RR remarks at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school:
"This is one of my last significant events."
"The trajectory that we are on now – a culture in which some technology companies work to defeat legitimate law enforcement activities – will not end well. Protecting honest people from being harmed by criminals is a worthy endeavor, but protecting criminals from being caught imposes a heavy cost."
"Today, you are relentlessly bombarded with information, much of it of unknown reliability. The internet lets people share their most ignorant thoughts. Many news stories rely on anonymous sources, without providing details to assess their credibility and bias. Some critics worry that our society will be unable to distinguish fact from opinion, and truth from fiction."
"But members of your generation take a different approach. You do not rely on any one news source. You recognize that some people who appear regularly on television – the ones who always form an opinion before they know the facts – those characters are in the entertainment business. Because you understand that, you are more skeptical, and less gullible."
"Complacency can be deadly. Taleb tells a story that illustrates the danger of forgetting that past performance is never a reliable indicator of future outcomes: “Consider a turkey that is fed every day. Every … feeding [strengthens] the bird’s [confidence] that it is the general rule of life [that humans always] ‘look… out for its best interests’ …. On the … [day] before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey.” Taleb refers to that as a “Black Swan” event – a occurrence so low in probability that we ignore the risk, but so great in impact that it renders projections meaningless."
"My time as a law enforcement official is coming to an end, a lot later than I expected. People joke about the revolving door between government and the private sector. The door never revolved for me. It was one way in, and one way out."
"When you study anyone’s career, there usually appears to be an obvious logic to their path. Each person was in the right place, at the right time, to take advantage of the next opportunity. But that appearance of logic is always wrong. It is a product of hindsight bias, the tendency to see a pattern in retrospect that never exists in real time."
"The truth is that everyone’s life is a product of random events and consequential decisions. The random events are things that happen to you, beyond your control. The consequential decisions are what you choose to do in response."
(((This sounds like farewell with confession)))