4 ms·

Who must you trust?

52 points by programd 12y ago

lifeisstillgood 12y ago
I sit here looking up at a sky with Mars hanging just above the half moon and realise that trying to enumerate who we trust is almost a fools errand - I have never computed the paths of the planets from my own observations, never verified we do revolve around the sun. I trust the consensus of the majority, based on the detailed calculationsnof the few. Heartbleed was and is the same. I am not goingnto review the medical literature on anti-biotics, read our politicians receipts nor any part of the thousand other things that I need to trust apart from computer security. I have no quibble with "know the ground upon which you stand and be able to rebuild it" but we must all make a judgement on where to draw the line. Looking at Mars I realised that the line is a darn sight closer than I realised.
- nkurz 12y ago
  I am not going to review the medical literature on anti-biotics I'd argue that occasionally sampling such things is worthwhile. While you aren't going to become an expert, I think that with a few hours spent on a few key papers, you (I, some people, likely you) can often learn enough about a tiny portion of a field to gain useful insight. Most likely this insight won't take the form of "X is true" or "Y is false", but "I should give more credence to X in the future" or "when I see Y reported in the media I should suspect exaggeration of the underlying research".
Mz 12y ago
"Forgiveness is a gift. Trust is earned." The opening paragraph strikes me as just nuts. You don't create a trusting atmosphere like that. That is the opposite of what it takes to create real trust. Thus, honestly, I really did not read beyond that. I kind of skimmed but just really could not get into it.
gone35 12y ago
In the late 1700s, a Frenchman named Claude Chappe3 invented a visual telegraph that used semaphore towers spaced 10 to 15 kilometers apart. With a telescope, each station could see neighboring towers and relay their semaphore positions to the destination. In a world where long-distance communication was via horse-carried letters, Chappe's telegraph was a wonder. Signals from Paris were received in Lille, where the first stations were built (about 218 kilometers or 136 miles apart), after only a few minutes. The network soon spread to Brest, Toulon, Strasbourg, and later even across the English Channel. Semaphore positions were defined in a codebook allowing a variety of messages to be sent. The well-crafted codebook provided easily recognizable semaphore patterns for common symbols, as well as error-correction codes that allowed a proper message to emerge despite errors in transmission or reception. The Chappe network was in continuous use for more than 60 years. An electrical telegraph network supplanted it once the technology of long-distance insulated wires made that invention practical. For our purposes, though, the most interesting aspect of the Chappe network came about in 1836 with the discovery that stock market information was being relayed across the network, buried in other messages, by means of what we now might call steganography. The semaphore operators were paid to introduce certain errors in the messages of various customers. Because of the error-correction codes the messages arrived intact, but if someone was privy to the raw symbols transmitted, the introduced errors contained a message that provided an advantage in buying or selling stocks. TIL 1830s European stock traders were already into latency arbitrage using an early form of surreptitious DSL over optical telegraphs...
- dredmorbius 12y ago
  In The Wordly Philosophers, Robert Heilbroner tells of a tactic of John D. Rockefeller in which the assistant hired by a competitor to signal trading information was bribed to the benefit of Standard Oil. One of the few apparently verifiable elements of the Rothschild legacy is their use of time arbitrage to trade advantageously on early news of the outcome of the battle of Waterloo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rothschild_family#The_Napoleonic_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rothschild_family#The_Napoleon...

52 points by programd 12y ago

I sit here looking up at a sky with Mars hanging just above the half moon and realise that trying to enumerate who we trust is almost a fools errand - I have never computed the paths of the planets from my own observations, never verified we do revolve around the sun. I trust the consensus of the majority, based on the detailed calculationsnof the few. Heartbleed was and is the same. I am not goingnto review the medical literature on anti-biotics, read our politicians receipts nor any part of the thousand other things that I need to trust apart from computer security. I have no quibble with "know the ground upon which you stand and be able to rebuild it" but we must all make a judgement on where to draw the line. Looking at Mars I realised that the line is a darn sight closer than I realised.

nkurz 12y ago
I am not going to review the medical literature on anti-biotics I'd argue that occasionally sampling such things is worthwhile. While you aren't going to become an expert, I think that with a few hours spent on a few key papers, you (I, some people, likely you) can often learn enough about a tiny portion of a field to gain useful insight. Most likely this insight won't take the form of "X is true" or "Y is false", but "I should give more credence to X in the future" or "when I see Y reported in the media I should suspect exaggeration of the underlying research".

Mz 12y ago

"Forgiveness is a gift. Trust is earned." The opening paragraph strikes me as just nuts. You don't create a trusting atmosphere like that. That is the opposite of what it takes to create real trust. Thus, honestly, I really did not read beyond that. I kind of skimmed but just really could not get into it.

gone35 12y ago

In the late 1700s, a Frenchman named Claude Chappe3 invented a visual telegraph that used semaphore towers spaced 10 to 15 kilometers apart. With a telescope, each station could see neighboring towers and relay their semaphore positions to the destination. In a world where long-distance communication was via horse-carried letters, Chappe's telegraph was a wonder. Signals from Paris were received in Lille, where the first stations were built (about 218 kilometers or 136 miles apart), after only a few minutes. The network soon spread to Brest, Toulon, Strasbourg, and later even across the English Channel. Semaphore positions were defined in a codebook allowing a variety of messages to be sent. The well-crafted codebook provided easily recognizable semaphore patterns for common symbols, as well as error-correction codes that allowed a proper message to emerge despite errors in transmission or reception. The Chappe network was in continuous use for more than 60 years. An electrical telegraph network supplanted it once the technology of long-distance insulated wires made that invention practical. For our purposes, though, the most interesting aspect of the Chappe network came about in 1836 with the discovery that stock market information was being relayed across the network, buried in other messages, by means of what we now might call steganography. The semaphore operators were paid to introduce certain errors in the messages of various customers. Because of the error-correction codes the messages arrived intact, but if someone was privy to the raw symbols transmitted, the introduced errors contained a message that provided an advantage in buying or selling stocks. TIL 1830s European stock traders were already into latency arbitrage using an early form of surreptitious DSL over optical telegraphs...

dredmorbius 12y ago
In The Wordly Philosophers, Robert Heilbroner tells of a tactic of John D. Rockefeller in which the assistant hired by a competitor to signal trading information was bribed to the benefit of Standard Oil. One of the few apparently verifiable elements of the Rothschild legacy is their use of time arbitrage to trade advantageously on early news of the outcome of the battle of Waterloo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rothschild_family#The_Napoleonic_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rothschild_family#The_Napoleon...