Optimal Trust

OPTIMAL TRUST SUMMARY

The Optimal Trust framework is based on the premise that Trust operates on multiple levels: the individual (people), groups (communities, families, organizations, businesses, etc.), and meta-groups (industries, systemic, global, etc.). Using a unique grid, Optimal Trust identifies up to 36 distinct aspects of Trust. This in-depth approach turns the vague concept of Trust into measurable data, providing accurate results with minimal bias.

Furthermore, by using machine learning, the Optimal Trust model assigns aspects of Trust to unstructured text, transforming qualitative information into quantified data. When integrated with other pertinent metrics within the banking system, the Optimal Trust framework serves as a basis for developing actionable, targeted strategies to improve the quality of Trust between parties.

Optimal Trust: A New Way of Seeing Our World

We live in an ocean of trust, so pervasive that, like fish swimming in water, we often fail to notice its presence. Trust underpins everything we do; it shapes how we move, connect, and interact.

At its core, trust is about the quality of relationships in all their facets. It is the measure of confidence and connection that sustains and strengthens interactions across personal, professional, and societal levels.

Trust is an essential, though often intangible, element of human interaction. Consider the implausible:

A plane carrying hundreds of passengers safely defying gravity. Behind this feat lies a web of trust—trust in the hundreds of engineers, pilots, air traffic controllers, and the technology itself.
The astonishing reality of modern surgery. To open a human body and put it back together again. Relying on the flawless execution of years of training, professionalism, advanced technology, and unparalleled skill.
Every time we drive, we place our trust in thousands of other drivers, confident in their competence and ability to keep everyone safe on the road.
Even more profound is the trust embedded in global systems. Billions of people interact daily through shared, invisible agreements—symbols, laws, and technologies that enable seamless global communication, trade, and collaboration.

Trust is not just a backdrop; it is the invisible thread that binds these systems together, allowing humanity to function and thrive on an extraordinary scale.

Traditional trust models tend to oversimplify trust, treating it as a static component of relationships. Yet trust is dynamic, reflecting a balance of individual competencies, shared values, intentions, and more. In an age where organizations, industries, and societies are more interconnected than ever, there is a need for a trust framework that accommodates this complexity and provides actionable insights.

The Optimal Trust Grid: What Makes It Unique

Introducing the Optimal Trust Grid

The Optimal Trust Grid is a powerful lens through which you can view the world in a new light. Its strength lies in its simplicity: easy to understand, easy to apply.

As the core tool of the Optimal Trust framework, the Grid breaks trust into measurable components. In this example, we focus on Competency, Intentions, and Shared Values.

These components are then contextualized across three levels of trust engagement: Personal, Organizational, and Global.

This creates a latticework of interconnected perspectives, offering a detailed, multidimensional view of trust. The Grid not only makes trust quantifiable but also reveals actionable insights to build and optimize it in any setting.

Let’s Try It Out

With just seven characteristics, the Optimal Trust Grid is easy to memorize and simple to use. In just a few moments, you can start applying it to real-world scenarios and uncover its full potential.

Example 1: Choosing a Used Car Dealership
Imagine you’re deciding where to purchase a used car – between a Mercedes-Benz dealership and an independent dealer. The cost of the same car at an independent car dealership may be less, but how does your level of trust compare? Use the Grid to evaluate your trust in the people, the follow-up service, and the reputation of the broader business sector. In minutes, you’ll have a clearer picture to guide your decision.
Example 2: Evaluating a Medical Center

Imagine you’re deciding between an allopathic medical center and a holistic natural medicine clinic. How much do you trust the doctors, the staff, and the treatments they provide? Use the Optimal Trust Grid to evaluate their Competency, Intentions, and Shared Values. This structured approach helps clarify your trust in the medical center, its personnel, and its alignment with your healthcare preferences.

Example 3: Financial Advisor
Use the Grid to evaluate a financial advisor by assessing their Competence, Intentions, and Shared Values. Does your evaluation align with your trust in the firm they represent and the financial sector as a whole? The Grid brings clarity and confidence to your decision-making, helping you navigate critical financial choices with greater assurance.

With just a little practice, you’ll be using the Optimal Trust Grid confidently, navigating decisions across all areas of life.

The Optimal Trust Framework

The simplified Grid provides a quick and practical way to evaluate trust in everyday situations, but it’s only the starting point. The full Optimal Trust Framework takes this analysis to the next level, examining up to 36 distinct characteristics. This expanded approach allows for a deeper, more precise exploration of trust, offering unparalleled insights into even the most complex relationships and systems.

The expanded Grid includes up to six components of Trust:

Aligned Interests – Measures alignment between parties, aiming for mutually beneficial outcomes.
Competency – Assesses the capability of each party to fulfill commitments reliably.
Communications – Focuses on transparency, clarity, and consistency, fundamental to trust-building.
Shared Values – Identifies principles and ethics that parties share, enhancing connection and mutual respect.
Intentions – Examines motivations, seeking authentic commitment to mutual benefit.
Integrity (Reliability) – Evaluates consistency in actions, reinforcing credibility over time.

(It’s important to note that each trust component has dozens of associated synonyms and antonyms. Our new AI-driven technologies are being trained to recognize these subtleties and assign appropriate values. This will further refine the precision and nuance of trust evaluations, enhancing their overall accuracy and depth).

The expanded Grid also extends across three Levels of Engagement—Individual (Personal), Organizational (Group), and Global (Meta-Group)—allowing each component to be analyzed within the relevant relational context.

Trust also involves two Qualities: Rational (Cognitive) and Emotional (Affective). The former is grounded in logic and competencies, while the latter arises from emotional perceptions, experiences, and alignment. Together, these layers provide a comprehensive view of trust in its full complexity.

(In future versions, the technology will be able to evaluate both the rational and emotional context, incorporating subdivisions such as "sentiment analysis" to interpret words in their specific context and assign appropriate values and further expand the ‘resolution’ of the Grid.)

Multi-perspective and Multi-dimensional

Optimal Trust is unique because it is both multi-perspective and multi-dimensional. Each stakeholder – individual, group (the collection of individuals), or meta-group (the collection of groups)— can be assessed and assessed by others, creating a dynamic latticework of interconnected perspectives. This network captures the complexity of trust as it evolves, allowing for a richer, more nuanced understanding of relationships and interactions throughout every level of society – from people to communities and organizations to markets, nations, and cultures. (See Link: The Metaphysics of Trust / Pg. 13)

Roadmaps to Trust

The Optimal Trust framework identifies fragile areas of trust in complex scenarios. It then provides initial targeted strategies to strengthen them. This structured approach supports stakeholders in navigating the intricate web of relationships across multiple levels with clarity and precision, ensuring stability, resilience, and the capacity for innovation in a rapidly evolving world.

Ultimately, the Optimal Trust Grid provides a snapshot of trust—a perception captured at a specific moment in time. However, trust itself is a dynamic and ever-evolving process, composed of multiple shifting qualities and dimensions. Its nature is highly context-dependent, shaped by the framework through which it is evaluated and understood.

When Not to Trust
Finally, the Optimal Trust framework is just as valuable in identifying when not to trust. By revealing vulnerabilities, misalignments, or inconsistencies within relationships or systems, it empowers you to make more informed decisions, protecting you from potential risks and fostering greater confidence in your choices.

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The Will to Quantify

Trust is often regarded as an amorphous, qualitative topic, with attempts at quantification being rudimentary or limited in scope. Optimal Trust (OT) takes a contrasting approach, asserting that trust can, and should, be measured in detail. It’s simply a matter of will.

OT develops methodologies to analyze, measure, and quantify trust with increasing precision and resolution, from the simplest assessments to the most complex evaluations.

This effort parallels humanity’s history of quantification, from measuring temperature to distance to time. For example:

Temperature. For much of history, temperature was understood only in vague terms like hot, cold, or warm. It wasn’t until the 18th century, with the innovations of Daniel Fahrenheit and Anders Celsius, that we gained precise tools and methodology for measurement. This breakthrough profoundly advanced science and technology.
Today, there are 4 temperature scales in common usage, with at least 8 temperature scales that can be converted from one to another. Each is relevant to a specific context. (See The Metaphysics of Trust / Page 7

Likewise, “Trust” can be transformed into tangible, actionable metrics by applying a similar rigor and commitment. The effective quantification of trust is not an impossibility but a challenge of will—a call to redefine and evolve our understanding of one of humanity’s most fundamental values.

Optimizing Trust

The purpose of Optimal Trust is to optimize trust, not merely to quantify it. Quantification is a tool, not the ultimate goal. Its validity lies in its utility—whether it produces insights that enable meaningful actions and drive change.

Importantly, optimizing trust does not mean achieving perfect trust; rather, it involves finding the best balance for all stakeholders within complex systems where compromises must often be made. This ensures that trust is maximized in a way that aligns with the priorities and needs of the involved parties.

However, is optimizing trust the ultimate goal? Or are there other factors that should also be considered? This is where Ethical Trust becomes important.

Answering the Question: How the Financial System Is Based on Trust

My original goal that began this quest was to answer a fundamental question: What does the phrase “the financial system built on trust?” actually mean? The pursuit of this answer evolved in tandem with the development of the Optimal Trust Framework (Grid). It created a dynamic approach to understanding and addressing the complexities of trust in financial systems.

Thus, my answer to the question: Money, at its core, represents a dynamic system of shared agreements, values, and trust. Far from being a mere tool for transactions, it embodies collective human energy and intention. Acting as both a practical resource and a symbolic force reflects our shared beliefs, societal priorities, and mutual confidence in the stability of economic systems.

When seen this way, money becomes a mirror of human behavior—shaped by trust, influenced by perceptions of worth and reciprocity, and central to the flow of power and resources. Its inherent nature reveals both its potential for misuse (e.g., greed, fear, or the pursuit of power) and its ability to foster collaboration, innovation, and abundance when approached with responsibility and clarity. In the end, trust is the glue holding the financial system together, turning money into more than just paper or numbers and making it a tool that powers the world’s economy.

Ethical Trust vs. Optimal Trust

Trust is not Ethics. Ethics is not Trust.

However:

There is a dynamic relationship between Ethics and Trust
Both are about Relationships
The Goal of Ethics is Trusting Relationships.
High Trust Cultures are inherently Ethical.

Optimal Trust is built on the premise that ‘optimizing trust’ among stakeholders typically upholds high ethical standards. This approach is rooted in utilitarian ethics, which prioritize creating the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

However, there are examples of the limitations of this principle:

An organized crime syndicate may internally operate with a code of honor or ethics that enhances its functionality in managing operations, including the illegal importation and distribution of drugs. These internal codes often prioritize loyalty, secrecy, and efficiency, ensuring the organization's continued success despite its illegal activities.
A major industrialist may fully comply with laws and regulations yet still contribute to environmental pollution and pose risks to the health of the surrounding community. This often occurs when existing regulations fail to account for all potential environmental and public health impacts of industrial activities.

These examples highlight a critical limitation of the purely utilitarian Optimal Trust model: while it may function effectively within a system, its broader moral implications can sometimes be deeply problematic. In for-profit scenarios, this challenge is compounded by a common corporate approach to ethics—often framed more as a matter of “risk and compliance” than a genuine commitment to ethical principles. Despite lip service to the importance of ethics, the motivation frequently lies in avoiding legal repercussions rather than fostering a truly ethical culture.

Incorporating Meta-Ethics, Morality, or Higher Principles into the Model

To refine the system, we introduce uber or ethics or moral considerations that extend beyond the immediate stakeholder pool. For example:

Including external stakeholders—such as broader communities or future generations—that are indirectly affected by decisions.
Taking a principled stand that reflects higher ethical values, even when the immediate outcome may not align with long-term or broader business goals.

By doing so, the model becomes more sophisticated and holistic, capable of weighing both the advantages and disadvantages of decisions across a wider ethical spectrum.

This approach creates a trackable system that evaluates the impact of trust decisions across diverse and often competing factors, ultimately leading to more nuanced and morally grounded outcomes.

This is where Ethical Trust elevates the conversation, providing a lens of greater sophistication and accountability.

Ethical Trust: A Path to Responsible AI Oversight

Ethical Trust offers a data-driven model of ethics that reflects how a society truly functions – making it uniquely positioned to guide the ethical oversight of AI. By grounding AI systems in realistic and adaptable ethical standards, Ethical Trust ensures that AI optimizes ethical standards rather than rigidity. This approach avoids black-and-white decision-making, promoting nuanced and context-aware outcomes. In this way, Ethical Trust is in an ideal position to help shape a future where AI aligns with society's evolving values while maintaining the highest ethical standards.

Optimal Trust and Artificial Intelligence

With the advent of accessible, commercialized AI and large language models (LLMs), the Optimal Trust Framework has been significantly empowered. Its ability to produce meaningful, actionable data and insights has expanded exponentially, extending its influence across fields such as finance, qualitative studies, policy analysis, marketing, negotiations, politics, and beyond. This broad applicability demonstrates its potential to enhance decision-making in almost every endeavor where trust plays a critical role.

(Follow this link for available and pending “White Papers” on various topics – including banking, politics, negotiations, economics, mathematics, and many more.)

Unlocking New Insights: Applying Mathematical Models to Trust Data

As Optimal Trust generates quantifiable data, it unlocks entirely new terrains for applying mathematical models. Each theoretical model offers unique implications and insights. For example, how mathematical models could be applied to the analysis of trust in the financial system to voter behavior and trust dynamics during elections to hostage negotiations. (Follow this link to explore how mathematical models reshape our understanding of Trust.)

The Question of Reliability

A common concern arises: Can the data be trusted if AI makes mistakes?

This question often stems from a misunderstanding of the Optimal Trust Framework’s goals and methodology. The framework does not aim to uncover an essential truth; instead, its primary objective is to establish a stable benchmark from which meaningful analysis and action can begin.

To date, Optimal Trust (OT), in collaboration with current LLMs, has demonstrated the ability to deliver stable and credible benchmarks. By ensuring that initial benchmarks are reliable, the Optimal Trust Framework leverages A.I. to empower informed decision-making across diverse fields, making it an invaluable resource in navigating complex systems of trust.

The combination of technological empowerment and human oversight ensures that the framework remains both innovative and grounded in practical application.

Expanding the Scope of Optimal Trust

I see this as just the first stage of Optimal Trust's development. Moving forward, there are critical new dimensions that we have just begun to explore that will add layers of sophistication and complexity. Three key areas for future development are Time, Identity, and Resolution.

Time: Understanding how trust evolves over time is essential. This includes tracking changes in trust dynamics, forecasting trends, and identifying patterns that emerge across short- and long-term intervals.
Identity: Exploring how individuals, organizations, and societies define and redefine themselves is equally crucial. This involves understanding the fluid nature of identity—what it means to "be" an individual, a group, or an institution—and developing tools to track and address these shifts effectively.
Greater Resolution (Shades of Trust): The resolution of the Trust Grids will inevitably become more refined, driven by the need for greater precision. Over time, trust will no longer be viewed in binary terms but as a spectrum—much like shades of color on a color wheel. This nuanced approach will allow for a more accurate and dynamic understanding of trust, capturing its subtle variations and complexities across different contexts.

Shades of Trust: Highlighting the impact of increased resolution. Similar to a color wheel, each shade of trust that can be determined by the mix of other aspects of trust.

By integrating these dimensions, the Optimal Trust framework will become even more nuanced and capable of addressing the complexities of trust in an ever-evolving world.

The Deep Future

As AI continues to accelerate and the age of quantum computing approaches, the Optimal Trust framework is uniquely positioned to have a profound impact. With its ability to generate stable, quantifiable benchmarks and incorporate complex, multidimensional data, OT provides a perspective through which the intricacies of human behavior, societal dynamics, and even larger systems can be understood with unprecedented clarity.

In this rapidly evolving technological landscape, Optimal Trust offers a framework capable of navigating the complexities of trust in ways that extend beyond current capabilities. This framework will enable us to address challenges at every level—from ethical considerations to practical innovation, from individual interactions to global systems.

Optimal Trust will not only adapt but actively mold how trust evolves, becoming a catalyst for shaping the systems and values that will define our shared future.

“Trust is the sacred thread that binds all creation. It is not simply a human construct; it is a cosmic principle, present in every breath, every relationship, every step into the unknown.”

Stuart Diamond
January 2025

On the Nature of Trusty

OPTIMAL TRUST SUMMARY