"Transparency is Surveillance" paper on trust and Transparency
- Transparency, it turns out, is a form of surveillance. By forcing reasoning into the explicit and public sphere, transparency roots out corruption — but it also inhibits the full application of expert skill, sensitivity, and subtle shared understandings. The difficulty here arises from the basic fact that human knowledge vastly outstrips any individual’s capacities. We all depend on experts, which makes us vulnerable to their biases and corruption. But if we try to wholly secure our trust — if we leash groups of experts to pursuing only the goals and taking only the actions that can be justified to the non-expert public — then we will undermine their expertise. We need both trust and transparency, but they are in essential tension. This is a deep practical dilemma; it admits of no neat resolution, but only painful compromise.
- trust - transparence dilemma
to implify, and emphasize one part of the argument:
- People think that trust and transparency go together. But they're actually at odds. Transparency demands that experts justify their reasoning to non-expert. But expert reasons are incomprehensible to non-experts, so transparency forces deception.
moloch-trap in the house?
it seems transparency in the context of systems-design is not necessarily a desirable goal, because it brings with it a tangle or problematic behaviors.
- ok he says its about "Assessment Transparency: The directive that some process be made available for assessment to outsiders"
- so not to confuse with a kind of transparency enouctered in e.g.:
  - learn-in-public
  - in attempts to curtail bias and corruption
its not about getting rid of transparency
- its about it being a form of aggressive surveillance
  - this is an example of landing-language make it clear that actually this is not transparency but aggressive surveillance.
- and its about being aware of these
it limits experts to actions that can be justified to non-export

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