[3069] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: practical encryption
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Dan Geer)
Fri Jul 24 13:26:40 1998
To: Marc Horowitz <marc@cygnus.com>
Cc: cryptography@c2.net
In-Reply-To: Your message of "23 Jul 1998 13:49:53 EDT."
<t53pvewwj7i.fsf@rover.cygnus.com>
Date: Fri, 24 Jul 1998 09:47:51 -0400
From: Dan Geer <geer@world.std.com>
People don't want to know how this stuff works.
In a famous and subtantiated finding, Tversky & Kahneman
showed that people tend to regard propositions that they
do not understand as more risky, regardless of their
intrinsic risk, and to regard things they do understand
as less risky, again without regard to intrinsic risk. **
This presumably drives the crypto community's dilemma
in affecting public taste w.r.t. tradeoffs of freedom
versus security.
--dan
** Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, "Judgment Under Uncertainty:
Heuristics and Biases," Science [185] 1974, pp. 1124-1131.
