September 13, 2020, Daniel Miessler

I think we’ve lost the plot on disinformation. It’s not the attacks that are the problem. It’s the fact that too many Americans are willing to believe almost anything.

Ideally we’d reduce both the attacks and the vulnerability.

Of course it would be nice to have fewer attacks. Of course it would be nice to keep attacks from being used against higher numbers of vulnerable people. But ultimately the problem is the vulnerability itself.

Bad ideas are worse than bad code because they’re naturally contagious.

This is easier to see in the information security world. If you have a target that will run any code that it’s given, you cannot spend all of your energy making sure it doesn’t receive any code. Part of your plan has to be making sure it’s not so eager to do so. We call that patching.

It’s the same with people. We need to do more than control bad ideas; we need to patch our population against them.

Trade school doesn’t immunize against specious ideas.

For people, patching means education. And not the worker-prep kind of education where you learn how to be an obedient and productive office worker, but the kind that teaches the fundamentals of how things work—from physics to psychology, and from physiology to philosophy.

MORE: https://danielmiessler.com/blog/our-real-weakness-is-gullibility-not-disinformation