The Life of Lou Ruppert

You can’t eat a habanero pepper and not remember it the next day. The decision to eat the shiny orange fruit is followed by a series of distinct burn incidents over a 24 hour period. According to some dog owners that I know, if you feed a dog a habanero pepper, he’ll eat it once, whimper, and never touch one again afterwards. But people will often go back to eating hotter and hotter foods, because they crave the adrenaline rush.

I often wonder why some people tend to only see the negative in things. Much like the dog who avoids the pepper once he’s tasted it once, they shrink back from normal life. I think certain types of person are optimized to avoid bad situations in the same way that our digestive systems are optimized to avoid bad food. They get burned once, exist in a general sense of uneasiness, and then get burned again when the memory resurfaces. It’s a natural biological mechanism, but one which can be retrained in the same way as the lover of Mexican food can retrain their digestive system to crave adrenaline more than they hate chemical burns.

How do some people turn out one way, and others turn out completely different? Why do some love adrenaline and others hate to be burned? I think it depends on how seriously we take things. I was talking with the guys from Sourcefire on Friday, and asked them why nobody’s marketed a security console that uses Bayesian techniques to learn what is dangerous and what is not. It works to over 99% accuracy in spam filtration, and since the biggest problem in intrusion analysis is noise, it would make sense to apply the same technique there. As it turns out, the reason nobody’s tried it is that you have a lot more to lose with a false positive in security monitoring than you do with spam filtration. If you accidentally make a bad guess about a spam message, you miss out on an announcement about a meeting that someone would probably call you about anyway. If you accidentally make a bad guess about a security message, the Russian mafia could be auctioning off your business secrets on the black market before you know what hit you.

Negative people are afraid to make a bad guess that something is OK, because missing out on a warning means serious doom. For them, not being awake and in tune with their gut instincts could result in some unspecified disaster. Positive people realize somehow that everything works out, and would rather suffer the occasional disaster if it means fewer noisy interruptions from the lizard brain. For them, the burn of failure is worth the fun of living a relatively unencumbered life.

I’ve always been a pessimist with a taste for spicy food, but now I’m starting to see the big picture. The brain hardware God has outfitted us with is far too advanced for us to use it to make the same kind of decisions as dogs make.

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