A Hacker's Mind, by Bruce Schneier

"Hacking" is using a system in a way that's legal/possible but not how its creators intended. We think of hackers as scrappy upstarts, but rich powerful people are actually much better at hacking, and much better at getting The System to retroactively accept their hacks as valid, e.g. weird abuses of the tax code that are now just legal.

This is another depressing book about how the rich and powerful get richer and powerfuller, and how it's structurally hard to stop them because they have the money/power to react faster and stronger to anything you do to try to stop them. I don't have a lot to say about that it except that it really really sucks.

One tangential thing the book got me thinking about is "willingness to bend rules" as a character trait. I think I'm relatively low on this trait, despite having some other traits that would make you think I'm high on it, and I think that's been a highly influential influence on my life-path: at several key moments things have gone very differently for me than if I'd been more of an "eh, we can just do this thing person."

I remember once a friend telling me about this dumb thing in the US medical system (... insert your own joke here) where you can get a certain pill at (say) 5mg and break it up into 1mg pieces yourself, and somehow this saves you a lot of money versus getting the 1mg version, and it has some weird grey status where you're allowed to do it but it's sort of officially anti-encouraged, I wish I could remember the details because that would make this a more coherent paragraph. Without making any kind of deeper judgement here – I have not thought seriously about this issue at all – I noticed that my initial reaction was "you can't do that!", whereas his initial reaction was "of course you should do that." And I feel like various little scenarios like that would be an interesting test for how much someone does/doesn't have Hacker Mindset, as Schneier defines it, and I feel like that has a big impact on various elements of life.

I especially notice that there are certain fields which will massively select for people with Hacker Mindset, because the fields have so many rules that you can never be sure if you're following all of them correctly, so the only people who get into them will be those who are comfortable saying "ah, the rules, they can bend a bit." And this itself will have massive consequences, including that the fields with the most rules will become filled with people who are not super-rule abiding, whereas if they had fewer rules they would maybe have more rule-bound people in them.