About
My name is Daniel Miessler (\mē'slûr\) and I'm from the San Francisco Bay Area. I'm in my thirties, engaged, and work in the field of Information Security.
Site Concept
I started this site in 1999 as a platform for collecting technical knowledge and experimenting with web technologies. Today it represents the most important (meta)project in my life. In fact, it's not even a project so much as an extension of myself.
While most see their websites as a place to release pressure, or project a presence, I see my site as nothing less than an augmentation of my own mind. I use it as a means of organizing everything I have learned and want to learn, and then as a means of sharing that same content with others.
You'll find the common bits here that most sites have, such as an About page (here), a Contact page, and the main blog (at the root of the site), but much of the site's focus lies in the other sections, as described below:
- Writing: Articles or essays that shouldn't change too much over time and are not generally technical.
- Study: Articles, often technical but not necessarily, capturing the essence of how something works. The goal is not completeness, but high density and clear transmission of useful information.
- Arguments: A collection of articles and essays (ideally my own but I'll also collect other peoples' as well) on a wide range of topics that interest me. These tend to be large issues, like political theory, philosophy, economics, etc. The goal is to be able to refer to "the best argument I know of" on a particular topic during the course of a conversation or debate. Few things are more frustrating than having consumed some concept and not be able to recall it when it is needed. This is a theme you'll see repeatedly here.
- Projects: Rather than being a set of discrete, well, projects, this is a collection of sub-categories for collecting knowledge and understanding. Categories include:
- Content Summarization: An attempt to extract the core concepts conveyed in content I read, watch, or otherwise consume. The main use case involves extracting lessons from quality literature, such as 1984, Animal Farm, Pride and Prejudice, The Jungle, What I Believe, etc. The goal is to consume content with the purpose of capturing the concepts within and then to make them available both to myself and to others in the future.
- Concepts: A collection of interesting principles that should be part of everyone's education but sadly are considered instead to be intellectual trivia to most. Examples include: Graham's Debate Hierarchy, The Naturalistic and Moralistic Fallacies, the Theory of Constraints, The Dunning-Kruger Effect, The Pareto Principle, etc.
- Collections: The site also serves a pure storage role for me in that I keep a number of lists here, including my favorite jokes, movies, quotes, etc. These are all things we keep up with in some form or another; I simply maintain a location here to permanently store and update them.
- Programming: I also have a more traditional list of "projects' I'm working on in terms of programming.".
- More to Come: You get the idea. I'll be adding many more things to this section as my interests pull me in various directions.
In sum, my site is where I keep everything that matters to me, and it's a constant process. It supplements my ability to acquire, organize, process, and share understanding/wonder/fascination/beauty/love, which is the single most important pursuit in life for me.
Life View
One way to summarize who I am, and what I try to do here, is to say that this site is an avatar for my own self-designed life purpose-an attempt to model the world in the most accurate way possible, and to do so without bias or fear of unpleasant truth. I desire to develop, articulate, and perpetually improve models of how things work, and then to use that understanding to increase happiness and reduce suffering in the world. I seek those on similar paths and thrive on sharing an appreciation of all that is interesting and beautiful with others.
This being the case, I thrive on information that breaks my model and/or supports another one. Nothing is more exciting than being shown how and/or why another way of viewing the world is superior to my own. This is why I spend a great deal of time looking for people with arguments that either 1) differ from my own view yet fit the data better, or 2) refine or improve my own understanding of a position I already hold.
In sum, I absolutely thrive on conversation that leads to the improvement of my understanding of the things, and I have no problem with being wrong since it necessarily leads to an improvement of my model. My pride primarily rests with being right after the debate, not before or during it.
In terms of familiar and popular religious concepts, I am an atheist, although I've lost my taste for the term as of late due to the assorted types of baggage it brings with it wherever it goes. I reject truth claims that don't have evidence; it's as simple as that. People who do so about theistic truth claims are atheists, so that's what I am. In my approximation, the universe happened somehow and a number of variables were presented into the world. We, and everything we know of and interact with, are the result of those interactions. We do not have free will, but we should behave in most cases as if we do.
There are, however, constructs that are too pleasing, and too necessary, for me to abandon--even when faced with the fact that we are simply the product of atomic activity. These include love, friendship, beauty, wonder, fascination, awe, and personal responsibility--the latter of which serves as the foundation of morality and justice in our society.
This used to be a problem for me, as it presents the ultimate source of cognitive dissonance. How does one enjoy love when we know it reduces to chemical reactions and can be emulated in a lab? How do you marvel at an image of the earth from space when we know it to be one planet among billions? How do you punish people who are simply unsuccessful combinations of variables and have no ultimate responsibility for their actions?
I have an answer: live (mostly) within the illusion. Moral decisions must be made within the confines of our lack of absolute free will, meaning that we know that we don't have true choice, but we simultaneously know that society cannot function while embracing that view in daily life. So we live as if free will exists, except where an intellectual analysis is needed, such as when considering consequentialist vs. retributive justice.
And as for love, friendship, joy, fascination, and wonder -- those are all quite real to me. Just as I try to better myself every day while knowing intellectually that I am not in control of my actions, I also rejoice in the wonders of life while knowing intellectually that they reduce to atomic interactions. This is not a problem for me. I can have both, and wouldn't want it otherwise.
To live in awe of these things while rejecting their nature is anti-intellectual, and to obsess over their true form without experiencing them leads to nihilism, cynicism, and negativity. I reject both options, and choose to live within the illusion while never losing sight of its existence.
Morality
I borrow from Bertrand Russell in believing that reason and compassion are the two primary qualities for human happiness and advancement, and if I were to embrace any sort of defined list of principles (which I find mostly unnecessary) it would have to be that of Secular Humanism, which focuses on the following tenets:
- Need to test beliefs – A conviction that dogmas, ideologies and traditions, whether religious, political or social, must be weighed and tested by each individual and not simply accepted on faith.
- Reason, evidence, scientific method – A commitment to the use of critical reason, factual evidence and scientific methods of inquiry, rather than faith and mysticism, in seeking solutions to human problems and answers to important human questions.
- Fulfillment, growth, creativity – A primary concern with fulfillment, growth and creativity for both the individual and humankind in general.
- Search for truth – A constant search for objective truth, with the understanding that new knowledge and experience constantly alter our imperfect perception of it.
- This life – A concern for this life and a commitment to making it meaningful through better understanding of ourselves, our history, our intellectual and artistic achievements, and the outlooks of those who differ from us.
- Ethics – A search for viable individual, social and political principles of ethical conduct, judging them on their ability to enhance human well-being and individual responsibility.
- Building a better world – A conviction that with reason, an open exchange of ideas, good will, and tolerance, progress can be made in building a better world for ourselves and our children.
Expanding on Russell's main constituents (reason and compassion) and the tenets found above, Sam Harris's model of using science to guide morality is also quite intuitive for me. He argues that:
- Morality deals with the well-being of conscious creatures.
- The well-being of conscious creates is determined in the brain.
- The brain exists in the natural world, and thus things that affect the natural world affect the brain.
- Therefore, if you wish to affect morality, you must affect the natural world. And the way to study the affects of changes to the natural world is through science.
These basics -- reason and compassion, the secular humanist tenets, and Harris's argument for science's link to morality -- are obvious to me, and I am unashamedly skeptical of anyone who isn't similarly inclined.
Technology
I see technology as a way to bring people together and to help explain how our world works (see above). I am particularly enamored with data visualization, as it speaks directly to my interest in discovering patterns in data where they would otherwise be obscured.
On the information security side, my primary technical interests include web application security and network traffic analysis focused around botnet defense, DDoS, etc. I also maintain a more general approach to infosec, meaning I never lose sight of the whole point of our discipline, which is to keep the business making as much money as possible. As with many areas of my life, I am content with this duality: one side security purist, and the other side business advocate. I think one needs both to function at the top tier of the discipline. As a point of interest, my preferred definition of security is as follows:
The process of maintaining an acceptable level of perceived risk.
As for technology preferences, I run OS X on the desktop and Ubuntu Linux on servers. I tolerate Windows because I have to, yet I do maintain that Outlook, Active Directory, and some facets of the Office Suite are decent enough.
Activities
Here are the primary ways I spend my free time.
- Reading: Mostly non-fiction, with focus on psychology/sociology and economics-oriented titles that give me new perspectives on the world. My latest interest, however, has been with classic literature. I have found that reading high quality literature (Orwell, Vonnegut, etc.) is infinitely more valuable to me than most newer content. I feel like reading the greats is perhaps the best way to spend my time right now, but I do mix it up with technical books and current non-fiction.
- Writing: Most everything I write can be found here---either on the blog or in my writing section of the site. My focus, as described above, is synthesizing what I learn from my various inputs into ideas and then capturing them here.
- Web Development / Design: I designed everything on this site, including the layout, color scheme, logo, all the CSS, etc. The entire site, including where you see Wordpress, is custom; it just has the WordPress loop embedded within it. That's why my blog and my study pages look identical. I also enjoy making my site extremely fast.
- Jujitsu (past): I love the art/science of Jujitsu and have taken some classes in the past. I may continue lessons at some point in the future.
- Mixed Martial Arts (observer): I don't like American football, basketball, or baseball, and generally am not a "sports" guy, but I have been a fan of MMA since the early 90's. My favorite fighters are Jon Jones, Fedor Emelianenko, Anderson Silva, Jose Aldo, and Cung Le.
- Amateur Astronomy: I've always been a lover of astronomy and I'm joining my local astronomy club and purchasing a scope soon.
- Table Tennis: I have been playing for around 10 years and have roughly a 1500 rating. I am highly inconsistent however, and I can regularly take games off of 1800-rated players (even in tournaments) yet can also lose to someone significantly below me. Hence my rating.
- Programming: I am nearly a novice programmer, with my interest focused mostly on Ruby, Rails, Python, and (recently) .NET.
Music
Here's a decent sample of my favorite types of music.
# some ruby to sort my band list
bands = [ ]
File.open('/my/band/list').each_line{ |s|
bands.push s.chomp
}
puts bands.join(", ")
Mana, Why?, The Ocean, The Sword, Bon Iver, Dethklok, Fever Ray, Portishead, Ratatat, Metallica (pre-black), Elvis Crespo, Danzig, Lamb of God, Buena Vista Social Club, The Black Keyes, Dillinger Escape Plan, Forward Russia, Arsis, Mastodon, New Order, Refused, VNV Nation, Yeasayer, Mars Volta, Opeth, Dimmu Borgir, Lykke Li, Amon Amarth, Volbeat, Tool, Dream Theater, Winds of Plague, Black Sabbath, Mercyful Fate, Chick Corea, Rush, Kimya Dawson, Slayer, Galactic, Avenged Sevenfold, King Diamond, Thievery Corporation, The Knife, Isis, Pelican, Bedouin Soundclash, God is an Astronaut, Jem, Yelle, D.R.I., The XX, Mercyful Fate, Galactic, Depeche Mode, New Order
In general though, I am partial to Metal, Techno (Trance especially), Classical, Classical Guitar, and Indy Rock (whatever that means -- think 'The XX').
Humor
I like to laugh. Here's a sample of my style of humor, which seems to be somewhat common among those in the creative class:
Charlie the Unicorn, Arrested Development, Seinfeld, LOLCats, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Dilbert, Ricky Gervais, XKCD, Pulp Fiction, Monty Python, Robot Chicken, The Office, Family Guy, Laughing Babies*, Daniel Tosh, Benny Lava
If this list resonates with you, and you know of something else I may not have seen, do let me know.
Random Stuff
- I'm mostly fluent in Spanish. I took five years in high school, have a nearly perfect accent, but have a poor vocabulary due to lack of practice.
- My initials are DRM.
Contact
Feel free to contact me if you have a question, a comment, or if you just want to say hello. Until then, I hope you find something here worth your time. ::