If, when, and how often ... security flaws and fake news

When I was in middle school, my family moved from the sleepy rural town of Hurley, New York to the nearby city of Kingston.  While living in Hurley, my family had grown accustomed to the security standards of small communities where the nearest neighbors are quite a long distance from one another--that is to say no security standards.  My family almost never locked our doors, and my parents regularly left their keys in the car overnight.

Within a few weeks of moving to the comparatively populated Kingston, my father's car disappeared one morning.  He had left the car unlocked, with the keys in the ignition.  Some enterprising young man had noticed and taken advantage of the security hole.

A few weeks later we heard from the police at SUNY Albany.  Apparently, the guy had taken the car up to the campus and had been breaking into dorm rooms and storing stuff in the car (which he had also been living out of).  When the car came back, it was full of stolen stuff.  Amazingly, the SUNY police refused to deal with the stolen stuff because the car was originally stolen in Kingston and the Kingston PD refused to deal with the stolen stuff because the robberies happened on SUNY campus, so we were left with a whole bunch of stuff.  The guy who did all the stealing went to jail for a few months and my dad started taking his keys out of the ignition at night.

Amazingly, the day that the guy got out of jail, our car disappeared again!  Apparently, he had made himself a copy of the key.  That key was among his personal things when he was jailed and was among the personal things returned to him upon release.  He walked straight to our house, unlocked and started up the car and --creatively-- headed straight to SUNY Albany again and started robbing dorm rooms.  When the car came back the second time, Dad finally changed the locks.

I hope this is going somewhere...

When I was a teenager, I got involved with the early idea of online video games.  Back then, "online" meant dial-up, and specifically it meant direct dialing either a BBC or a friend's computer.  You would plug your phone line into the modem (external modem, of course) and then one of you would call the other one.  A few DOS commands later (actually a ton of inscrutably complex commands later) and you were DOOMing it up against one another.  In the '80s and early '90s, security considerations were a lot like Hurley... everything was unlocked and the keys were in the ignition.

Years later, at one of the first companies I started, I decided to host the email and web server for the company locally.  By "host locally" what I mean is that I got a static IP, stuck an old desktop in a closet and installed Apache.  Installing Apache was easy, but configuring security was complex and lengthy.  I thought back to the old BBC days and considered "what are the odds that somebody will discover this IP?"  The idea of learning about the security was interesting to me, though, and I put in a few days to educate myself, figure it all out, configure and install, etc. before activating the server.

What happened astonished me.  The first attack on the server came within a few seconds.  The next one just a few minutes after that.  By the end of the day, there had been dozens of intrusion attempts against this brand new server that was there to serve up a couple of lame web pages about a nobody video games company and to pass our completely uninteresting emails back and forth.  The pace of attacks didn't slow down, either.  It continued to increase as time went on.

At the time I started saying that security is serious business.  Security wasn't a question of IF you will get attacked or even WHEN, but HOW OFTEN will you get attacked?  This is probably more true now than ever before.

Over time, I have come to recognize that this equation is a function of network density.  The more dense a network of nodes are interconnected, the more interactions each node needs to expect.  These interactions can be anticipated, they can be serendipitous, or they can be hostile.  The more deeply and broadly we immerse ourselves as individuals into a more interconnected society, the more interactions we are exposed to.  The likelihood of "intrusion attempts" (hostile interactions) goes from "will it happen?" to "when will it happen?" to "how often will it happen?"

The next interesting question becomes "what will tomorrow's intrusion attempts look like?"  A decade ago everybody had at least a few Nigerian prince emails.  A few years ago, everybody was falling for phishing scams on Facebook.

This year was the year of fake news.  Possibly the most insidious of all hostile interactions, fake news plays on our human desire for an echo chamber.  Fake news spreads like a virus through the like-minded and hijacks our rational-thinking.  The Nigerian emails stole bank account numbers.  The phishing scams stole our identities.  Now fake news is stealing our ability to think.

Growth and ungrowth - forcing the vote

Over the past 30 years the US economy has grown.

from http://data.worldbank.org/

At the same time, middle class incomes have stayed flat.

from: http://www.advisorperspectives.com/

I found a really great breakdown and analysis of earnings trends at this website.  It's interesting to note that the sources here are not political sources or think tanks.  This is the US census and a couple of investment advisers that have aggregated and charted the census data.

At the same time, there has been considerable growth in the income of middle class women, and some minorities.

http://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2013/ted_20131104.htm

The majority of middle class men have not been realizing these gains.  Additionally, many recent college grads are not experiencing these gains.  Link to wikipedia on income

There is a significant body of research on happiness that points to the concept that an individual's sense of happiness is a function of how they feel they compare to their self-described set of peers.  When a person looks around at their friends they do a natural, precognitive comparison that establishes happiness on a sliding scale.  In the case of the economy, the rule is similar.  White men are still better off than most ethnographic groups in the US, but when they measure themselves based on growth, they feel left behind (they are left behind in growth).

Lastly, I'll leave this article on the slide of the American Middle class from the NYT.

Now I will make a logically unsubstantiated leap here and posit that a vast majority of Donald Trumps supports are accurately described by the above economic picture.  I believe that Trump's base is built on the frustrations of white men (and those who are close to them and care about them) who have legitimate economic grievances regarding their individual situation.

It is really a shame that Trump is their mouthpiece, however, because his root cause analysis is deeply flawed.  I don't think there are any credible economists out there who would blame illegal immigration for the trends I identified above.  Certainly there are no economists who would blame ISIS or gay rights or a woman's right to freedom from sexual assault or any of Trump's other defining positions.

The shame here is that he a) provides an unproductive distraction to the people who are getting screwed.  They're now getting screwed by him, too.  b) His angry rhetoric is producing a dangerous death spiral in the form of a reactionary populist echo chamber.  c) the result is that everybody who has been experiencing the gains in the economy assumes that those who are left behind are just racist crackpots.  The whole argument becomes illegitimate.

Ironically, the result is very similar to what you see with Black Lives Matter.  White men are not the subject of negative implicit bias and therefore are not systematically and consistently exposed to negative (and often lethal) encounters with the Police can't wrap their heads around the problem.  They look at the movement, find the worst in it, see some looters or rioters and decide the whole thing is bullshit.  Same story, different disenfranchised and marginalized set of experiences.

Metacognition, forecasts and estimating ability

tl;dr: Odds are pretty good that your opinions on everything are worse and more ill-informed than you think they are. Suspend judgment about the ability of others (positive or negative) because it is probably just an echo effect (they're brilliant if they agree with you and stupid if they don't). This is all especially true if you aren't an expert in the field under consideration. Don't apply this logic to others, apply it to yourself first.

Metacognition refers to the act of thinking about thinking. This is the same sort of concept as Freud's superego, or what phenomenologist philosophers call our consciousness. Kahneman might refer to it as "slow thinking".

In general, our brain has two methods for making a decision. By "decision" I mean just about any sort of conclusion about something. There is a fast method that runs ahead and draws its conclusions based on instinct, training, experience and mental shortcuts. The fast method is great for things that we are evolutionarily prepared for and for things where training is effective. Generally training is effective for things that require quick reflexes and that provide immediate, salient feedback. Fast thinking is gut feel and reflexes and is not something we are aware of consciously because it doesn't formulate in language -- it forms in action.

The slow method is what we think of as "thinking". It is logical, it handles new ideas and concepts. It is what we observe as "thought". It presents itself in our language and is shaped by the way our language works. Slow thinking spends a lot of its time confabulating a logical reason why the fast method came up with what it did. A lot of our thought is spent thinking about what we just did and justifying it to ourselves.

This where our ability to forecast comes in. Most of the time, when asked about the future, people immediately have a gut feel. That gut feel is hugely biased (too many forms of bias to go into now). As long as we don't get immediate and obvious feedback that the forecast was wrong, our brain has mechanisms in place to pat itself on the back for another great forecast. Even if the forecast is terrible, if the feedback is subtle or slow, our brain still thinks it did a great job and our metacognition formulates a story to back it up.

Unfortunately, most of the forecasting situations we face in the modern world don't provide immediate and obvious feedback.

This is the reason that we're all bad at estimating our ability. We are best at identifying problems when we have expertise with a subject. The better we are at something, the more capable we are of identifying when we screw it up. Conversely, the worse we are at something, the worse we are at identifying how bad we are. We blithely go along, thinking we're pretty awesome at the stuff we're worst at. Those who are the best at things are also the most aware of their shortcomings.

There are lots of examples of this in the world. I guarantee that Tiger Woods is far more critical of his golf game than a typical weekend duffer. Proof-reading the English language is another great example--if you don't know the rules of grammar very well, then you won't be aware of your errors. Driving is another example where people are notoriously bad at identifying their own skill (except race-car drivers, who are typically very slow drivers on city streets).

So what?

Well, this whole thing applies to business, sure. I think what's really interesting is how much it applies to politics. Look at how many people who know nothing about economics are judging the economic policy pronouncements of the Presidential candidates. Look at how many people who know nothing about police training are hypothesizing about their motives. Look at how many people who know nothing about life experience as a black American are denigrating their perspective. Science would tell us all those people are probably wrong and atribiliously wrong about it because they are even ignorant of their ignorance.

Mutual Admiration Society

Be careful what you hear, it may not have been what was said (or what was meant).

I just finished Malcolm Gladwell's wonderful podcast series "Revisionist History".  There are many interesting threads through the various episodes, but the big meta-theme that loomed large for me was the danger of confirmation bias.  I think it was the second episode  (the one about Saigon) that really hit on the issue.  It is worth the listen.

This problem is giant when you're building a business model.  It is very hard to keep somebody in the room who honestly thinks your idea is stupid, but that person is essential.  I'm not talking about some devil's advocate who will throw out half-baked objections before rolling over and giving you a false sense of accomplishment.  I mean somebody who really thinks the idea won't work and is willing to try hard to articulate why.

"Oh, you're so smart and your new business idea can't fail!"

What comes naturally is that you will find somebody else who is enthusiastic about your idea and will be supportive.  Often this is somebody you already know, and probably you're on friendly terms. After all, that's why you brought the idea to her in the first place.  She'll talk up how great your idea is and you'll recognize what a genius she is for liking your idea.  The two of you will add more friends until you've built up a real, proper mutual admiration society around self-love as represented in lavish praise for one another's brilliance.

"We're all so smart and funny and we're all going to be super-successful!!"

This is great when you're starting out!  Everybody except the most ruthlessly anti-social people need external approval of some kind.  The trick is knowing when it is time to stop bolstering your confidence and adding good news and start sorting out the potential problems, doing your pre-mortems with serious abandon and sorting out the real contingency plans.

At that point, it's essential to realize that sometimes the smartest people in the room are the ones who are willing to say "I don't get it" and your best friends are the ones who are willing to say "that's stupid."