Trustworthiness

Certain words that many companies use in their annual reports—words like ethical, integrity and responsibility—are meant to convey trustworthiness. But research suggests that companies that use such words in annual filings known are often hiding their untrustworthiness.

The study found that use of “trust” words in annual statements was linked with a decreased interest in the stock of the company in question. Basing their findings on 21 words that seek to evoke a sense of trustworthiness, the authors also found that companies whose annual filings included the words tended to pay about $100,000 more in auditing fees than firms without the words.

Companies using trust words were also about 15% more likely to receive a comment letter from the Securities and Exchange Commission asking them to clarify information on their annual report than companies that didn’t use trust words.

One of the researchers wrote, “Companies likely use trust words to project a positive image and better manage information within the annual report, but it seems that no one is really fooled.”

In a new study published in Computers in Human Behavior, a team evaluated 118 children aged three to six and found that overall, kids were more inclined to trust machines over humans.

The study divided children into different groups and showed them videos of humans and robots labeling objects, some recognizable to the kids and other items that would be new to them.

Researchers demonstrated the reliability and trustworthiness of humans and robots by having them incorrectly identify familiar items, calling a brush a plate, for instance. This intentional mislabeling allowed researchers to manipulate the children’s concept of who could and could not be trusted. Interestingly, the children showed a stark preference for robots.

When both bots and humans were shown to be equally reliable, children were more inclined to ask robots questions and accept their answers as true. Even when the robots proved unreliable, children preferred them to reliable adults. Children also appeared to be more forgiving of their machine-friends versus their human ones. When the robots made a mistake, children perceived it as accidental. But when the adults fumbled? Children thought those missteps were intentional.

When asked who they would want to learn from and share secrets with, the majority of children chose the robots over the humans. But that preference might only last for so long: Older children were likelier to trust humans when a robot was shown to be unreliable.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Parents have a God-given responsibility of nurturing trust and educating their children. This profound duty should remain in their hands, not delegated to AI, government, or technology. Embracing this role empowers parents to shape the values and character of the next generation.

In March of 2024, aviation manufacturer Boeing announced changes to their internal processes after failing a safety audit by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The audit followed a string of negative stories involving the safety of its aircrafts, including an incident in January where an Alaska Airlines flight experienced explosive decompression when an insufficiently secured door plug popped out.

The FAA reviewed 89 aspects of production at a plant in Renton, Washington, and found that the company failed at 33 of them. That amounts to a 63% success rate, which in school would normally earn students a letter grade of D.

In a memo to employees, president of Boeing’s commercial division Stan Deal said that the vast majority of failures involved employees not following approved procedures, and promised to provide opportunities for remedial learning. “We’ll be working with each employee noted with a non-compliance during the audit to ensure they fully understand the work instructions and procedures.”

Deal also acknowledged that the problems did not solely rest on the backs of production-level employees, but that many of Boeing’s procedures were confusing and changed too frequently. He said, “Our teams are working to simplify and streamline our processes and address the panel’s recommendations.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Whether in secular work or in ministry, taking hazardous shortcuts in a responsible work position, because of laziness, inexperience, or time pressure, can lead to disastrous results. It is better to speak up and take responsibility to make sure that a trust is fulfilled (1 Cor. 4:2).

First, there was a pop. And then a big bang. Air loudly whooshed out of the side of the airplane, which was flying at 16,000 feet with an emergency exit size gash. A cellphone, a teddy bear, and a passenger’s shirt were sucked out the hole in the cabin. Oxygen masks dropped from overhead compartments.

Passengers on Alaska Airlines flight 1282—which was enroute to Ontario, Calif., from Portland, Oregon—were fearful for their lives. The flight, however, landed back at the Portland airport less than 30 minutes after takeoff, with 171 passengers and six crew members aboard, all of them alive.

One passenger said, “We literally thought we were going to die.” Bolts needed to secure part of an Alaska Airlines jet that blew off in midair appear to have been missing when the plane left the factory.

Boeing and other industry officials increasingly believe the plane maker’s employees failed to put back the bolts when they reinstalled a 737 MAX 9 plug door after opening or removing it during production.

The scenario was based partly on an absence of markings on the Alaska door plug itself that would suggest bolts were not in place when it blew off the jet around 16,000 feet over Oregon. They also pointed to paperwork and process lapses at Boeing’s Renton, Washington factory related to the company’s work on the plug door.

Separating fact from fiction is getting harder. Manipulating images—and creating increasingly convincing deepfakes—is getting easier. As what’s real becomes less clear, authenticity is “something we’re thinking about, writing about, aspiring to and judging more than ever.” This is why Merriam-Webster’s word of the year is “authentic,” the company announced in November of 2023.

Editor Peter Sokolowski said, “Can we trust whether a student wrote this paper? Can we trust whether a politician made this statement? We don’t always trust what we see anymore. We sometimes don’t believe our own eyes or our own ears. We are now recognizing that authenticity is a performance itself.”

According to the announcement from Merriam-Webster, “authentic” is a “high-volume lookup” most years but saw a “substantial increase” in 2023. The dictionary has several definitions for the word, including “not false or imitation,” “true to one’s own personality, spirit, or character” and “worthy of acceptance or belief as conforming to or based on fact,” among others.

Sokolowski said, “We see in 2023 a kind of crisis of authenticity. What we realize is that when we question authenticity, we value it even more.”

Other words that saw spikes this year include “deepfake,” “dystopian,” “doppelgänger,” and “deadname,” per Merriam-Webster. This year’s theme of searching for truth seems fitting following last year’s focus on manipulation. The 2022 word of the year was “gaslighting,” a term that originated from a 1938 play by Patrick Hamilton. In the play, a woman complains that the gas lights in her house are dimming while her husband tries to convince her that it’s all in her head.

Possible Preaching Angle:

As technology’s ability to manipulate reality improves, people are searching for the truth. Only the Word of God contains the absolute truth “your word is truth” (John 17:17), as revealed by Jesus, who is “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6).

The moment we’ve all breathlessly waited for is finally here: Dictionaries are announcing their words of the year. In December, the US’s most esteemed lexicon, Merriam-Webster, revealed its choice: “authentic.”

In its announcement, the dictionary said the word had seen a big jump in searches this year, thanks to discussions “about AI, celebrity culture, identity, and social media.” The concept of authenticity sits at the intersection of what’s been on our collective minds.

Large language models like ChatGPT and image generators like Dall-E have left us uncertain about what’s genuine, from student essays to the pope’s fashion choices. When it comes to the news, online mis- and disinformation, along with armies of bots, have us operating under different sets of facts.

Sure enough, other leading dictionaries’ words of the year are remarkably similar. Cambridge chose “hallucinate,” focusing its announcement on generative AI: “It’s capable of producing false information – hallucinations – and presenting this information as fact.” Collins didn’t beat around the bush: its word of the year is “AI.”

In a polarized world, the dictionaries’ solidarity suggests there’s something we can all agree on: robots are terrifying. AI is an obsession that seems to cross generations. Whether you’re a boomer or Gen Z, OpenAI feels like a sign of change far beyond NFTs, the metaverse, and all the other fads we were told would transform humanity.

Social media feeds have become carefully curated extensions of ourselves—like little aspirational art projects. As Merriam-Webster points out, authenticity itself has become a performance. In other words, we’re getting very good at pretending to be real.

Just how bad are the polls for those in political office right now? It turns out more people are putting their faith in the dead than in living politicians. A new survey finds there are more people who believe in ghosts than trust their government.

The poll of nearly 1,000 people in the United Kingdom, found that 50% believe in the existence of ghosts. Meanwhile, just one in five say they have faith in the government. It also turns out that more than twice as many people believe in ghosts than trust in the media.

A belief in ghosts (50%) is more common than believing in astrology (23%) or magic (12%). In fact, 18% of respondents say they’ve had contact with an actual ghost. Luckily, many of these are not the horror movie kind of encounters—as only 23% say they’re afraid of these spirits.

When it comes to religion, Catholics are more likely to say they believe in ghosts (64%) than Protestants (53%), agnostics (42%), and atheists (37%). Although atheists are the least likely to fear a spooky ghost (17%), just one in three Catholics said the same—pointing to most people actually having a positive opinion of these supernatural visitors.

Interestingly, one in three young adults in Gen Z say they’re afraid of ghosts, making them the most fearful of any generation in the poll. Just 16 percent of baby boomers say ghosts creep them out.

Gerrit De Vynck wrote a story in The Washington Post about how artificial intelligences respond to the errors they make.

Citing a recent MIT research paper, De Vynck reported that a group of scientists loaded up two iterations of Open AI’s ChatGPT, and asked each one a simple question about the geographical origin of one of MIT’s professors. One gave an incorrect answer, the other a correct one.

Researchers then asked the two bots to debate until they could agree on an answer. Eventually, the incorrect bot apologized and agreed with the correct one. The researchers’ leading theory is that allowing chatbots to debate one another will create more factually correct outcomes in their interactions with people.

One of the researchers said, “Language models are trained to predict the next word. They are not trained to tell people they don’t know what they’re doing.” De Vynck adds, “The result is bots that act like precocious people-pleasers. [They’re] making up answers instead of admitting they simply don’t know.”

AIs like ChatGPT are not trained to discern truth from falsehood, which means that false information gets included along with truth. Chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Bing, and Google’s Bard have demonstrated a major fatal flaw: They make stuff up all the time. These falsehoods, or digital hallucinations as they are being called, are a serious concern because they limit the effectiveness of the AI as a tool for fact-finding.

What’s worse, scientists are beginning to see evidence that AIs pick up on societal fears around robots gaining sentience and turning against humanity, and mimic the behavior they see depicted in science fiction. According to this theory, if an artificial intelligence actually kills a human being, it might be because it learned from HAL, the murderous robot from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Sundar Pichai, chief executive officer at Google said, “No one in the field has yet solved the hallucination problem. All models do have this as an issue.” When asked if or when this will change, Pichai was less than optimistic. “[It’s] a matter of intense debate,” he said.

Possible Preaching Angle:

In our pursuit of technology, we must never give up our human responsibility to seeking or telling the truth.

After doing an analysis of seven high-profile cases where people died as a result of use of force by police, Washington Post reporters Ashley Parker and Justine McDaniel found a disturbing pattern. They say they found that police consistently gave initial statements that were “misleading, incomplete or wrong, with the first accounts consistently in conflict with the full set of facts once they finally emerged.”

Philip Stinson teaches criminal justice at Bowling Green State University, and says trends like these are not merely coincidental. He said, “The police own the narrative in every interaction they have with the public, because they write up the reports. Sometimes the reports are written to justify the actions the officers have taken, and sometimes to cover up what actually happened.”

In their analysis, Parker and McDaniel found that police accounts “regularly described the victims in terms assuming they were guilty of a crime; and the initial police version frequently used clinical language that seemed to obscure their own role in the incidents.”

According to Lauren Bonds, executive director of the National Police Accountability Project, police often achieve this by employing deliberate use of the passive voice. She said, “When we use passive language in our own lives, usually we’re trying to create some distance from what happened, [as in] it’s ‘the milk fell’ instead of ‘I spilled the milk.’”

According to Stinson, restoring trust with the public will require greater accountability by police departments. “It’s very damaging to the police department because it does damage to their reputation when they put out these press releases and it turns out they’re false.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Effective leadership requires integrity and truth telling; when those in authority lie, obscure, or exaggerate the truth to protect themselves, they erode their credibility and trustworthiness.

Representatives from the city of Portland appeared in federal court to address the city’s ongoing lack of compliance with a 2014 settlement agreement from the Department Of Justice. US District Court Judge Michael Simon was charged with assessing the city’s progress. And the initial feedback was less than positive.

City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty said, “I did not [want to] speak with the city today, because I don’t see myself standing with people saying, ‘We’re doing a good job.’ We’re not.” Hardesty pleaded with the judge to demand tangible actions to address departmental shortcomings.

The agreement was the result of a DOJ lawsuit against the city of Portland for consistent uses of excessive force, especially against people exhibiting signs of mental illness. And despite numerous hearings designed to shed light on the process since its 2014 inception, it had taken the city until February of 2020 for its police force to come into full policy compliance.

And yet, there were several incidents involving police response to the ongoing public protests throughout the summer of 2020 and into 2021 that revealed several operational gaps. City attorneys tried to explain these incidents as being products of extraordinary circumstances, but Hardesty and various community stakeholders say otherwise.

Attorney Ashlee Albies said, “PPB has held itself out as a learning organization. But in order to be a learning organization, it must self-reflect and do so critically. And it’s not for the purposes of punishment. It is for the purpose of … holding officers accountable, holding systems accountable, so that the public has faith in that system.”

Judge Simon agreed saying, “We want policing to work. We want our community to trust our police officers. We want our police officers to continue to feel good about what they do and to earn the respect of the people that they serve.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

As Christians it's our responsibility to respond to correction with humility and repentance. Refusing to do what's right is not being steadfast, but being stubborn.

The Springtide Research Institute recently surveyed more than 10,000 Americans ages 13 to 25 (Generation Z) about their religious views and involvement. What surprised the researchers are the views of those who claim to be affiliated with a mainstream religion.

Josh Packard, executive director of Springtide, reveals: “They’re checking the box that says they are Jewish or Catholic or whatever, but over half of them are saying, ‘even though I checked the box, I don’t trust organized religion.’ This is sort of stunning and not what you would expect from somebody who checked the box.”

The report advises more one-on-one mentoring between adults and youth:

They also respond to “relational authority,” which means authority that is not based on hierarchy or titles so much as a genuine interest in young people as individuals. 4 in 5 Gen Z members surveyed said they were likely to take guidance from adults who care about them.

The report pinpoints five values that characterize this relational authority: listening, transparency, integrity, care, and expertise. (Expertise comes last on the list intentionally, because 65% of young people say an adult’s expertise doesn’t matter unless the adult cares for them. Listening comes first in establishing a genuine, non-transactional relationship.)

NASA’s Perseverance rover was launched on July 30, 2020 and landed on Mars on February 18, 2021. Its mission was to seek for signs of ancient life and collect samples of rock for a possible return to Earth.

It’s only reasonable to think that all the components of NASA’s Perseverance rover are new. After all, it is the successor to the Curiosity rover, and it was only launched in 2020. And so, it would be a surprise to find out that the Perseverance’s brain is a piece of technology from the late 90s. That’s right. A processor released by IBM and Motorola over two decades ago, in 1997, serves as the brain of the Perseverance rover. The question is, why?

The craft's developers were more interested in reliability than sheer power. Their solution was a G3 processor used in Apple's Macintosh starting in 1998. Apple veterans remember the G3 fondly. It smoked older Macs with a processor operating speed that topped out at a screaming 266 megahertz (MHz). Or so we thought at the time. Today's processors leave the G3 in the dust. For example, the processor in an Apple iPhone 12 runs at 3 GigaHertz (GHz).

Possible Preaching Angle:

What is old is not necessarily outdated and it can be more reliable than what is newer. This is certainly true of the Word of God. "Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away" (Matt 24:35). "Your word, O LORD, is eternal; it stands firm in the heavens" (Ps. 119:89).

Author Gad Saad is one of the leading voices exposing the harm and folly of political correctness in the US and Canada. In his most recent book, he explores the current futile practice known as “virtue signaling.” Most often on social media, people express moral outrage just by hash-tagging a cause and doing nothing else. Just one example is the #BringBackOurGirls, that was used by millions globally because of the kidnapping of Nigerian school girls by Boko Haram. The only thing that came out of all the virtue signaling was the feeding of one’s ego and the social message that they are progressive and a good person.

Saad gives an example of a public display of valor known as “costly signaling”:

The Sateré-Mawé, an indigenous Amazonian tribe, have a very powerful way of differentiating prospective warriors from their fake counterparts. They sedate bullet ants, whose sting is akin to being shot, and then weave them into leaf gloves. Initiates wear the gloves for several minutes and must withstand the stings of hundreds of these ants as they come out of their sedated torpor. One sting causes unimaginable pain, and yet the inductees must withstand the suffering with restrained dignity (they cannot holler).

One such ordeal would be sufficient to test anyone’s toughness, and yet the young men must endure this tribulation twenty separate times. If all it took to become a warrior was the completion of ten push-ups, nearly everyone could complete the task. ... (It is) a rite of passage that serves as an honest signal of toughness and courage, and you’ve solved the problem of identifying the fakers.

You can watch the YouTube video of the tribal ritual here.

Author Jake Meador writes:

Love also must be faithful because when we love we do not simply will the person’s good a single time and then stop. We see this in marriage and parenting, of course, but friendship should be faithful as well. In the aftermath of my father’s injury, one of the qualities we most appreciated in many of my parents’ friends was their fidelity. One woman from the church is still mowing their yard once a week over three years after Dad’s injury. We could depend on them not simply on the day of the injury but a month later, a year later, three years later.

In December of 2016, a ride at Knott's Berry Farm in California became stuck 148 feet in the air. There were 20 people on board, including seven children. Firefighters tried to reach the stranded passengers by using a massive ladder, but it was too short. Fire crews had no choice. They would have to lower each passenger from 148 feet in the air, harnessed to a single rope.

Fire Captain Larry Kurtz said, "It sounds scary, but … we have very, very strong ropes that have 9,000 pounds of breaking strength on them." He was building the faith of those who were trapped. He was giving them information that if believed would dissipate their fears. It was up to each person to believe what he said and place their trust in the firefighter.

Let's zero in on one of the youngsters, and say his name was Luke. He's seven years old—old enough to feel terror as he looks at the ground 148 feet below. The fire­fighter looks Luke in his eyes, and with a steadying voice says, "Trust me, Luke. I won't let you go. Your life is very precious to me, and I will have you down before you know it."

Luke listens to him and thinks about the "very, very strong rope." He believes the firefighter's reassuring words and trusts him completely. This is his only hope of getting to safety. If he doesn’t have faith, then he doesn't believe that the firefighter cares for him. He would then lose his only hope of reaching the ground. Faith, hope, and love are bound together.

Luke and all 20 passengers were lowered safely to the ground just before 10 p.m. that night.

I remember watching a father play with his little boy, repeatedly throwing him in the air and catching him just before he hit the ground. The child is relaxed and having a great time saying, "Do it again! Do it again!"

I thought, If that was me, I 'd be stiff as a board .

"Can you explain why he's so relaxed, even when he's out of control?" I asked the father.

"It's very simple," he said. "We have a history together. We've played this game before, and I've never dropped him."

While no man has succeeded ... without some spark of divine fire, many have succeeded better by taking precious good care of a precious small spark than others, who have been careless with a generous flame.