One of the subskills mentioned in Eliezer's Security Mindset post is mitigating assumption risk–that is, the risk of losing utility because some of your assumptions are wrong. There are two main ways to do this:
- Gain more information about whether your assumptions hold
- Make the assumption irrelevant (such as the hashing passwords example)
Here are a bunch more examples:
- Repeating back what someone said in your own words, to check understanding
- Adding a margin of safety when estimating how much load a bridge can bear
- Using Statistical models that make fewer assumptions, or have fatter tails
- Exposing your work to attack in low-risk situations, such as comedians testing new material in small clubs, or Netflix's Chaos Monkey
- Emphasizing fast adaption to unexpected circumstances over better forecasting
- Putting spare capacity in steps in your process that aren't the bottleneck
- Testing code frequently while refactoring to check functionality doesn't unintentionally change
- Doing an analysis in different ways on different datasets, and only trusting them when the conclusions match
There's definitely a lot of meat to dig into. Your mention of legal reminds me that having backups for when legal options fail, or the law is actively turned against you (for any reason) are also important.
What would you do if all of your accounts are frozen and you can't use any credit cards or other electronic sources of money? This could happen due to something like identity theft, so it's not even assuming legal trouble, let alone legal trouble you deserve.
What would you do if you needed to be off the grid entirely?
And the central point Benquo points to here, I think, is that in order to have security mindset your models must be made of gears. If your system does things you don't understand, there's no way to fix them when they break, or find workarounds to broken parts. If I'm going to need bread, ordinary paranoia might be having extra supplies or places to buy. To be secure, I'll need to know how to find additional places to buy, and/or what makes bread making work, and so forth. The more specific or black box my plans are, the less chance I have to adapt to change, even non-hostile change.