Harwell Village News and Gossip

Since this site has been up and running, which is over five months now, there have been only three people who have offered any sort of defence of June Blisset's position, and no one has offered any support for the other members of the Parish Council that have been named and shamed on our site.

Of the three people who 'rushed' to her aid, one sent a partially illiterate email, the second sent a well constructed email that could be part of a good debate, and the last sent an email that has actually made me question my assumptions.

It is this third email that has interested me and a nice debate broke out in the White Hart in our group discussing it. The email starts by offering assistance to the Harwell Village web site, but goes on to say “I could never trust anything where I do not know the author”. What a great statement, and I suspect quite a naive statement.

If this statement was true, then one would have to question his understanding of 'trust'. I suspect for example, that the author of the email 'trusts' documents issued by banks – the statement of your account, what the cash point tells him, letters from the branch and head office. None of these items has an author to which he is aware, and yet largely (apart from some cursory review) the information provided is taken as given.

So if trust is given to computerised and automated systems, does that imply that the author of the email trusts computers more than people (and therefore trusting the person/organisation who programmed that computer)? Perhaps it's the logo or the format of the paperwork that makes us trust it?

If we were to take the example further, train timetables, bus timetables etc are usually taken as a given. These could be fobbed off as statistics, but they have been written by someone, and I would suspect that one would never question the timetables (although one may question if the bus/train is on time).

So trust could also be given to statistics? Should we not question the information provided to us anyway?

Again, playing devils advocate, if the statement were true you would have to live in a world where newspapers, pages of information on the Internet, general public information (such as that on the Harwell Parish notice board) would all be irrelevant, as the sources of this information, the owners of the companies/organisation that produced them, or the editor that manipulated the words would all be unknown to you, and the information would have to be considered non-trustworthy.

Clearly, this is an extreme as we do trust some information. The big debate and question to examine is “What makes us 'trust' information provided to us?”