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Today's Chuck Norris Fact:
The chief export of Chuck Norris is pain.
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I talked the other day about FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) and some of the current arguments that are full of it. Today I'd like to talk about why it works and how it manipulates our perception of threats so that we end up putting our priorities, and thus our resources, in the wrong place.
Why is FUD so effective and thus so often seen? To answer that question, we have to go directly to what FUD is. FUD, in many ways, is like Benjamin Disraeli's statistics in his "lies, damn lies, and statistics" quote. It is overwhelming awful information or conjecture in the absence of proper context. To further the statistics analogy, let's say that someone tells you that, in your town, murders are up 500% this year. That certainly sounds very, very bad, doesn't it? Well, let's find out exactly what that statistic means in different contexts. If your town is Denver, like mine, that means you're dealing with some number of murders for the year among about 3 million people. So if the number of murders went up from 1 to 6 (I believe that's a 500% increase), that's still pretty meaningless and in reality no serious cause for alarm. If the number goes from 1000 murders to 6000, that's a bit more serious, considering the percentage of murdered in proportion to the total population is much higher. Now, if murder is up 500% in your town, and your town has 500 people, that's a very serious thing no matter what the actual increase in number might be, because the relation of that statistic to your town's population is much higher no matter what the number is. You have to know the additional contextual information to be able to determine if a statistic is meaningful to you or not, right? We all know this.
FUD works very much the same way, only without the numbers. It IS interesting, though, that statistics such as the one above are often used to support FUD. FUD usually makes wild claims and, almost as often, predictions for a bleak future for humankind as a result of the particular subject of their claims. The global warming issue is one of the most FUD-filled subjects you could possibly encounter. In fact, global warming is an ideal breeding ground for FUD, precisely because of the lack of contextual information to either support or disprove. Our lack of meaningful long-term data for useful trending makes the global warming issue approach almost the level of religion, on both sides. It takes a great deal of faith for its supporters to continue to evangelize it, and its detractors see it the same way they see Roman mythology: lots and lots of superstitious drivel.
In my daily world of information security, I deal with lots of FUD relating to privacy concerns, new threats, new concepts and "meta-threats", national infrastructure, cyber-extortion, all sorts of doomsday scenarios for myself, my company, or my country. Some of these are truly terrifying, and some I laugh off. But I always listen and think, and that's the real way to see through FUD. You must first listen, then think critically about what you're hearing. FUD works so well precisely because so few people are willing to think critically about the issue they're dealing with. I admit that there are times that I don't want to think critically about an issue presented to me. Today's world gives so much information on so many issues, it can be very difficult to decide where to devote brainpower. It is essential, however, to focus on the information and find the context you need to push FUD away. Once that is done, you can begin to remove FUD from your life, and reduce the stress that always accompanies FUD.
I'll talk more about FUD later. For now, keep thinking, keep fighting the FUD.
Thanks for reading along.
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