With a good critical thinking base, it is fairly easy to avoid the 'evil' of technology and technology-enabled communications while benefiting greatly from broad knowledge, understanding, and, ideally, beneficial connections.  If you are limited to or you choose the path of ignorance, you may fall for anything.

Good critical thinking capability, along with a good awareness of scams, cognitive bias mistake patterns, and risk analysis, is a multi-layered defense-in-depth system, with the penultimate safety of a cognitive-enabled application level firewall.  Lesser mental architectures try to stop everything with a port-based firewalls or anti-virus, but they're wide open to easily constructed phishing and zero-day attack.  Openness to memetic infection is like allowing anyone to run code as root at the host level rather than in a throwaway Docker container.  The opposite problem is being so afraid of being taken again that you won't incorporate anything new because you don't trust that you can discriminate.  That's a lot like refusing to update your software for fear of exploit but leaving yourself open to now-known bugs and gaps that have been fixed.  Or you simply are used to your current pattern and dislike change; to be safe, you may reject most input.

I left home at 15 and taught myself programming etc., so I have a bias toward self-sufficiency:  I didn't believe in sheltering my children except at the extremes; they are thoroughly resistant to memetic infection.

sdw

On 9/6/16 10:55 AM, Peressim wrote: