He doesn’t call them by name, but Cory Doctorow nails the human inability to deal with Black Swans, the Very-High-Impact, Very-Low-Likelihood event perfectly.

The single most pernicious threat to liberty today is humanity’s natural
tendency to misunderstand the statistics of rare events. We’re just not wired to have good intuition about things that happen with extreme infrequency.

I’ll prove it. If we were good at understanding statistics, then here’s what would happen when you flew to Las Vegas. You’d step out of McCarran airport, stare down the Strip at all those glittering, palatial casinos and say to yourself, “Holy crap – think of all the suckers who must have lost everything to finance this place!” Instead, our foolish minds are filled with thoughts like, “Man, look at all the money in this town – I’m going to win big!” And another casino is built.

He spoke about two miles from my house on his book tour a week ago, but I was unable to make it. *sigh*

As an FYI, I’ll be at SecureWorld in Chicago (really, it’s out in the ‘burbs in Rosemont) Wednesday and Thursday. I’ll be on Glenn Kapetansky’s panel on Virtualization Wednesday afternoon (”Desktop Virtualization as a Security Mechanism (Did We Stuff Glue in Our USB Ports Too Soon?)”) and roaming around various and sundry other presentations, keynotes, etc. the rest of the time.

Should be a good time.

I can’t properly attribute this, since my wife sent it to me as an email, but I still wanted to share:

Last night my sister and I were sitting in the den and I said to her, ‘I never want to live in a vegetative state, dependent on some machine and fluids from a bottle to keep me alive. That would be no quality of life at all, if that ever happens, just pull the plug.’ So she got up, unplugged the computer, and threw out my wine.

She’s such a bitch.

Happy Friday, everyone!