that does not conform to the societal norms--is what essentially moves a society forward.
The book provides an overview of a broad field. That was nice for somebody like me, as I have no background in the field of security. The arguments were clear and well-illustrated. The book is a little bit redundant--the core points are reiterated quite extensively in the interest of clarity. It seems like this has bothered some reviewers more than it bothered me. The writing is interesting, the examples are clear, and the subject matter is made interesting for somebody who wasn't already interested in it.
After introducing the topic and defining terms, Schneier provides a theoretical account of the forces that prompt cooperative behavior. After introducing the topic and defining terms, Schneier establishes four levels of pressure--moral pressure, reputational pressure, institutional pressure, and security. He then discusses at length both how these levels of pressure bring about cooperation and how these levels of pressure fail to bring about cooperation in societies.
Among the more interesting discussions:
The different levels of pressure scale differently--reputational pressures, for instance, are effective in small societies, but are much less effective in very large societies.
Not all agents are individuals. Different forces are needed to cause a collective agent (like a corporation or an institution) to act cooperatively than to cause an individual agent to act cooperatively.
Perhaps most crucially, no society will ever have cooperation rates of 100%--and it's not clear that such a society would even be desirable. Defection--behavior that does not conform to the societal norms--is what essentially moves a society forward.
The book provides an overview of a broad field. That was nice for somebody like me, as I have no background in the field of security. The arguments were clear and well-illustrated. The book is a little bit redundant--the core points are reiterated quite extensively in the interest of clarity. It seems like this has bothered some reviewers more than it bothered me. The writing is interesting, the examples are clear, and the subject matter is made interesting for somebody who wasn't already interested in it.