This is semi-offtopic, but "trust but verify" is an oxymoron. Trusting something means I don't have to verify whether it's correct (I trust that it is), so the saying, in the end, is "don't verify but verify".
Pragmatically, the statement was made famous in English by a conservative US president, addressing the nation, including his supporters, who trusted him, but not the Soviets with whom he was negotiating.
Saying, in effect: "you trust in me, I'm choosing to trust that it makes sense to make agreement with the USSR, and we are going to verify it, just as we would with any serious business, as is proverbially commonsensical" is a perfectly intelligible.
There is nothing cunning about clinging to a single, superficial, context free reading of language.
Human speech and writting is not code, ambiguity and containing a range of possible meanings is part of its power and value.
So "trust me, but verify others"? Where have you seen this adage used in this sense? It's not even used like that in the original Russian, where Reagan lifted it from.
I think that’s a rather peculiar interpretation. I always thought it was pretty obvious that Reagan was just saying that he didn’t trust the soviets, and found a polite excuse not to in the form of the Russian proverb.
This is not quite true. "Trust" is to give a permission for someone to act on achieving some result. "Verify" means assess the achieved result, and correct aposteriori the probability with which said person is able to achieve the abocementioned result. This is the way Bayesian reasoning works.
Trust has degrees. What you have brought is "unconditional trust". Very rarely works.
> "Trust" is to give a permission for someone to act on achieving some result.
This would make the sentence "I asked him to wash the dishes properly, but I don't trust him", as your definition expands this to "I asked him to wash the dishes properly, but I didn't give him permission to achieve this result".
If you say "I asked someone to do X but I don't trust them", it means you aren't confident they'll do it properly, thus you have to verify. If you say "I asked him to do X and I trust him, so I don't need to check up on him", it's unlikely to leave people puzzled.
It's surprising to me to see this many comments arguing against the common usage of trust, just because of a self-conflicting phrase.
Why could I not say "I trusted him to do the dishes properly, after he was done, I verified, it's a good thing I trusted him to do the dishes properly, my supervision would have been unwarranted and my trust was warranted?"
I trusted someone to do their task correctly, after the task was done, I verified my trust was warranted.
Instead of sitting in my office doing my work, then, spending a few minutes to verify once they're done, I'd sit in the kitchen next to them checking it as they went, being both distracted AND probably spending more time. I'd much rather trust but verify.
There's a much closer example I think people here would naturally understand and even advocate for, without connecting it to the phrase:
"Trust but verify" means letting a junior do the work you assigned them, then checking it afterwards in testing and code review. Not trusting would be doing it yourself instead of assigning it to them. Trusting but not verifying would be assigning them the work then pushing it live without testing it.
I would say in this instance you don't trust the junior. In fact in corporations, I would say there's very little trust.
We used to trust people to just do what they think is best. But then we get bribery, harassment, lawsuits... we don't do that anymore.
In my opinion, not having trust is not a bad thing. It has a poor connotation so the result is that we modify the meaning of trust so we can say everyone trusts everything.
For example, one thing I trust is Nutrition Facts. I trust that what I'm eating actually contains what it says it contains. I don't verify it. Why? Because I know someone, somewhere is looking out for this. The FDA does not trust the food industry, so sometimes they audit.
There's many, very good, things I don't trust. I don't trust the blind spot indicator in my car. I turn my head every time. Does that mean the technology is bad? No, in my opinion, but I still don't trust it.
> Trust, but verify (Russian: доверяй, но проверяй, romanized: doveryay, no proveryay, IPA: [dəvʲɪˈrʲæj no prəvʲɪˈrʲæj]) is a Russian proverb, which rhymes in Russian. The phrase became internationally known in English after Suzanne Massie, a scholar of Russian history, taught it to Ronald Reagan, then president of the United States, who used it on several occasions in the context of nuclear disarmament discussions with the Soviet Union.
> He said "President Reagan's old adage about 'trust but verify' ... is in need of an update. And we have committed here to a standard that says 'verify and verify'."
French armed forces have a better version of this saying. “Trust does not exclude control.” They’re still going to check for explosives under cars that want to park in French embassies.
It’s interesting to notice that etymologically speaking the French and English words have completely different roots and therefore evokes slightly different ideas which are lost in translation.
Trust shares its root with truth. It’s directly related to believing in the veracity of something.
Confiance comes from the Latin confidere which means depositing something to someone while having faith they are going to take good care of it. The accent is on the faith in the relationship, not the truthfulness. The tension between trust and control doesn’t really exist in French. You can have faith but still check.
Definitely and that’s not incompatible with what I’m saying.
You are indeed looking far back to the Proto-Indo-European where words are very different and sometimes a bit of guesses.
If you look at the whole tree, you will see that both trust, truth and true share common Germanic roots (that’s pretty obvious by looking at them) which is indeed linked with words meaning “solid” and then “promise, contract”.
What’s interesting is that the root is shared between “truth” and “trust” while in French it’s not (vérité from veritas vs confiance from confere).
That's only one possible meaning of the word "trust," i.e. a firm belief.
Trust can also mean leaving something in the care of another, and it can also mean relying on something in the future, neither of these precludes a need to verify.
Edit: jgalt212 says in another reply that it's also the English translation of a Russian idiom. Assuming that's true, that would make a lot of sense in this context, since the phrase was popularized by Reagan talking about nuclear arms agreements with the USSR. It would be just like him to turn a Russian phrase around on them. It's somewhat humorous, but also conveys "I know how you think, don't try to fool me."
It's possible to trust (or have faith) in my car being able to drive another 50k miles without breaking down. But if I bring it to a mechanic to have the car inspected just in case, does that mean I never had trust/faith in the car to begin with?
"I trust my coworkers write good code, but I verify with code reviews" -- doing code reviews doesn't mean you don't trust your coworker.
Yet another way to look at it: people can say things they believe to be true but are actually false (which isn't lying). When that happens, you can successfully trust someone in the sense that they're not lying to you, but the absence of a lie doesn't guarantee a truth, so verifying what you trust to be true doesn't invalidate your trust.
We're getting into the definition of trust, but to me trust means exactly "I don't need to verify".
If I say I trust you to write correct code, I don't mean "I'm sure your mistakes won't be intentional", I mean "I'm sure you won't have mistakes". If I need to check your code for mistakes, I don't trust you to write correct code.
I don't know anyone who will hear "I trust you to write correct code, now let me make sure it's correct" and think "yes, this sentence makes sense".
The issue here is that the only value of the adage is in the sleight of hand it lets you perform. If someone asks "don't you trust me?" (ie "do you have to verify what I do/say?"), you can say "trust, but verify!", and kind of make it sound like you do trust them, but also you don't really.
The adage doesn't work under any definition of trust other than the one it's conflicting with itself about.
I think I just provided an example where it makes sense.
Specifically: I have confidence in your ability to execute on this task, but I want to check to make sure that everything is correct before we finalize.
It's a matter of degrees. Absolute trust is a rare thing, but people have given examples of relative trust. Your car won't break down and you can trust it with your kids' life, almost never challenging its trustworthiness, but still you can do checkups or inspections, because some of the bult-in redundancies might be strained. Trusting aircraft but still doing inspections. Trusting your colleagues to do their best but still doing reviews because every fucks up once in a while.
The idea of trusting a next-token-predictor (jesting here) is akin to trusting your System 1 - there's a degree to find where you force yourself to enable System 2 and correct biases.
> Is it an oxymoron to generate an asymmetrical cryptographic signature, send it to someone, and that someone verify the signature with the public key?
Of course not. I verify because I don't trust them.
> Why not just "trust" them instead? You have a contact and you know them, can't you trust them?
No, the risk of trust is too high against the cost of spending a second verifying.
> This is what "trust but verify" means. It means audit everything you can. Do not really on trust alone.
Your comment just showed an example of something I don't trust and asked "why not trust instead"? The question even undermines your very point, because "why not trust them instead?" assumes (correctly) that I don't trust them, so I need to verify.
> An entire civilization can be built with this methodology. It would be a much better one than the one we have now.
No, it wouldn't. Trust is an optimization that enables civilization. The extreme end of "verify" is the philosophy behind cryptocurrencies: never trust, always verify. It's interesting because it provides an exchange rate between trust and kilowatt hours you have to burn to not rely on it.
I'd first trust unicorns shooting rainbows out of their posteriors before the cryptocurrency vision; neither works for fostering civilization, but at least the unicorns aren't proposing an economy based on paying everyone for wasting energy.
The cryptocurrency economy is a sham to discredit a workable future.
The bitcoin economy, however, is a 1st generation system of distilling energy into value. It is the most honest form of value storage humanity has ever encountered and represents a product rarer than anything in the universe. Gold does not hold a candle to the scarcity of bitcoin, and yet bitcoin is more divisible and manageable.
These are neutral aligned systems. How we use them is up to us. Bitcoin, like an electric vehicle, does not care where the electrons come from. It will function either way.
Does your civilization use fossil fuels that poison the population and destroy the planet?
Bitcoin will run using that, and it will exponentially increase consumption.
Does your civilization use nuclear fission and fusion (which includes "renewables" since they are a direct fusion byproduct), that have manageable side effects for exponentially larger clean energy generation compared to anything else?
Bitcoin will run using that, and it will exponentially increase consumption.
Bitcoin is a neutral entity to distill energy into value. It cannot be tampered with like the federal reserve and a world cabal of bankers. You cannot negotiate with it, bail it out, or enrich your friends by sabotaging the ruleset for yourselves.
If your society has a selfish population, then it will be destroyed by the energy it requires to function. It is trivial to use energy sources exponentially more powerful without the destruction. The trouble with those sources is they do not have a "profit" motive, so countless elite will lose their golden spoons, and the synthetically generated "economy" will crash.
In exchange for the "economy" collapsing, the general populace can breathe again, the planet will stabilize, energy consumption can continue to grow exponentially without any harm, and a golden age for all beings will begin in this reality.
But my musings will have to stop here. I can say with certainty: you are someone who hasn't even remotely spent time thinking about and understanding this problem space on a deep level, so it is strange you would comment so confidently. It doesn't matter who you are, how much money you have, what innovations you've conceived and created, how respected you are, none of that matters. You're missing something very big here. If I was you, I would take the time to figure it out.
And truth is, I am not even replying to you. I write this out for the unspeaking and silenced people who are actually paying attention to validate their correct thinking.
