Rotundus.com

It's not short, but I rather enjoyed this interview with Mark Andreessen:

Found this excerpted here:

The highest form that civilization can reach is a seamless web of deserved trust. Not much procedure, just totally reliable people correctly trusting one another.

That’s the way an operating room works at the Mayo Clinic. If a bunch of lawyers were to introduce a lot of process, the patients would all die.

So never forget, when you’re a lawyer, that you may be rewarded for selling this stuff, but you don’t have to buy it. In your own life, what you want is a seamless web of deserved trust. And if your proposed marriage contract has forty-seven pages, my suggestion is you not enter.

There are often times where it's pointed out that people don't trust and, most frequently, that lack of trust is at least somewhat deserved and unsurprising.

Peace, Poverty and Betrayal

An excerpt from the book subtitled "A New History of British India" from a review: "This short charge sheet differs from the extensive accusations made by modern left-leaning historians, who recognize economic exploitation but choose instead to emphasize cultural issues, especially the bureaucratization of Indian society and the introduction of capitalist norms. This is hardly fair, because the progressive middle classes in India would have done broadly the same things if they could. Almost nothing of the imperial administrative agenda was undone in independent India."

Child-Adoption Matching: Preferences for Gender and Race

"girls are consistently preferred to boys, and Caucasians and Hispanics are consistently preferred to African-Americans. In monetary terms, the increase in desirability of a girl relative to a boy can be compensated by a decrease of approximately $19, 500 in adoption finalization costs. Similarly, the increase in desirability of a non-African-American baby with respect to an African-American baby (both of unknown gender) is equivalent to a decrease of at least $38, 000 in adoption finalization cost." I've mentioned this before regarding abortion, but evidence for sex-selection out of certain sub-communities seems opposite to what you often find asserted.

In Defence of the Bad, White Working Class

"the willingness to expose your wounds is another sign of privilege. Those for whom injury has a use-value will display their injuries; those for whom woundedness is a survival risk, won’t. As a consequence, middle-class grievances now drown out lower class pain. This is why the wounded lower classes come to embrace conservative discourses that ridicule middle-class anguish. Those who cannot afford to see themselves as disadvantaged are instinctively repulsed by those who harp on about disadvantage. ... I grew up in violent environments. For people like me, ‘symbolic violence’ or ‘offensive speech’ were, if anything, a benign alternative to real violence and real hate. It was often registered as a joke—or yes, banter—because we understood its relative harmlessness."

This is from Dan Gardner's Don't Trust The Trust Decline, talking about how others may make incorrect assumptions about the world by making assumptions from watching American-focused media:

I’m very confident that most people assume that black Britons also have shorter life expectancies than white Britons. They don’t. In fact, the average black Briton from the Caribbean lives a little longer than the average white Briton, and the average black Briton from Africa has a much longer life expectancy — longer even than the life expectancy in Japan, which is among the world’s highest. (Similarly, all-cause mortality is lower among black Canadians than white Canadians. I doubt I’ll ever read that in the Toronto Star, although I will read headlines like this.)