[IWeldMelons]

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.

[stavros]

> "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.

[neom]

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.

[stavros]

What would be different if you didn't trust them to do it correctly?

[neom]

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.

[Izkata]

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.

[consteval]

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.