
Kobayashi Maru - EndXA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobayashi_Maru
======
MilnerRoute
I'm glad they mentioned the Star Trek paperback where each of the crew members
remembers their own experience with the Kobayashi Maru.

It didn't just start with "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan". It was really
central to that movie's theme. (Captain Kirk's insistence that he doesn't
believe in no-win scenarios.) It was such a good distillation of his character
that I wasn't surprised they brought it back for the first movie in the
rebooted franchise.

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Jun8
“I don’t believe in a no-win scenario.” Probably Kirk’s best quote and a
valuable life philosophy.

~~~
badrabbit
A nice bumper sticker slogan... Indeed there are perceived no-win scenarios
for which you can cheat or redefine the rules somehow or even redefine what
winning means. In my opinion (and many others' as well) you can't lead anyone
if you don't know how to lose right.

Death is a perfect example. Especially preventable death of a child. You can't
even grieve properly if you can't accept loss.

But let's talk about infosec, the entired discipline of incident response is
founded on the expectation of security incident,as in security in some way was
compromised or reduced. The whole point is to lose well! As in you responded
well so the loss in security was minimized. You still lost because your
attacker was able to get past your defenses and reduce security. Or perhaps
one might say it is only a loss if confidentiality of data was breached. Ok,
you did everything right and due to human error 0day exploits that abused
attack vectors outside your threat model, your crown jewels were lost. What
then? If you accept loss, you communicatr the data breach effectively, follow
your plan for such a no-win situation. You simply can't lose right if you
can't accept loss and losing right is not winning. You lost what was important
to you,that process cannot be reversed and it was not preventable.

I think as a philosophy murphy's law gives a better perspective.

~~~
dogma1138
You limit your example to a perfect world scenario in which IR is the only
reactionary discipline.

If you want to see just how much Kirk was right look at any major breach and
how companies react to it for example the Equifax beach.

Yeah their IR team might have dealt with the no-win scenario as you mention,
but their senior management Kirked the hell out of it by selling stock shortly
after the breach was discovered to ensure they don’t their fortune and then
the corporate machine was set into play to ensure that the company gets mostly
unscathed from the entire ordeal.

So IR did their job, they fell on their swords and what not, but the execs,
the lawyers, lobbyists an the PR folks just shrugged and said that’s nice let
us show you how it’s really done.

~~~
badrabbit
I don't get what you are saying. Infosec teams are part of the company, if
they choose to capitalize on a breach, good for them. They still lost, like i
said earlier, making the best out of a loss does not change the fact that
there was a loss. Their brand reputation will always be inferior because of
this. They accepted loss so they tried to lose well. Not accepting loss would
be to not be prepared because your security is too good or to refuse to
disclose the public because of consequences right?

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phnofive
See also:

[https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/2747/symbolis...](https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/2747/symbolism-
of-the-mind-game-in-enders-game)

Winners do use cheats, I suppose.

