Comment by teddyh
6 years ago
> In the meantime, non-technical people only give you weird disbelieving looks when you mention this to them, and then continue ignoring it.
It’s psychological. People can’t believe things which would make it too hard for them to stay the person they currently are. It’s almost impossible for anyone to do anything but ignore and repress such information. If you ask them later about it, they probably would deny even hearing it or having the conversation, because they wouldn’t actually remember it.
Ask anyone who tried to convince a sweeping societal change based on logical arguments. See what happened to Ignaz Semmelweis. You simply can’t convince people of hard things with logic.
How many crackpots have there been there for each Ignaz Semmelweiss, though? Ignoring weird people pays off if it saves having having to spend time on their far-out theories, even if Ignaz was right as well as weird.
I personally think security has been spoiled by unrealistic advice. "Use PGP" is the worst, but it's not alone. A few years ago a mass-market device (tens of millions sold) asked me to enter my password three times within two minutes in order to carry out one single operation, and it demanded that the password be secure enough that I needed two kinds of mode-shift to enter it on that device's keyboard. Who takes that vendor's ideas about security seriously after experiencing shit like that?
Crackpots can be filtered out using logic, though. But people don’t do that; people filter based on how hard it would be to change in the proposed way.
People might say that they want security, but when some logical person takes this literally and respond “Use PGP”, they might be logically correct (since as bad as it may be, there might not be any secure alternative to PGP), this advice will always be ignored because what people want is not actually security. What people want is to feel secure while not changing anything about what they are doing or how they are doing it.
> Crackpots can be filtered out using logic, though. But people don’t do that;
For an excellent argument of why most people shouldn't do that, I recommend the essay "epistemic learned helplessness": https://web.archive.org/web/20180406150429/https://squid314....
The gist is that most people are so bad at evaluating logical arguments that they are more likely to be swayed by false arguments rather than correct ones, so the winning strategy is to simply ignore everything that sounds strange.
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If the headache of dealing with PGP is greater than the headache of dealing with a hacker and dodging google targeted ads, it's not remotely illogical to choose the latter.
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They just do the naive cost-benefit analysis: everyone uses it, successful people use these things, yet no bad things happen to them, why should I really care?
And that behavior is rational. If I have 1 in 1 million chance of dying from a loose brick in a building falling on my head, the rational thing is to completely disregard this risk and live my life as usual, especially if I live in a city.
Unless it’s planes or terrorism. Why is that?
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Totally. A lot of people leave the back door to their house unlocked too. Where risk is low, the amount of resources people expend to mitigate that risk is also low, and generally should be.
We're herd animals. We're safe if we stick with the herd.
Have you ever assumed it's not some weird psychological effect but rather that people aren't interested enough in technology? It's like trying to preach GPL to the average programmer; who cares really?
For real, basically going straight to "their weak human-lizard brains can't handle the weight of reality bearing down on them" seems borderline comically presumptuous.
Who said anything about “their” or “them”? I spoke about people, and I meant everybody, including myself. We, human beings, can’t make logical decisions. The most we can hope for is to stop ourselves from making illogical ones, by forcing ourselves to logically rationalize our decisions after the fact. However, rationalizations are tricky things, and almost anything can be rationalized to seem reasonable. But it’s the best we have.
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All this because the phone has some extra Linux or something. Framing buying a phone with a different operating system as an irrational decision made by feeble trapped brains is what gives Linux zealots a bad name.
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> make it too hard for them to stay the person they currently are
Why do you think people's identity is tied to the auditability of complex computer systems?
> Why do you think people's identity is tied to the auditability of complex computer systems?
I don’t think that. I think people tie their identity to all sorts of things, including the obvious Apple and Android fans, but more importantly “user of mainstream apps”. Many people think they can’t be who they are (a.k.a. “can’t live”) without normal mainstream phone apps.
People don’t have to tie their identity to this, but many do.
I guess it's similar to being fully aware of one's mortality. You can't live in that reality without suffering quite a bit.
Yes, I see what you mean, and I agree that it’s a good analogy. But factually, the absolute version of that statement is wrong. You can, in fact, live with your own mortality without suffering. The process of arriving to that state of mind might require some suffering, though.
—
I didn’t put you in a prison, Evey. I just showed you the bars.
[…]
You were in a cell, Evey. They offered you a choice between the death of your principles and the death of your body. You said you’d rather die. You faced the fear of your own death, and you were calm and still. Try to feel now what you felt then…
I… felt… like… an angel…
— V for Vendetta, issue 7, 1989