If you are like me and are interested in security, not only in computer systems but in general, this essay by Bruce (link to his post about the essay, which contains a link to the pdf), he gets into the psychology of feeling secure vs being secure.
Some of the things he says can even be called obvious (like the daily security trade-offs we make when, for example, we decide on a route to drive from home to work), but most people don’t really realize what most decisions we make in life really entail. Without these decisions, we’d never accomplish anything…and if we’d let the full implications of the task get in the way of our decision, some times we’d end up frozen and undecided.
On the other hand, his views can also be surprisingly deep and thought provoking, like the following:
And yet at the same time we seem hopelessly bad at it. We get it
wrong all the time. We exaggerate some risks while minimizing others.
We exaggerate some costs while minimizing others. Even simple
trade-offs we get wrong, wrong, wrong — again and again. A Vulcan
studying human security behavior would shake his head in amazement.
The truth is that we’re not hopelessly bad at making security
trade-offs. We are very well adapted to dealing with the security
environment endemic to hominids living in small family groups on the
highland plains of East Africa. It’s just that the environment in New
York in 2006 is different from Kenya circa 100,000 BC. And so our
feeling of security diverges from the reality of security, and we get
things wrong.
So…has humanity’s decision-making ability stayed undeveloped while civilization and our way of life kept evolving and changing? Or is it just that life changes too fast for our poor brains to keep up with it?
Anyway, the essay is extremely interesting, well worth reading, even if security isn’t the only thing you think about :)
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Tags: Tech, Thoughts
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