Hephaistos Fnord
2 linked references
October 9th, 2025
keeping fragments here as I go about some reading old wri… › theological virtues › to just gesture briefly at what I know of each of some ot… › Faith (trust/confidence in what you can't see)
- oddly I'm struck by a sense that Hephaistos Fnord actually has a lot of faith, despite not having a lot of trust in the world. but his faith contains a lot of the things he's afraid of; he's placating the punisher, in part
November 23rd, 2021
- interesting bit by Hephaistos Fnord about naive trust
- > I think that convincing others that you genuinely mean them well is far more important than actually meaning them well.
If you genuinely mean them well but fuck up, but they dont believe you, then you lose trust altogether.
If you dont mean them well, but they trust that you do, then they will continue to forgive your "mistakes", which will allow you to keep learning until an equilibrium is reached. - > Trust, even misplaced trust, is more important than sincerity. Once trust is gone, you simply lose the ability to continue learning the "how".
- > FINALLY, because of Goodhart's law, virtue signalling, or whatever you want to call it, it is more costly to actually be trustworthy than it is to deceptively maintain trust. Since people are having to allocate a scarce resource (their attention and time and trust), this is a zero-sum competitive game, which means the bad actors will drive out the bad [I assume he meant good].
- > Which means that to continue, you need to abandon caring for others, simply to maintain the competitive illusion that you still do.