[sowbug]

It's been a couple days since this thread quieted down, but I've continued to think about the logic behind the discussion. I believe the fallacy here is akin to arguing about numbers without units attached to them.

For most of the people in this thread, the units are all something like "number of times my house burns down." I guess I'd rather my house burned down once rather than twice, so to that extent your position is not irrational. But the second time is not meaningfully different; the only further loss is maybe a magazine or newspaper that the postal service delivered the day after the first fire and placed on the ashes that used to be my mailbox. It's certainly sad that I won't get to read the paper after the second fire in as many days, but I'm still mostly concerned that my house burned down.

Your units, on the other hand, are inconsistent and surprisingly ordered. Either you really enjoyed the unburned article you read, apparently enough to forget that the rest of your worldly possessions are gone (this is the "at least nobody eavesdropped on my conversation with the MITM" position), which implies that the units are large, or that avoidance of eavesdropping outweighs undetected MITM. Or else you wear an asbestos suit 24/7 because you already assumed most of the world is on fire and don't care if it engulfs your home (this is the part about how you believe HN could someday serve malicious JS, so that origin authenticity wasn't a big deal in the first place), which suggests that the units were small.

Your values are your own, and only you can decide to change them. But the discussion might have been shorter and smoother if you'd acknowledged that others have been using a single, consistent unit called "catastrophes," and that the only numbers we care about are zero and any.

[kuratkull]

Good analogy. I stopped responding after I understood some easily avoidable risks were totally acceptable to bandrami. That's not how my risk model works, especially when it's usually very easy to not accept such risks at all and the alternative would be a potential disaster.

I personally like to have my life/work set up so that I know what catastrophies _can't_ happen (the probablities can be compared to the effort required to boil oceans or waiting until the heat death of the universe).

[bandrami]

Again, not "totally acceptable", but better to be limited to a single attack channel than multiple ones. You're just being willfully obtuse to ignore that.

[sowbug]

+1. High-school curriculums should include something like applied Bayesian reasoning. Understanding dependent probabilities is an underappreciated superpower.

[bandrami]

What I learned from this thread is that a lot of y'all seem to trust counterparties a lot more than you should just because one of the 172 CAs in your OS's chain will claim they are who they say they are. Remember that those 172 CAs include the Chinese and Turkish governments.