Hi Peter --
Your two additional explanatory messages here were needed to explain
how you deal with trust transitivity when trust is not simply transitive,
but might serve to allow you to explore for a path that, when tested by
trial and error, might find a working transitive case in reality, based
on more information than the simple assumption of transitivity without
testing it to obtain more information via additional information
transmission channels.
So, now you are confirming what I understand about defining trust.
Information, per Shannon, is some specific bits which the recipient did
not expect to receive. On this definitional foundation he built a huge
edifice of mathematics for computing a lot of stuff about the capacities
of wires and other transmission media, and the design of telephone and
other communications channels, including how many redundant bits are
needed to detect and correct errors.
And Trust, per my friend Ed Gerck, is that information, obtained via
some different channel (or channels), which is required to
understand and to trust said received information bits that (per Shannon)
were not specifically expected to be received.
So, what you have done to counter the fact that trust is simply not
transitive, is to add more channels to the process of communication,
to obtain the required trust information via other channels, which you
also state "might not prove to induce the desired trust".
In the specific case you have chosen, I expect that your target will not
accept your "tokens" as I have been considered to be the most dangerous
person on the Internet, per various people. This means that I might not
be considered to be trustworthy.
This condition of untrustworthy perceptions is OK with me, but in the
context of this discussion, you may very well have not gotten your message
to be accepted by Paul Vixie.
Maybe next time you will succeed, but so far, the odds are against you
next time too;-)...
So, for all intentions and purposes, trust is not simply transitive.
In part this is because it assumes a single channel, while additional
channels are required because trust information cannot be meaningfully
sent via the same channel as carried the information to be trusted.
This is why people typically laugh when a salesman says "Trust Me!"
Because they intuitively know that self assertion of trustworthiness
has no value.
Cheers...\Stef
PS: In this case, it is good that you did follow-up on your own message.
...\S
At 20:58 -0700 5/28/03, Peter Deutsch wrote:
g'day,
Oops, bad form to follow-up to your own posts, but I just want to make
sure I'm on record as being the first to notice that this is really just
another instantiation of the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. In honour of
this observation, my current working name for this system is "Bacon"
(for the hopefully obvious reason).
I wrote:
So, back comes the Oracle, with the path:
Peter Deutsch -> Einar Stefferud -> Randy Bush -> Paul Vixie
Sorry Randy, I'm going to drop you from the example. I think it's
funnier if it reads:
Peter Deutsch -> Einar Stefferud -> Kevin Bacon -> Paul Vixie
And if you don't get this, go read:
http://www-distance.syr.edu/bacon.html
- peterd
--
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Peter Deutsch pdeutsch(_at_)gydig(_dot_)com
Gydig Software
"Bungle..."
"That's an 'i', you idiot..."
"Oh, right. 'Bingle..."
- Red versus Blue...
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