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Comment by blackoil | Hacker News Reader

A trustless society can't progress/function a lot. I trust doctors who treat me, civil engineers who built my house and even in software which I pretend to be expert in I haven't seen source code of any OS and browser I use as I trust on companies or OSS devs.

Most of this is based on reputation. LLMs are same, I just have to calculate level of trust as I use it.

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Some trust is necessary, yes, but not complete trust. I certainly don't trust my coworkers code. I don't trust their services to return what they say they will return 100% of the time. I don't trust that someone won't introduce a bug.

I assert assumptions and dive into their code when something is fishy.

I also know nothing about health, but I'm going to double check what my doctors say. Maybe against a 2nd doctor, maybe against the Internet, or maybe just listen to what my body is saying. Doctors are frequently wrong. It's kind of astonishing and scary how much they don't know

Tldr trust but verify.

Trust but verify is absolutely essential for doctors, as with most things. I’ve been given medication and told it’s perfectly safe only to find out the side effects and odds the hard way afterwards, for a symptom I should and could’ve treated with a simple dietary change. That’s my least egregious experience, even if said side effects have taken years to recover from.

Family members have had far far worse. And that’s in Norway’s healthcare system. So now I trust that they’ll mean well but verify because that’s not enough.

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