The Perils Of Outsourced Thinking

Today started like any other — tidying up the house and listening to a podcast while caffeine and electrolytes permeated my brain, followed by wizard’splaining to a client why Amazon RDS Proxy represented a better opening bid than PgBouncer when it comes to advancing our stories around identity hardening, configuration management, audit logging, high availability, and elastic scalability.

Those remonstrations ran a little long and so I found myself making haste to shovel food into my face, pull on skiing clothes, and zip up Little Cottonwood Canyon for a late afternoon sesh on the skis. The top of Alta’s web page simply said “road open / parking available”, the Open Snow app suggested maybe a few inches of fresh stuff, and the stock iOS weather app showed a mix of sunny and snowy conditions.

My first inkling of something being amiss came as I found myself dodging downhill canyon traffic blazing around blind curves on the wrong side of the road to avoid a felled tree. The vibe grew weirder still as similar events accrued. When I pulled into the Wildcat parking lot I immediately noticed that the Collins lift had quiesced, and yet “road open / parking available” Alta’s website reported still.

“Hrm. What say you, ‘Alta Alerts’ Twitter account?”

“Due to high winds and weather conditions, Alta Ski Area is now closed for the day”, it had announced just nine minutes prior.

“Frack. SRSLY?”

I pulled up the Wind Alert app and looked at the sensor on a nearby peak — “63 gusting to 120 MPH”.

“Whoah.”

As I sat in my car, reflecting on the two hours I had squandered on prep and driving, I watched countless skiers streaming down the base of the mountain, people who perhaps just moments earlier had found themselves in the terrifying situation of clinging to a chair lift as their magic foot sticks transformed into murderous air foils.

Preparing to hold myself in reproach for allowing haste to undermine my usual rigor in forecast cognizance I pulled up the XC Skies web app, enabled the Surface Gust overview for the HRRR 3 forecast, and noticed a vaguely Eye Of Sauron-esque rendering right where I had imagined putting my fragile meatbag — something that had I seen it as part of my usual all source intelligence approach would have caused me to head to the gym in the valley instead of doom in the mountains.

Derp.

Only by dint of luck owing to being a little bit late did I avoid finding myself in an ordeal reminiscent of the day in 2018 when I took the Snowbird tram to the top and for my troubles was rewarded by the universe with what I now use as my preferred profile pic (which I only have because a stranger obliged my request that they snap the shot on their phone and text it to me since I found myself so thoroughly encased in ice as not to be able to retrieve my own phone from my pocket).

Goooooooood times.

At some point between these two days I made the dubious life choice of taking up paragliding, a sport that has taken a run at me on more than a few occasions, and from which I have grown a deeper skepticism for many things, a remarkable development for someone already long steeped in the security engineering context of nation state actors.

Resort skiing will engender a certain intellectual laziness and operational complacency that when transferred elsewhere may kill you. However badass you imagine yourself when navigating such a context, resort-based shenanigans rest atop decades of mountain operations at that specific location, the accumulated wisdom of countless humans developing relevant tooling and tradecraft, and daily avalanche risk assessment and mitigation performed by professionals. You can get pretty messed up doing resort skiing, and many people do, but it nonetheless represents a highly curated experience… usually. And so it is extra horrifying when the system fails.

These days I would never strap myself to a paraglider without checking, re-checking, and re-re-re-checking the forecasts from multiple angles in XC Skies as well as scrutinizing the actuals with my eyeballs, radar returns, and wind stations, and I never get in a small airplane (as PIC or otherwise) without doing all that plus poring over what ForeFlight has to say about my intended route. Paragliding and General Aviation represent far less curated experiences than most of what most people do on any given day and that risk amplifies when you travel which may put you in contact with unfamiliar systems, protocols, and cultures.

By extension, I do similar before heading out for hikes lest I be caught in rain, and I even further check the “Cloud Cover” view in XC Skies before heading to the pool to maximize how much sun I can soak up while cranking out the laps. Other areas of spill-over include greater insistence on checklists, taking a Garmin SATCOM device whenever I play FAFO in any form, and always having some degree of first-aid kit in the pack.

So I’m just a little irked at myself today for failing to be my usual diligent self simply because I found myself in a bit of a hurry. Sure, Cumulative Risk may sit top-of-hierarchy for metrics to monitor, but Risk Of Ruin also represents a very important one, especially when the risks one takes so often exist at the “meat” tier of consequences.

Gray swan events such as today’s doomed skiing outing abound and serve as grim reminder — how unintuitive to find myself operating in a net more dangerous mode when limiting myself to a “safer” activity because the more inherently “dangerous” activities were off the table and consequently my situational awareness was operating in a degraded state. I’m reminded of a recent year when, cataloguing my injuries for that interval, I noted that exploding my pinky toe on a concrete stoop in the yard while spinning poi represented the worst of it despite several far more perilous moments (probably attached to a paraglider), doubtless because our perception of danger tracks actual danger so poorly during the mundane moments. One wonders if what eventually kills me will be perhaps an unperceived cat on a staircase.

Today I unduly outsourced my thinking to others and got a cheap lesson. And, zooming out, I imagine such outsourcing to represent a chief peril in today’s age. Never has technology been more capable of generating a synthesis that is so detailed, nuanced, compelling… and wrong. If you don’t believe that, just ask an LLM.

I think a lot about the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect — the cognitive bias of individuals toward critically assessing media reports in a domain where they possess expertise while reflexively trusting reporting in other areas. Once you start to perceive it then you see it EVERYWHERE and can never really unsee it except in momentary lapses.

Every time I hear Chamath talk about, say, cryptography on the “All In” podcast I’m left to wonder if literally every other opinion expressed by a guy who doesn’t seem to know the difference between encryption and hashing is as cartoonishly wrong. I’m reminded of a recurring gag during my Bridgewater days where a cohort of us would use the now infamous “Dot Collector Tool” to slap low scored dots on each other for “Seeing Multiple Possibilities” and/or “Assertive But Open Minded” with the obligatory attached comment of “So confidently wrong”.

Perhaps we need a companion term to capture a more general concept, say the Gibbs Amnesia Effect — whereupon the more highly curated a class of situation, the graver the perils it presents at the tails owing to complacency effects.

The examples are legion and the solutions non-intuitive — consider Tom Vanderbilt’s 2009 book “Traffic: Why We Drive The Way We Do”, which reveals such oddities as the replacement of guard rails with trees enhancing safety by reminding motorists of the easily forgotten inherent dangers of an activity where controlled explosions propel masses many times in excess of the heaviest human to speeds many multiples of the fastest human.

As the world grows ever more complex and the leverage of various products and services to help us navigate this complexity becomes ever more compelling, the temptation to outsource our thinking becomes enormous… but all it takes to realize the risks of such dependency is to accidentally close Google Maps on your phone when beyond the reach of cell towers. I gather most people have experienced this particular horror at least once yet most of us still likely behave in a way that presumes being saturated in high-bandwidth/low-latency reality with access to our favorite magic most of the time. Occasionally crazy stuff happens when S3, GitHub, CloudFlare, or CrowdStrike takes a dump but then a day later we’re all back to worshipping at the alter of efficiency no matter how much tail risk imperils our way of being. Nuclear weapons, anybody?

Surely t’would be folly to wholly eschew such powers as the modern world offers us — your neighbors would outcompete and murder you on any given Tuesday. But perhaps tis also folly to incorporate these powers so carelessly as to forgo the fault tolerance that comes of retaining competence and judgment inside the confines of one’s own skull. Wisdom lies not in whether to use the fruits of our modern technological world but how. Natural selection long ago learned on earth that the short-term temptations of efficiency and homogeneity lead to the long-term catastrophes of class breaks owing to fragility — we sport spare organs, reproduce sexually, and have long childhoods because fault tolerance and population diversity win out in the long term over myopic optimization. We now wrestle with similar implications in our use of tools.

Choose wisely.