Friday, June 22, 2012

What I've Been Reading

Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive by Bruce Schneier. The first half the book is a nothing but an ubiquitous refresher course on psychological biases, behavioral economics et al. But if one could skim through the first half, the meat of the book is the latter half which covers Schneier's specialty - Security. Btw., I loved his TEDX talk and debate on profiling with Sam Harris more than this book.

This is the recurring theme of the book:

"The important thing to remember is this: no security system is perfect. It's hard to admit in our technologically advanced society that we can't do something, but in security there are a lot of things we can't do. This isn't a reason to live in fear, or even necessarily a cause for concern. This is the normal state of life. It might even be a good thing. Being alive entails risk, and there always will be outliers. Even if you reduced the murder rate to one in a million, three hundred unlucky people in the U.S. would be murdered every year.

We need to be able to trust strangers, singly and in organizations, all over the world all the time. We also need to be able to trust indirectly; we need to trust the trust people we don't already know and systems we don't yet understand. We need to trust trust."





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