Bruce Schneier Talks Brain Heuristics and Security

ancientribe writes "Bruce Schneier is at it again: the security icon shares his latest research and insight on the interplay between psychology and security in this article in Dark Reading. The focus of Schneier's latest research is on brain heuristics and perceptions of security, which may be the basis for the best-selling author's next book. His goal for the topic, which he'll be presenting at the RSA Conference next week, is to focus on how people think, and feel, about security, and how neuroscience can help explain how our perception of risk doesn't always match reality."

Re:That word. . .

[poopdeville]

Please look in a dictionary. Only one of the five to six meanings for the word 'literal' is opposite in meaning to 'figurative.' The rest are orthogonal. Indeed, the primary and secondary definitions are "conforming to the exact meaning of words",[1] and adverbial forms of 'real', 'factual', and 'unembellished'.

Really, it's good that you paid attention in high school. You learned a lot of great rules of thumb that will help you avoid making grammatical errors. But they're just rules of thumb. They don't make you qualified to correct other people's errors in domains in which the rules you learned don't apply.

[1] Before you throw a hissy fit about the use of the words 'exact' and 'meaning,' read this. [wikipedia.org]

Re:That word. . .

[poopdeville]

Did I say that?

There are plenty of perfectly good uses for the word 'literally'. I counted 6 when I looked in my dictionary.

The "tweed jackets" (nice flamebait there, by the way. I happen to wear tweed every day) have shown that one of the commonly used meanings for the word is vacuous. To paraphrase Wittgenstein, the meaning of a phrase is in its uses. And this possibly figurative meaning can be perfectly exact. Ergo, a phrase can be meant literally and figuratively at the same time.

Re:Perception

[Sique]

The same can be said about the terrorism panic. It's still more likely to choke on a fishbone and die than to be hit by a terroristic attack. For Germany [pop. 80 mio] there are about 700 reported dead each year because of choking on a fishbone. I wonder if the number of all Germans ever dying during a terroristic attack since 1947 has ever reached 700.
And the perception still gets it wrong if two risks are very similar: Think about the craze because of the H5N1 bird flu. Worldwide we have now ~200 people who died because of H5N1. Each year the numbers of people dying on whatever flu is currently going around is in the millions. For Germany the estimations are between 10,000 and 20,000.

The New Science of Change

[screeder]

For what it's worth, I wrote an in-depth look at the neuroscience of the brain and its impact on peoples' ability to change for CIO magazine here: http://www.cio.com/archive/091506/change.html [cio.com].