Is there a straightforward way to do 2 so that you recommend others attempt it, or are you relating something you’ve experienced and found reduced your confidence in general?
Perhaps 2 is a special case of “find something that you can generate a feeling of high confidence but where you will subsequently be wrong with high probability”. You might interpret this as “experience being a crank”.
I was an intern in the cryptography research group of a large technology company. My boss got an email from someone in product development wanting us to review a cipher they had designed and intended to use in a product. Of course he gave them the standard reply that any cipher not designed by an expert is almost certainly weak (and they should just use a standard cipher that has gone through years of review by the entire cryptography community), but they refused to believe that their cipher is weak, so we had to actually break it. My boss didn’t want to bother one of the researchers, so I got the job, and broke it after a couple of days. (An expert would have literally taken minutes, but none of the researchers specialized in symmetric cipher cryptanalysis.)
If you study cryptography for a while you’ll hear and see plenty of cautionary tales like this, so you can pretty much absorb the lesson without actually being on the “receiving end” of it. If you’re less patient, but happen to work in a large technology company with a cryptography group that you can email, try that. :) Otherwise, yeah, 2 generalizes to “find something that you can generate a feeling of high confidence but where you will subsequently be wrong with high probability”.
Nice topic.
Is there a straightforward way to do 2 so that you recommend others attempt it, or are you relating something you’ve experienced and found reduced your confidence in general?
Perhaps 2 is a special case of “find something that you can generate a feeling of high confidence but where you will subsequently be wrong with high probability”. You might interpret this as “experience being a crank”.
I was an intern in the cryptography research group of a large technology company. My boss got an email from someone in product development wanting us to review a cipher they had designed and intended to use in a product. Of course he gave them the standard reply that any cipher not designed by an expert is almost certainly weak (and they should just use a standard cipher that has gone through years of review by the entire cryptography community), but they refused to believe that their cipher is weak, so we had to actually break it. My boss didn’t want to bother one of the researchers, so I got the job, and broke it after a couple of days. (An expert would have literally taken minutes, but none of the researchers specialized in symmetric cipher cryptanalysis.)
If you study cryptography for a while you’ll hear and see plenty of cautionary tales like this, so you can pretty much absorb the lesson without actually being on the “receiving end” of it. If you’re less patient, but happen to work in a large technology company with a cryptography group that you can email, try that. :) Otherwise, yeah, 2 generalizes to “find something that you can generate a feeling of high confidence but where you will subsequently be wrong with high probability”.