This past September I gave the closing keynote at posit::conf; it’s now on YouTube to watch. Keen-eyed observers will note from the title that it’s about trustworthy data visualization. But it’s also about trust a bit more generally, and how we should think about it in a world where researchers are faking results, AIs are enthusiastically confabulating, and government is destroying data infrastructure. When you find yourself giving a talk with a little tiny microphone stuck to the side of your head you have to ask yourself some hard questions, but the talk was partly about that.

One of the nice things about the opportunity to give a talk like this to a large audience is that you can tell the audience not just about your own stuff, but also the work you build from and rely on. This is, as you’ll see if you watch, one of the themes of the talk in the first place. In my case, in addition to all the good things done by people in the general area of data visualization and data science, I was able to talk about some ideas from social theory and, in addition, some of the work of Katherine Hawley on trust and commitment. The fulcrum of the talk is essentially an idea about commitment that she developed in her book How to be Trustworthy. I got to know Katherine and her family a little bit over a few summers in the 2010s when my own family used to visit St Andrews, where she was Professor of Philosophy. She died of cancer at the age of fifty in 2021. She was a wonderful person; a clear-minded philosopher of enviable intellectual gifts but also immense personal kindness. It was good to be able to think of her while writing this talk and, in however small a way, introduce some of her ideas to a new audience when I gave it.