[apollo_mojave]

I thought this article was going to be somehow less intuitive, but in reality, it simply says something most people inherently understand: that you have to grease the skids a bit to make things work. Dressing it up in academic sloganeering doesn't make the insight all that much more powerful.

I think most people understand that a risk-free society is a poor society. Take driving: the safest way to drive is to not get in the car at all. Similarly, the best way to save yourself from credit card fraud is not to have a credit card. But does this justify driving like a maniac, or being careless with your personal information? Of course not.

In other words, the article simply points out that categorical thinking (1 or 0) is useless in this context (as it is in most contexts, to be honest). The meaningful question is what degree of fraud we should be willing to accept, and in what contexts.

[dvdkon]

It's a common insight, yet you see slogans like "zero tolerance" or "our overriding priority is security" everywhere. You can choose to believe people championing them are just oversimplifying or actually encouraging a bad system for their own gains, but it's important to be able to point to a well-written piece explaining why they're a bad idea.