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".
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.
Trust has degrees. What you have brought is "unconditional trust". Very rarely works.
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.
I trusted someone to do their task correctly, after the task was done, I verified my trust was warranted.
"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.
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 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.
Would you mind sharing your reference on that? All the etymology sites I rely on seem to place the root in words that end up at "solid" or "comfort".
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).
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."
"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.
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".
Or maybe the proverb needs to be rewritten as “feign trust and verify”
That's a bit wordy but I'm sure someone can come up with a pithy phrase to encapsulate the idea.
If you use the slightly weaker definition that trust means you have confidence in someone, then the adage makes sense.
The adage doesn't work under any definition of trust other than the one it's conflicting with itself about.
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.
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.
It's a Russian proverb BTW: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust%2C_but_verify
I'd just assume see it not used though.
Why not just "trust" them instead? You have a contact and you know them, can't you trust them?
This is what "trust but verify" means. It means audit everything you can. Do not really on trust alone.
An entire civilization can be built with this methodology. It would be a much better one than the one we have now.
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.
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 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.