ICYMI They Kill Tech Geeks Too...

Steve Kinney admin at pilobilus.net
Sun Jan 3 14:31:23 PST 2016


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On 01/03/2016 03:57 PM, Troy Benjegerdes wrote:

> This is the **cypherpunks** mail list. Isn't the point of of
> being a punk to *question* authority, and the cypherpunk to
> question the narrative of weak authentication systems?
> 
> It seems important not to confuse the man Ian with a device
> and cryptographic key that was once known to be in posession of
> the man, who is now deceased.
> 
> Now if there is some reliable human witness that Ian actually
> keyed that text into a device in his physical posession then I
> think we'd all like to hear about it.
> 
> The only digital witness to the alleged tweets is not a
> particularly credible one, in my opinion.

"Everybody lies." - Greg House

First and foremost we lie to ourselves, continuously, as our
central nervous systems build models of the world based on
incomplete data and unexamined assumptions.  We usually believe
the result of this process is the "real world," because it is the
only world we can experience.  We have to believe, because the
processing overhead of questioning and testing everything, all the
time, would be crippling - and the results would be inconclusive.

But there is a limit to the advantage of taking our illusory
impressions of the real world at face value, and sometimes it does
pay to consciously examine how confident we are of a source of
information, why we have that confidence, and how these factors
should affect own conclusions about that information.  What
evidence do we really have, where did it come from and how can it
be tested?

When our available information is second hand, ambiguous and/or
self contradictory, and especially when it originates in a context
of human conflict, there may be no rational basis for confident
conclusions about what really happened:  Just a cluster of
possible interpretations which can be assigned higher or lower
probability on a basis of educated guesswork about the quality of
the sources and how the information itself fits - or does not fit
- - into what we already 'know' about its native context.

People who do this for a living are called intelligence analysts,
and their training includes all of the above.  When the going gets
spooky, the spooks his the books.  Highly recommended for anyone
who takes an interest in news and current events:

http://cryptome.org/2013/01/aaron-swartz/Psychology-of-Intelligence-
Analysis.pdf

Subjective human experience is the instrument that detects and
represents "reality," so it pays to have a handle on how that
system works.  I doubt that the CIA requires trainees to read and
study this textbook, but it wouldn't hurt if they did:

http://www.principiadiscordia.com/downloads/04%20Prometheus%20Rising
.pdf

:o)




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