What does it mean to "trust someone"
Dec. 17th, 2013 11:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackIf you say you trust someone what does that mean? That you trust their integrity, not to deliberately take advantage of you? Or that you trust their competence? Or that you trust their self-knowledge of their own level of competence?
It seems a common sitcom moment that people take "trust" to mean, "if someone is important in your life, you must automatically believe everything that comes out of their mouth, however ridiculous". Which seems obviously a bad idea.
But I think I'm also worse-than-average at inferring whether or not I _should_ take something on trust, that someone hasn't explicitly stated.
It's like, suppose someone offers to post an important letter for you. I think it's reasonable to assume they wouldn't take it as far as the postbox, then choose to crumple it up and throw it away instead of posting it. But is it reasonable to assume they'll REMEMBER to post it? If they SAY they'll remember, is it reasonable to assume they're right? Do you have the same idea of how important it is that it's posted TODAY? For some people, it goes without saying that DO know how, and doubting that is insulting their competence. But it's also true that basically everyone THINKS they can post a letter, but many of us also assume "oh, I forgot and did it tomorrow" or "yes, but I spilled some beer on it" are equally good. So, I always want to clarify, "do you actually have good evidence for the level of certainty I wanted, or did you just assume that you could do it 'well enough'"? But that always comes across as "don't trust you", because we assume that we SHOULD be competent enough, and someone doubting us is assuming (a) we're untrustworthy or (b) we're so stupid we don't know whether we can perform a common day-to-day action or not :(
It seems a common sitcom moment that people take "trust" to mean, "if someone is important in your life, you must automatically believe everything that comes out of their mouth, however ridiculous". Which seems obviously a bad idea.
But I think I'm also worse-than-average at inferring whether or not I _should_ take something on trust, that someone hasn't explicitly stated.
It's like, suppose someone offers to post an important letter for you. I think it's reasonable to assume they wouldn't take it as far as the postbox, then choose to crumple it up and throw it away instead of posting it. But is it reasonable to assume they'll REMEMBER to post it? If they SAY they'll remember, is it reasonable to assume they're right? Do you have the same idea of how important it is that it's posted TODAY? For some people, it goes without saying that DO know how, and doubting that is insulting their competence. But it's also true that basically everyone THINKS they can post a letter, but many of us also assume "oh, I forgot and did it tomorrow" or "yes, but I spilled some beer on it" are equally good. So, I always want to clarify, "do you actually have good evidence for the level of certainty I wanted, or did you just assume that you could do it 'well enough'"? But that always comes across as "don't trust you", because we assume that we SHOULD be competent enough, and someone doubting us is assuming (a) we're untrustworthy or (b) we're so stupid we don't know whether we can perform a common day-to-day action or not :(
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Date: 2013-12-17 02:19 pm (UTC)Just as we recognise several different meanings of "love", the trust I place in my partner, in my airline pilot, in my work colleagues, are quite different.
The distinctions become quite stark once one is thinking in terms of security engineering. Marketing people, for example, seem to abuse "trusted" to mean "you have no alternative but to trust this", which is emphatically not the same thing as "trustworthy". And the PGP web of trust explicitly distinguishes between your trust that key X belongs to person Y, and your trust that key X will be diligent in choosing which other keys to sign.