this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2025
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I've always hated the phrase "trust but verify."
It's a nonsensical oxymoron. It's like saying "I trust my wife not to cheat on me, but I verify it by having her followed." Then you don't trust your wife dude
I'll get off my soapbox now.
That's why in Germany we instead say: Trust is good, but verification is better
I think you understand it correctly. 😂
Itsironic.webm
It resolves if you realize that “trust” can refer to an action taken which will only turn out okay if the thing trusted is indeed trustworthy.
For example, a field agent reports that there’s a forbidden shipment of firearms passing through X port on such a such date.
“Trust but verify” in this situation means:
That’s my take on it at least. You take whatever action would be warranted if the intel is correct. But you also work to verify the intel (you just don’t wait for the confirmation to take action).
edit: this is a wild guess, by the way
This is exactly it. The OPs analogy of his wife cheating needs a bit of a tweak because the assumption his wife is predicated on the fact that she was unfaithful at some point.
A lighter example might be trust your wife started the dishwasher. You verify that she did by checking the dish detergent door.
It’s a risk management strategy where you only do checks afterwards.
“Trust” means that you don’t make processes wait on passing checks before proceeding, because that would be expensive and/or slow.
“Verify” means that you have a separate process that comes through and runs checks afterwards, maybe on only some of the things you trusted, to catch issues.
It’s ideal when you have high-volume and/or low-latency processes where failures are low stakes but you still want to catch systemic issues eventually.
It’s related to the idea that “the optimal amount of fraud is non-zero”.
I trust that you know what you are doing, however rules say I must verify your work to ensure no errors (or ensure fairness.)
How about: “I have no reason to doubt, but I’m gonna verify just to be sure”?
In my work it refers moreso to how you speak with the client, while still needing to verify their claims.