My favourite definition of trust is “willingness to be vulnerable” and I think this answers most of the questions in the post. For example it explains why trust is a decision that can exist independently from your beliefs: if you think someone is genuinely on your side with probability 95%, you can choose to trust them, by doing something that benefit you in 95% of cases and hurt you on the 5% of cases, or you can decide not to, by taking actions that are better in the 5% of cases. Similar for trusting a statement about the world.
I think this definition comes from psychology, but I also found it useful when talking about trusted third parties in cryptography. Also in this case, we don’t care about the probability that the third part is malicious, what matters is that you are vulnerable if and only if they are malicious.
Yes, this is pretty much how I see trust. It is an abstraction over how much I would think that the other person will do what I would want them to do.
Trusting someone means that I don’t have to double-check their work and we can work closer and faster together. If I don’t trust someone to do something, I have to spend much more time verifying that the thing that they are doing is correct.
My favourite definition of trust is “willingness to be vulnerable” and I think this answers most of the questions in the post. For example it explains why trust is a decision that can exist independently from your beliefs: if you think someone is genuinely on your side with probability 95%, you can choose to trust them, by doing something that benefit you in 95% of cases and hurt you on the 5% of cases, or you can decide not to, by taking actions that are better in the 5% of cases. Similar for trusting a statement about the world.
I think this definition comes from psychology, but I also found it useful when talking about trusted third parties in cryptography. Also in this case, we don’t care about the probability that the third part is malicious, what matters is that you are vulnerable if and only if they are malicious.
Yes, this is pretty much how I see trust. It is an abstraction over how much I would think that the other person will do what I would want them to do.
Trusting someone means that I don’t have to double-check their work and we can work closer and faster together. If I don’t trust someone to do something, I have to spend much more time verifying that the thing that they are doing is correct.