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You can trim that down quite a lot by assuming things aren't magic and use some minimal trust. If people say that cars are designed using newtonian physics, and

You can trim that down quite a lot by assuming things aren't magic and use some minimal trust. If people say that cars are designed using newtonian physics, and you see your car is working, then you can say you have tested newtonian physics even if you don't understand the calculations. Basically you test what you have and trust the description of the implementation. If it works you can trust the whole chain. This is of course not 100%, but it is about as reliable as it can get for an individual. What you shouldn't do is assume that stuff that aren't 100% for sure are equally bad.

soulofmischief 3y ago
It's quite easy to test this very assumption against chaos theory in a controlled environment and demonstrate why a system involving a complex chain of dependencies is increasingly unpredictable down the chain. As an uninformed consumer at or the bottom of the chain, you cannot trust that an interface that works today, will work tomorrow, for you do not have access to all of the chaotic variables which constrain the interface.
cornholio 3y ago
This is exactly why the appeal to authority is such a useful heuristic: when it comes to physics, I trust the man who teaches the engineers that car companies employ to make cars - because I can see cars work every day, so at the end of the chain there must exist a person who has fundamental insights about how the world works. So while I can't prove something is right by appeal to authority, it's a very practical way for me to swift though the unbounded mass of claims and information that I couldn't possibly verify or prove in my lifetime, not even to a 19th century level of scientific knowledge. For example, I saw an onion cell once at a school microscope, but I have never seen a bacteria. So as far as I can independently prove, I live in times before the germ theory of disease - but that doesn't mean I shouldn't trust my doctor when he recommends vaccines and antibiotics. The entire antivaxx movement is just an attempt to challenge the medical authority by people who are not intellectually equipped to verify the scientific claims.
andrewflnr 3y ago
"Minimal trust" is still distinctly non-zero, which is my point. GP was trying to tell us we should get to zero, which is obviously not feasible.

soulofmischief 3y ago

It's quite easy to test this very assumption against chaos theory in a controlled environment and demonstrate why a system involving a complex chain of dependencies is increasingly unpredictable down the chain. As an uninformed consumer at or the bottom of the chain, you cannot trust that an interface that works today, will work tomorrow, for you do not have access to all of the chaotic variables which constrain the interface.

cornholio 3y ago

This is exactly why the appeal to authority is such a useful heuristic: when it comes to physics, I trust the man who teaches the engineers that car companies employ to make cars - because I can see cars work every day, so at the end of the chain there must exist a person who has fundamental insights about how the world works. So while I can't prove something is right by appeal to authority, it's a very practical way for me to swift though the unbounded mass of claims and information that I couldn't possibly verify or prove in my lifetime, not even to a 19th century level of scientific knowledge. For example, I saw an onion cell once at a school microscope, but I have never seen a bacteria. So as far as I can independently prove, I live in times before the germ theory of disease - but that doesn't mean I shouldn't trust my doctor when he recommends vaccines and antibiotics. The entire antivaxx movement is just an attempt to challenge the medical authority by people who are not intellectually equipped to verify the scientific claims.

andrewflnr 3y ago

"Minimal trust" is still distinctly non-zero, which is my point. GP was trying to tell us we should get to zero, which is obviously not feasible.