> Make the secret a lot more trouble than the trick seems worth. You will be fooled by a trick if it involves more time, money and practice than you (or any other sane onlooker) would be willing to invest.
In the pilot episode he says something to the effect of, "It's not magic. It's never magic. People just can't imagine, or can't be bothered to do this much bloody work"
Deep domain expertise, with plodding, methodical deliberative thinking until he finds a solution.
No flashy mental superpowers, just patience, trial-and-error and lateral thinking.
Are you an art thief and is your Van Gough in transit worth $1.5mil? Be pretty dumb not to spend $1mil to recover it for your team of 3, then, right? But nobody does. And nobody spends $1mil to protect said artwork. It's like we collectively agree that official valuations are BS.
I am now curious if there is a formalization of this idea of variable value which seems to be a function of some kind of friction/work requirement. And I imagine is a function of scale relative to the context.
What I mean is, if you're an auction house or a major museum, with an operating budget in the $100Ms or more, at some point it is at least cognitively simpler (if not prudent) to accept a certain amount of shrinkage/fraud/loss etc., which you might prevent with even minimal effort, because the minimal effort is too costly in some other way. Cognitively. Administratively. Whatever.
I remember learning from relatives who had worked in the FBI that their had been in their day thresholds for what level of check fraud merited investigation. Below a certain level it was not a good use of limited resources to waste time chasing it.
This has an interesting follow-on effect, that it was worth consistent effort to obscure that actuality and promote belief in a much more comprehensively aware and interested (and competent) FBI than existed, because that was itself effective in discouraging a certain amount of crime. "Not worth the risk" is miscalculated when you overestimate the risk. And you have little ability to test the system.
I find this interesting because it is a reminder that e.g. value is not BS, exactly; but it's multidimensionally contingent and contextual. Which I guess you can see in other places all the time but this is an interesting angle.
Not least because it suggests where to look for rich veins of "arbitrage," the places you can exploit differences in relative value.
A la Superman III!
If the reward is $1M. If it's $10m then 10% is worth it. $1B? Why are the many, many billionaires around the world not making this kind of play?
As the other commenter points out the expected value of the heist of a $1.5M painting is a lot less than $1M for potential thieves.
The crucial thing people tend to miss: Attacks scale. They can be automated. Your blog may not be worth the trouble hacking it, but hacking thousands of private blogs and abusing them for spam and only having to work out the attack once is.
I mean, even Scotty from Star Trek verifiably beat Trump's ghost writer to the punch on that wisdom by years and it was already an ancient idea before that.