digitalprimate

Driving to Aikido tonight, a motorcyclist passed me. The weather was fine, and although he was driving reasonably and traffic was light, I had a strong sense that something bad was going to happen to him. So strong in fact that despite knowing the roads on which I was driving intimately, I took not one but two wrong, very wrong turns, for example turning South instead of North on the Bronx River Parkway, a fairly major highway around here and one I take often. The sensation disorientated me, subtly drawing my attention to dangerous sections of highway then projecting those backdrops into dire little films that changed constantly but played continuously in the Cartesian movie hall of my head. I couldn’t shake the feeling until I left the highway and hit the classic anytown USA streets of Scarsdale.

Being thrown around for an hour and a half in Aikido, however, did shake the hoodoo out of me, and by the time I left Scarsdale, I’d forgotten all about it until I pulled the sharp left down the ramp to the Bronx River again and, remembering how I’d spooked so easily earlier, chided myself to remember this most obvious example of confirmation bias next time I chalked up being distracted or hitting the new espresso machine too many times to premonitions.

Five minutes later, LE had traffic stopped both directions on the Bronx River Parkway. I dutifully stopped behind an SUV which itself was stopped behind a police cruiser around and beside which a bunch of guys in shorts and t-shirts looking for something with flashlights. My first thought was, this must be a sobriety check point, but that didn’t’ fit what was going on: plainclothes cops with flashlights not being stuck into drivers’ faces. A uniformed officer went by, I asked what was happening, and he replied, “A motorcycle fatality. They’re looking for his body parts.” It was then I noticed most of his leg was about 10 meters in front of me and to the left (just above that pink light squiggle in the photo, near the guardrail. It was hard not to notice when another cop shouted at a ambulance to stop because it was about to run over it.) After the cops detoured us around the Parkway, at the next exit coming from the South you could see what was left of his bike - not much -crushed against the median guardrail - a good 40 or 50 meters from where the rest of him was.

When I recounted this to my wife she pointed out that at least he must have died instantly. I counted eight small to mid size baggies being taken back to the ambulance and saw more parts that needed bagging, so, yes, one would assume that it was quite immediate. In our morgue, I’ve seen bodies hit by subway trains (jumpers) and by cars, and I’ve seen two motorcycle fatalities. I consider myself a person who, for the most part, abides by the laws of physics, but I can’t think of any way to explain how that poor guy got so torn up. Bodies just don’t rip completely apart like that in these types of accidents. The only thing I can think of - and this would explain why only one car was in front of me while there were two cruisers, one blocking traffic on each side of the Parkway - is that after the initial accident, multiple cars didn’t see him or couldn’t stop in time.

At most, I missed witnessing the accident, or even being involved, by five minutes, perhaps the five minutes after class when an unusual turn of a rather random conversation led me to discuss diving spots in Thailand with a classmate headed there in a couple of months. I wrote about premonitions before, and all my disclaimers about them are there. At the time I declared that I almost certainly wouldn’t avoid boarding a jetliner about which I’d just had a premonition. After tonight, I’m not so certain.

What’s a good empiricist to think?

Is it possible that one’s thinking, perhaps via Einstein’s famous, “spooky action at a distance,” can influence machines?

Or is it more likely that Wired is pulling shit out dey ass?

I don’t know: it sure would be cool if our thoughts could someday remotely control machines, but it just rings so counter to everything I’ve been taught about how the world works. Then again, maybe not.

In this excellent interview, Schneier talks about how we human primates tend to evaluate risk, and why we’re often so bad at it.

Here’s the boilerplate intro to Schneier’s philosophy:

In Beyond Fear, Schneier presents a set of questions to rationally assess the security process, in other words, how to get beyond fear:

Step 1: What assets are you trying to protect?
Step 2: What are the risks to those assets?
Step 3: How well does the security solution mitigate those risks?
Step 4: What other risks does the security solution cause?
Step 5: What costs and trade-offs does the security solution impose?
And finally: Is the countermeasure worth it?

Easy enough, but why are people so bad at it?

Central to the trade-off decision is a concept of risk, and people’s perceptions of risk rarely match the reality of risk. Like the DC sniper example, people simply don’t understand the true extent of the risk, and thus either trade off too much or too little.
There are lots of psychological studies that shed a light on this phenomenon. In Beyond Fear, I talk about five common fallacies:

1. People exaggerate spectacular but rare risks, and downplay common risks.
2. The unknown is perceived to be riskier than the familiar.
3. Personified risks are perceived to be greater than anonymous risks.
4. People overestimate involuntary risks: risks in situations they can’t control.
5. People overestimate risks that they can’t control but think they should.

What this means in real life is:

As animals, we make security trade-offs based on our immediate environment. We do it either through instinct or through intelligence, and the bias in either case is toward survival.

Unfortunately, there are two aspects of modern society that throw this all out of whack. The first is technology. Our security intuition evolved in a world where nothing ever changed. Fear of the new made a lot of sense in that kind of world. But the pace of today’s technology means that things change all the time. Look at the Internet: every week there’s a new attack tool, a new vulnerability, a new danger….

The interview is somewhat long and far ranging, but still remarkably clear and practical. Anyone concerned with evaluating risk should read it.

OK, no more Gibson or Schneier fanboy stuff for a while.