Trust Me, I'm Thinking

Trust is not a feeling. It’s a judgment. And we’ve gotten worse at making it.

For all the cultural panic over misinformation, polarization, and post-truth relativism, the deeper problem isn’t that people disagree on the facts. The problem is that people no longer trust each other to think about the facts. Not reasonably. Not charitably. Not in good faith.

And that’s a crisis not of truth but of credibility.

We no longer assume that others are reasoning in good faith—even when we agree with them. We suspect motives. We look for tribal cues. We scan for inconsistencies, not insight. We don’t judge arguments anymore. We judge the act of judging itself, usually as suspect.

And like all forms of suspicion, this one corrodes its object.

I. Judgment Without Trust Is Just Analysis

We tend to think of judgment as a solitary act—something I do, privately, in my own head. But in practice, judgment is relational. It always involves imagining someone else’s response, interpreting norms, projecting consequences. It depends on a shared grammar of sense-making—what Kant called the sensus communis—so that when I say “I believe this,” there’s at least a tacit understanding of what “this” means and why someone might believe it.

But that shared grammar doesn’t run on pure reason. It runs on trust. Not blind trust in the content of what someone says, but in the form of their engagement. Are they thinking carefully? Are they speaking honestly? Are they willing to revise? These are judgments we make every day—quietly, often unconsciously—but when they disappear, public life falls apart.

And it is falling apart. Because credibility has been replaced with content. And content, we now know, can be produced by anyone—including no one.

II. The AI Problem Is a Judgment Problem

Here’s where the panic over artificial intelligence gets interesting.

People aren’t just worried that AI will generate falsehoods. They’re worried that it will generate plausible-sounding arguments without any of the moral, intellectual, or social commitments that make an argument trustworthy.

Which is to say: we’re not scared that AI will replace thought. We’re scared that it will replace trust.

And when trustworthy-sounding becomes indistinguishable from trustworthy, the public loses its grip—not just on what’s true, but on how truth is supposed to feel. That’s the real threat.

III. So What Now?

If the old rules don’t hold—if institutional authority no longer guarantees trust—then credibility becomes something we build, not inherit.

And building it takes time. It means making your reasoning visible. It means admitting uncertainty without collapsing into nihilism. It means staying consistent, even when the winds change. It means telling people how you’re thinking—not just what you think.

In short, it means showing your work.

Because in an era saturated with confident-sounding nonsense, transparency is the new persuasion.

IV. The Work Ahead

This is the slow, disciplined work of restoring sensus communis—not as a return to uniformity, but as a space where judgment can be trusted again. Not because we all agree. But because we’ve learned how to disagree in a way that still honors the act of thinking.

Common sense, as I’ve argued before, begins not with facts, but with faculties—with the shared, fallible, human capacities we bring to bear when we try to make sense of the world. Those faculties aren’t disappearing. But they are under pressure.

And the only thing that keeps them alive is trust—earned, extended, recalibrated. Every day.

So: trust slowly. Reason openly. Think in public.

We are not, thank God, algorithms. Let’s stop performing like them.