This is an FYI post about a great article by Bruce Schneier, assessing the psychological issues involved in assessing various security trade-offs. He touches on all aspects of behavioral finance,psychological biases, prospect theory, decision-making etc that are relevant and affect our felling of security vis-a-vis actual and objective security. Although, he is not that strong when it comes to discussing the neurological basis of these, I would highly recommended reading the article in its entirety!
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As a person familiar with computer security, Bruce Schneier, is very popular in the security community.
Btw, I wanted to ask you this: I have read a little about the Psycho-sexual development by Freud. However, I could not find enough hard evidence to prove the theories beyond doubt. In Engineering “Occam’s Razor” means the simplest solution is correct solution. But the whole idea of Oedipus complex, fear of castration, penis envy sounds like a lot of hand waving! Could you write a post on the contemporary beliefs on the subject?
Hi Pratap,
I, myself, am not a big fan of Freud; esp his psycho-sexual development theories; yet I find the psycho developmental theories of Erik Erikson, which were modeled on Freud’s stages, quite plausible. I’ll try to summarizes the current thinking on these in a full post sometime soon, but suffice it to say that the theories of Freud have fallen out of fashion as they are disprovable and thus not prone to scientific inquiry.