Quote of the Day
Often it’s perfectly fine to blindly follow rules and guidelines, but sometimes, every once in a while, it can permit atrocities to happen: from cruel conspiracies against that one person in your friend group who’s a little different all the way up the scale to genocidal actions. So it’s absolutely vital to be able to think about the norms we follow, and, from time to time, to break the less useful ones just to make sure we still can. We need to practice non-conformity to make sure we can do it when we need to. It’s always wise to take a minute to think, ‘Do I really agree with this, and could it harm anyone?’ before acting.
Marie Snyder
January 2, 2025
Stand Out: How to Prevent Obeying in Advance – 3 Quarks Daily
Via email from Chris M.
Following this advice is tougher than you think. This behavior extends from seemly insignificant curiosities to the mind boggling horrific.
For example. Turn off all the lights in a room and shine a light through a pin hole in a wall. Ask the group of people in the room to report which direction the light is moving. After discussing it, they will agree the stationary light is moving and the direction of that movement.
We have examples from the other end of the scale as well. Virtually no one in a group will use their shovel to attack their murderers. This is true even if they are knowingly digging their own graves. Everyone else is digging, so the individual conforms to the norm.
Practice being a non-conformist. It may save your life and/or the lives of thousands or even millions of others.
At the same time, there is some value in practicing a certain level of conformity. There is wisdom in knowing why a fence was put up in the first place, and that wisdom may lead to the understanding of why it is safe to tear down that fence because the cause no longer exists, or the fence can be moved to be more appropriate, or the fence needs to be replaced with a wall because the original fence was only a slapdash half-measure in the first place.
My wife (MD, PhD, MBA) has real problems conceiving that other people can make rules to organize their life, and she might be required to become acquainted with those rules and abide by them. She is capable of learning… what she wants to learn. And if it is not her idea to learn a thing, she consistently refuses to remember that it exists or that there is even a logic or widely-agreed-upon convention that surrounds its existence.
Repeatedly, on the irregular occasions that something needs to be scanned, she asks me, “How do I find the document I just scanned?”
*sigh* “On your PC, open the Windows Explorer, enter into the address bar backslash backslash one nine two dot one six eight dot…”
“What’s with the funny little numbers?”
“You mean the Internet Protocol Address, the ‘funny little numbers’ that make all modern computer communications work?”
“Why can’t I just put in ‘printer’?”
“Because you’re using your work laptop, as you refuse to get your own private PC or use an secondary account on any of the other PCs in the house, and it doesn’t use the household DNS server which would quite happily translate ‘printer’ into those ‘funny little numbers’ that actually make the computers talk to each other. In any case, the scanned documents aren’t on the printer, but on the NAS, and you have to use the IP address so your work laptop can directly talk to the NAS and bypass your company’s security restrictions.”
“Now it wants a password.”
“So put in your password for the NAS.”
“I don’t know what it is.”
“I’ve just reset it to PhDWon’tRemember, capital P, capital D, capital W, include the apostrophe, capital R, and this time check the box to remember credentials.”
What follows is an explanation of why she won’t check the box for some imagined risk of security problems that derived from a completely misunderstood fragment of her company’s mandatory annual security training, and then asking why it says “Enter Username” even though she put in the password I told her.
Agreed. I didn’t intend to advocate to be non-conforming at all times. But recognizing and occasionally questioning herd behavior has great benefits beyond the current context.
It is true: proverbially, the more you take off the race-car or airplane, the faster it goes. And so you should do so… right up until you find out you needed that bit to keep from exploding in a ball of flame. Keep that bit.
Also works in IT: Who owns that server or virtual machine? Nobody? OK, we’ll shut it down and see who screams.
Now, for the 2A: who needs it, says the anti-gunners. They do, which they find incomprehensible. It’s a bit late, when they’re standing at the edge of the mass grave with a pneumatic captive bolt gun pressed to their craniocervical junction, to have an epiphany, “Oh, that’s what ‘necessary to the security of a free state’ means! A state of freedom for the people! Whoops!”
As difficult as technology often is, it’s still easier to solve these kinds of problems through technology:
Run a transparent DNS proxy on your gateway firewall, so she *has* to use your DNS. Have the printer ID and authorize her traffic by fingerprinting her machine, or just block all unauthorized traffic to it.
When someone wants to watch netflix on the “tv”, they have to run a program to punch a three hour hole in the firewall for it. Shockingly easy to do, after you have the firewall in place. (hint, the firewall should bridge, and should not have an IP address)
DNS proxy on my gateway/firewall wouldn’t work: once her company VPN goes up, all DNS traffic goes through the tunnel to his her company’s DNS. That’s why she has to use RFC 1918 IP addresses in the local home network. There are other solutions, but I don’t have administrative privileges on her work laptop, and she’s not capable of following any instructions any more complicated.
The rest of the stuff you’re referencing, I already do with all the computers in the household.
Of course… the old VPN trick..
.. shoulda thought of that.
All I can think of is… pick some kinda “printer” sounding hostname that actually resolves on global DNS to some IP she’ll never use, and then transparent proxy *that* IP to the printer 😀
Hmm… no good if she routes it through the VPN…
Maybe you could find some kinda printer sounding hostname that resolves to a RFC 1918 IP… that’s a stretch….
looky what I found:
https://serverfault.com/questions/4458/private-ip-address-in-public-dns
Ok, so if you control DNS for your own domain, you can set printer.mydomain.me A to 192.168.x.x
She’s still gotta type the whole domain, but that’s alot easier to memorize than an IP. Might enargen your attack surface ever so slightly… but with good security, obscurity matters less. I mean…
Do you disable the IME on your machines?
All good. Except as mentioned already. Non-conformity is a tool. And as it can be used to replace a worn part. It can also be used to beat your civilization to death.
Communism brainwashed a whole generation in the 60’s to reject anything “normal” to older generations. And society is on the edge of collapse because of it today.
Jesus spoke of us using our discernment in life. And seeking truth in all things discernable. “Seek the truth, and the truth shall set you free.”
That’s served the western world pretty good for the last 2,000 years. Maybe we could give it a try again?
I know, I know, “What is truth?” Which is what came out of Pontius Pilate’s mouth just before he crucified Jesus for f-ing with the world order.
So, there is that.
The truth is, that a lot of people don’t like the truth. And that seems to be the real problem.
Note: I come now not to praise Pontius Pilate, but to condemn him.
In the Nicene and Apostle’s Creeds, there are five persons referenced by name:
1) God, the Father
2) Jesus Christ, the only Son
3) The Holy Spirit
4) The Virgin Mary
5) Pontius Pilate
How’d that last guy get billing?!?
On one part, it is to make specific historical reference to the tenure of Pontius Pilate as fifth Roman governor of Judea from about 26 to 37 AD.
As MTHead referenced, he is known for saying “What is truth?” and in his defense, he just had some uppity Jewish community leaders come up to him out of nowhere and demand the execution of another Jew that they had roughed up, and they threatened Pilate with reporting to Caesar that he was less than vigorous in crushing Jewish revolutionaries (such as the Barabbas that they actually asked to be released). In context, Judea had been a Roman semi-vassal for three generations, and then the populace asked for Rome to incorporate it as a province with direct Roman rule after the misrule of King Herod. The revolt of Judas of Galilee during the first Roman governorship kind of set the stage for all following governors to be ready to jump on rebellion with both sandals.
Pilate was also known to have told the Jewish leaders that he found no guilt in Jesus, and he wanted to release Jesus.
So, in exclaiming in what I interpret as exasperation, “What is truth?”, he personally believed on one hand that Jesus was innocent of a crime that deserved execution, on the other hand he knew the Jewish leaders were willing to cause him a lot of trouble, and on the last hand that was gripping him by the throat, this was not his Circus Maximus and these were not his chariots and his job was to keep a lid on things.
Where I’m going with this is that there is this little principle subtly built into the fundamental Christian creeds, right from the earliest days: government officials will kill you for their own convenience, even when they know the truth and the right thing to do.
Yup, some more of that discernment Christ talked about.
Think maybe that’s why Jesus told them.
After I’m gone, you’all gonna to need swords.
She screws her whole argument by dropping the loaded term ‘blindly’ into the first sentence. How would you deal with someone who didn’t follow the range safety rules at Boomershoot, blindly or not?
Something like this: First occurrence: Confront and advise. If defiant, ejection from the event. If submissive, follow up with close observance.
Second occurrence: Confront, lecture, Range Safety Officer assigned to observe. If defiant, ejection from the event.
Third occurrence: Ejection from event.
Be advised: do not fail either the Attitude Test or the Intelligence Test at Boomershoot.
Tirno provides the hint. Here are the details.
Of general interest…
In the last two years there have not been any rule violations observed or reported.
Some methods of non-comformity are harmless and quite amusing, and yet take a not-insignificant degree of willpower to follow through with. Walk into an elevator and stand facing the back wall; or wear a Christmas sweater to a Halloween party, and vice versa.
Just little things that go against the grain of social expectation or seem a little crazy, but you’d be surprised — or maybe you won’t — how many people would be anxious enough to never do any of them.