Just after posting in February about the Middle East, my site got hacked. My posts all disappeared and in its place was a graphic. I was left with a message, only I can’t read it. (If you can read Arabic, please leave me a comment and translate it for me!)
My mind immediately started creating reasons for the hack. A wildly irrational one was that I’d posted something about Egypt and some hacker took offense and attacked my site (hence the Arabic message). This is quite unlikely because my site isn’t so visible or well trafficked that it would be found by irate hackers, intent on censoring random messages about Egypt.
This is a classic example of how the mind works to create a story with bits of incomplete data. We have an innate need to make sense of things. Rather than stay in the place of “I don’t know” we almost can’t help inventing a reason for the bits of data we collect or even notice.
The problem with this is that it gets us into trouble. First, the story we create puts us in a state of not being very receptive to other data which might change the story. We get attached to the story we invent because it makes us feel less defenceless against the unknown. Letting go and opening to new information, holding the space for ambiguity, isn’t in our nature.
The other, more serious thing that happens is that we come to believe the story. We may even forget that it is a story and confuse it with reality. In this case we have travelled a long way from random, confusing data to interpretation of reality. This is all framed by a mental model that we may or may not be aware of. The example of my website hack invented story is a simple one and easy to unpack. My mental model includes sparse data on the Arabic world so I put the two events (my post and the hack) in the same mental model bin.
In the case of my hacked site, a more logical explanation is that I installed a supposed hack-proofing plug-in. Perhaps it really provided access to the site so it could be hacked? But that is just another story I invented. I don’t know how or why it happened.
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Often there are groups (anywhere) that look for various security exploits, often through automated means, and post a message like that. Some of the time, they claim to be a security group and purely rewrite the home page with their message and not touch anything else, or it could be somebody trying to make a statement through various small outlets (this post is visible in Google)