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In 1999, I was trying college for the first time. (It wouldn't end well, but that was another story.) I was still a Duct Tape Sword Guy, so I had a smallish duct tape sword. It had become a little battered, but my dear friends BJ and Shawn had given it to me, so it had sentimental value. One night I was up late, hanging out with the midnight crowd down in the lobby. I had my duct tape sword with me.

"Hey, can I see that?" some guy asked. He seemed friendly, I'd seen him around, and some of the other guys had had a go with the duct tape sword. I handed it over.

He snapped the duct tape sword over his knee and walked off.

In 2003-ish, I'd broken up with a boyfriend but we were still on good terms, and I'd made friends with lady he was seeing off and on. He babysat for my roommate's kindergarten-ish age kid when there weren't any adults of the household available. He sometimes played around on my computer while he was over.

One day his lady friend IMed me to let me know that while he was on my computer, he'd seen a chat log between her and me that I'd saved to my journal (as was my habit, since I made up for a somewhat flaky memory with electronics, and my journal was the least likely to die a horrible electronic death). He'd read the chat log, broken into her journal, given himself access to a filtered entry of hers, left a wounded comment on the entry, and showed himself out again.

Some years ago, I was having a casual conversation with a close friend. The topic of a mutual mentor came up. "Do you think he's a good man?" they asked me out of the blue. I replied, hedging slightly over a particular character flaw, but I eventually said that I thought he was a good man.

My friend sort of drew up short. "... You don't know," they realized.

At which point I learned some things about this mentor which I will never unlearn.

I thought the social contract would protect my sports equipment. I had no clue that my ex-boyfriend would betray my trust to betray his girlfriend's trust in that way. I had never dreamed that this mentor would have done anything of that sort or to that scale.

I was looking, just now, for the account that someone I know wrote about a conversation she tends to have with friends with kids. The toddler is reluctant to interact, and the parent encourages, apologizes. "Oh, no need to apologize, it's healthy." "Oh, it's not like you're a stranger..." "Fun fact-- ... oh, you didn't know..."

Humans tend to hold on hard to the idea that since you can spot some untrustworthy dickweeds from a mile away, it follows that you should be able to spot most untrustworthy dickweeds with enough observation and vigilance. Never mind that false positives crowd the field, and people are quick to reassure you: Oh, he's fine, he's my friend, he's okay, I'm safe around him so you're safe around him. Never mind that sometimes it's just chance, and a disinclination to carry textbooks, that keeps you from being alone and unobserved in the presence of the wrong person.

Every assessment of trust I make carries two values: my trust of that person on that axis, and my confidence in my assessment.

I trust that this dude will not be extraordinarily reckless with my sword; he probably won't use it to stab passing strangers, but he might whack at me or these guys a bit. Confidence: well, I've only seen him in passing and for a grand total of about 5 minutes, but he doesn't look like a jerk. Call it 60%?

I trust that my ex will take good care of my nephew, and won't allow the apartment to get trashed while I'm gone. I trust that he won't install malware on my laptop. Confidence: we were together for a couple months and I still wanted to keep him as a friend even though the spark wasn't there, so 95%.

I trust that this guy will be a good mentor and teach my group lots of important things about technology. He will probably not straight-up murder us, if the class pisses him off we'll have enough warning to get out of there. Confidence: there have been no previous reports of murder, and he seems friendly when he's having a good day. 80%.

I was right. He didn't stab anybody with my sword. He didn't neglect my nephew or let the cat trash the apartment or install malware. He did teach us a lot of things, and he didn't murder anybody. And I never saw any of it coming.

There have been plenty of people who showed obvious warning signs, and some of them, I never offered the chance to betray my trust. Dude with a history of cheating, perhaps we should not date. Dude who is making various generally violent comments and leering at me on the bus, maybe I'm not going to show you what my actual bus stop is. Girl with the history of bullying, like hell am I going to tell you something personal about myself just because you asked me.

It's the ones who surprise you that you worry about, after.

So there I am at work, and there's a thing and it looks like a little red flag, waving in the breeze. Not a big one, not the sort of banner that you can grab a handful of and wave it at all your friends and say "This is a flag, it's made of nylon or something, it's really shiny and thin and bright red and it will wave in the breeze if you can find a pole to run it up. This is a flag, and it's red." Just a little one. It might even be orange, or brown. You can't quite tell.

What if he turned out to be untrustworthy? says the back of the head, listing off the times that someone with no apparent red flags fucked up your life, for hours or days or years. What accesses does this guy have? What are his powers? How easy would it be to defeat him? You discount the protestations of trust from people who know him, even if they do have a pretty convincing reason for that flag to be there legitimately. You once defended someone who proved themselves unworthy of it. Some people may hide the flags around their friends, and the ones who hide it are more dangerous, because they know what they're doing.

What's the realistic worst-case scenario? the little voice presses. How screwed are we?

So today I also had one of those terrifyingly emotionally naked philosophical-disagreement-except-for-me-it's-less-abstract conversations with Purple, one of the ones that I would not be having in the slightest with someone, except that I trust his intentions toward me, I trust that he generally views women as people, I trust he never intends to hurt me, and I know when he hurts me he is sorry and tries to help in ways which are legitimately helpful. (And I think we're both of us sufficiently grown-up and not all raw nerve endings and have a much more formal and decorous relationship that he's only managed the emotional equivalent of an accidental whack to the funnybone every now and then; with Darkside some 14-ish years ago I was gutted and tearstained practically once a week. Plus that time Darkside literally put a finger up my nose by accident, which was not exactly painful but was completely undignified.)

We started out at http://www.psmag.com/business-economics/wah-wah-why-dont-you-cry-a-little-more-you-little-man-jk-stfu (which someone in a chat had shared largely on strength of the slug), went into high standards, went through some specifics related to scarcity of women in tech, then got into the aforementioned philosophical disagreement. I know I'm being vague. He was very respectful of my emotional labor and thanked me for the screed he knew I was in the process of typing, before I'd sent it. ;) It was a bonding experience, and it took a turn for the somewhat unexpected when the phrase "take offense" came up.

I asked him to unpack what that meant to him, since it's a phrase that has some substantially different meanings to various people, and to be quite honest I often find it dismissive of the actual problem. While he was composing his message about duration, and the offense is the ones that stick with you a while and bother you, I was breaking it down Inside Out style, and mentioned that while one of the common connotations involves surprise and disgust and maybe some anger, what I typically felt when something "offensive" happened was maybe less surprise, certainly disgust, probably anger, and fear.

The fear surprised the fuck out of him.

It shortly became apparent to me that I needed to establish a baseline.

I said that at a conference like Open Source Bridge, I was about 99% confident in my safety. At work, in this workplace, about 95%. At work late (not in his presence), 90%. (I did not mention that his presence is a significant booster.) Familiar grocery store, about 80%. He was nodding along, with a wince at the drop for grocery store. Same grocery store's parking lot, poorly lit, 75%. He seemed a bit startled: oh, the grocery store number was inside the store? Yeep.

16th and Mission BART (outside), 55% (and here being tall, fat, white, armed*, and not on wheels gives me a bit of a buff vs. a woman who lacks some of those). (BART elevator *entirely* depends who's on it with me so I didn't rate it, but I do have 5 9s of confidence that I will encounter some pee there.) DEFcon, no greater than 45% confidence in my general safety, which is why I don't even think about attending. He agreed that personal safety there seemed ... spotty, and mentioned that even as a guy, he would want an experienced buddy at least the first time he went. (I don't believe he's been, either.)

* For the purposes of the mean streets of San Francisco, my mobility cane doubles as a weapon.

Then I rated general tech conferences (not Open Source Bridge) as 75%, which surprised him: we'd been aligning pretty well on most of these (except apparently the grocery store vs. parking lot). Similar to work, as a white technical guy, he would have a 95% expectation of safety at a random technical conference.

I did start unpacking my threat assessment of any given man. I feel like I am more physically confident than a less heavy and less strong woman, because for most (not obviously super-buff, not obviously armed) men under about 175lbs, my physical threat assessment is generally "meh, I could sit on him." (I find this assessment hilarious.) Also my old college roommate Sis taught me to walk with the confidence of the well-armed, and that tends to deter guys looking for easy prey.

Sadly for the discussion, because it was super fascinating and I want to continue unpacking my risk and threat assessments (including the fact that with individual guys it's not necessarily "how likely is he to do something bad" but "how much trouble am I in if he decides to do something bad"), Purple had a pre-existing appointment for dinner with one of the unfamiliar guys who'd been at lunch. I look forward to establishing to a greater number of oblivious tech bros that in fact that women tend to carry a substantial fear burden, and tech does not generally provide a shelter from that fear.

It's one of those invisible things that I don't tend to discuss with *sigh* sadly Purple specifically, because most of the time I feel like I have a lower fear burden than the average woman, and the last time it spiked because of a situation in the workplace, he tried to be supportive because he could see that I was in distress, but he didn't understand it and very clearly communicated that he felt I was freaking out over what was essentially nothing.

A quiet Sunday.

Came home in a state of general delight and pleasure with the world, wrote up Saturday's happenings. Conked out in bed at something approaching a reasonable hour. Slept until early afternoon, as one does.

A further note: those thin black drink-straws really don't work well as chopsticks for ice cubes. I was SO CLOSE, though.

Embarked on various bits of reading, both off internet and on. Did some minor tidying and/or dishes.

Eventually I realized that it was getting on in hours and my fitbit was telling me I was behind on steps for the day. (I try to aim for at least the goal, but no higher than double.) So I moved myself with my chat with

sithjawa on my phone to the bouncy-ball, and there spent a reasonably instructive hour allowing my abdominal muscles to stand in for legs.

zarhooie was having various Adventures of Road. Snow was not meant to travel in a sideways direction, no, not even in Minnesnowda.

I finished up reading Archer's Goon, which I found good.
( A spoiler. )
The tooth marks on my copy look like either a staple-remover or a cat.

A friend observed that Purple went from zero to Trusted very fast (for me)! This is true. ( Read more... )

The common factor in going quickly from zero to Trusted seems to involve getting a relatively low scoring of halt or caution flags, which could originate either internally or externally. A higher scoring hits the threshold where all the new stuff has to be carefully inspected lest it fuck stuff up, and that slows down the information transfer rate something serious. This results in a) more actual time elapsed per unit of information transferred, resulting in b) more actual time elapsed per trust benchmark. It also means c) there is a high halt/caution score, which goes right along with d) various forms of distrust or no-go piling up.

My trust is of course a multifactor thing, not a single axis. Imagine a very long page full of slider-bars. They're all set more or less in the neutral middle (with modifications for societal stuff: it's not like I'm expecting every dude I meet to react with an AK-47 to a gay-hug, but there's always the possibility that someone's a Sara*). There is a slider-bar for basically absolutely every interpersonal attribute you could imagine, from "I trust you to not kill me and dump my body in a ditch" to "given sufficient rehearsal time, we could sing a duet together and I'm pretty sure you wouldn't screw it up".

* Sorry, non-homophobic Saras (and people who love them).

Some sliders pull others. Some sliders are a compilation of others. Some have thresholds set by others. Some have no effect on others. Not trusting someone to not kill or otherwise hurt me has an amazing effect on my willingness to enter a large-scale project with, spend time in the company of, or leave my cat with, someone. However, unwillingness to lend someone my calculator because they may perhaps have a larger issue with carelessness with their friends' possessions doesn't necessarily have anything to do with their acting skill and their dramatic chemistry with me; I may be happy to play opposite them on any script perhaps even without examining it first. (Oh, Shawn.) Do I trust you to hold a tune without a bucket? No? No matter, I'm still willing to consider telling you my secrets, provided something else hasn't blocked that. (And maybe we could sing a duet just for fun, just us two, giving zero fucks about staying on-key.)

Something on my reading list today reminded me of this thing that is sometimes in my life.

I happen to have trust issues.

I have been asked, more than once, sometimes in these exact words: "What can I do to make you trust me?" This might be a reasonable request to someone who is not me and does not have the same shape of trust issues that I do.

At some point during the last six months, I read a blog post on the way that some people (mostly men) treat attempting to get sex out of a particular woman as a "black box" system that can be gamed: feed enough different inputs into the system, and EVENTUALLY BY THE LAW OF AVERAGES YOU HIT UPON THE MAGIC COMBO, RIGHT?!?! [Edit: "No More Mister Nice Guy", by Froborr at the Slacktiverse, kindly re-found by

alexseanchai.]

This is a bad idea. This is not worse than attempting to physically force the outcome (either by direct force, threat of force, drugs, or WHATEVER ELSE THE RAPISTS OF TOMORROW THINK OF), but it is still bad.

Humans are complicated systems. While some mechanical or automated systems don't notice it when the same entity tries and fails to gain access, humans tend to notice these things. Identity is complicated and hard to automatically pin down, but most humans tend to be able to recognize a person who has been making repeated attempts to get in their pants. Most password-protected systems have a timeout to prevent this sort of gaming. Many humans treat that sort of repeated attempt as a threat and shut down all future possibility, even if dude learns incremental backoff.

(Using a varied approach of methods at a rate of three* or fewer per person on a very wide range of potential partners is far less creepy. * Number pulled out of my ass. It may not make people who know you like you better than they did at baseline, but in my book "player" is better than "potential sexual assault".)

Now, trust.

If I actively distrust you, why on earth should I hand you the manual that would make it possible for you to more effectively game my psychological protection suite?

Now, if it happened that someone was doing some specific actions that were contributing to active distrust, like repeated attempts to get in somewhere that they were unwelcome, and they didn't realize that this was causing distrust, it is possible that upon being told "Well, please stop trying to grope me every time we're alone" would cause them to rethink their approach and gain general trustworthiness on that front. But I personally don't always analyze the actions someone else takes that contribute to me not particularly trusting them. It's a lot of quality brain time that I could use on a topic that's more productive or pleasing, and again, why even should I go out of my way to make it easier for someone I distrust to game me?

It's extremely plausible that in more than one case of someone asking me this, the intent was more like "I think you're pretty spiffy. You also seem to know a lot about human interaction. I want to know you better! I want to be friends! I am bad at being friends with humans. Could you help me level up?" Unfortunately, the phrasing "so how do I get you to trust me" pushes the WRONG button inside my black box.

From a morning page past --

-- whenever someone says that they don't tell lies, and then you catch them in one, that automatically catches them in two, and then the whole thing is cast into doubt.

Current Music: "Pandora" by the Cocteau Twins, on "Late Night & Dreaming" Pandora

Figment's been avoiding cleaning out his inbox. As near as I can tell, he hasn't touched it since at least March. I worry about the man, because ... well ... yeah.

So he told me that if I was worrying so much, I should go check it for him. And he gave me the password.

So I'm cleaning out his inbox, cleaning up the known spam so he can look through the other messages and see if any of them are anything he needs.

And it strikes me how big an act of trust this is. I can't believe I'm actually cleaning up someone else's e-mail account for them. I'm having a really hard time with the idea, even as I'm doing it.