I feel this in my bones as an anthropologist when it comes to semi-structured interviews, which frankly have very little to do with anthropological inquiry but have nonetheless become a rote methodology.
It’s similar in IT. Almost no one recommends regular password changes anymore, but we won’t pass our audit if we don’t require password changes every 90 days.
Same vibe as management buying Oracle products because it’s “trustworthy”.
When we first switched to JD Edwards, it still sent the passwords in plain text, and our Oracle partner set up our weblogic instances over http instead of https.
I had to prove I could steal passwords as just a local admin on a workstation before they made encrypting the traffic a priority.
A very non-techy relative works in a company that requires password changes every month. At this point his passwords are just extremely easy to guess and basically go like 123aBc+ and variations of it.
Yeah, no clue how that caught traction.
Our IT department won’t allow password managers. Their current stance on what we should do instead is “Uh, we’re working on it”. So everyone at work uses weak passwords and writes them down in notepad. headdesk
the only way this gets fixed is when the audits say to follow NIST recommendations.
Oof, ouch, right in the psychology degree :(
Don’t know if this is the intended reference, but this pretty much perfectly describes why we use the Polygraph. As covered (and better explained than I can myself) on Adam Ruins Everything https://youtu.be/nyDMoGjKvNk
👀 lookin’ at you, alpha=.05
The history of IQ-tests…
It makes me wonder if we can create AIs that behave close enough to humans by adding an additional neurological baseline noise to the LLM training. Then throwing it in simulations to see whether social sciences might work. I’d be curious to see how true to life something like that would be as well.
A while ago, some researchers designed a game where chatGPT was assigned to characters and told to act and live like humans. It was interesting to watch. https://www.iflscience.com/stanford-scientists-put-chatgpt-into-video-game-characters-and-its-incredible-68434
