Someone pointed out to me today that cryptography (and information security) might be really good ways to develop humility. I can’t count the number of times I was *certain* I was right about something, only to have someone show me I’m completely wrong.

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@matthew_d_green I'm not sure I'd call that humility: conversely, you can be pretty sure that you've proven something and (usually) you can be very sure that you've disproven something[*]. There's some amount of asymmetry, and some amount of reliance on some "ultimate" forms of argument, while downweighting intuition, analogies, and empirical observations.

[*] very informally; I mean "somethings" like statements that start with a universal quantifier and have an easyish to evaluate expression under it

@robryk Humility is being sure you’re right but knowing that means nothing.

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