This story is about the beautiful humility of professionals who tackle cybersecurity, but first I want to talk about the hubris of American doctors. To do that, we've got to go back. Way, way back.

I was diagnosed with epilepsy when I was twenty-five. It was a terrible time. For most of it I was frightened, uncertain, even bewildered. The symptoms I had didn't initially present as something immediately comprehensible. They didn't look like classic, clear-cut seizures. Neurologists would argue over my bedside. Over the course of a year I got like seven different diagnoses including schizoprehenia and narcolepsy.

Over the course of that Odyssean journey, I interacted with many different doctors. Many different neurologists, to be specific. Most of them were all the same. Arrogant, focused, dismissive. In their offices I rarely felt like a human being. Many of them even radiated anger at me, as I sat on the tissue paper that lined their office patient beds.

Listen to what happened to me once with a doctor at the Mayo Clinic.

In his office during my intake appointment, I described to him having hallucinated a fractal pattern across my entire visual field — seeing that thing was wild, neon pastel psychedelic colors with a single black dot in the exact center, all overlaid onto my normal vision — while standing in line waiting for a table at a restaurant.

"You were waiting for a table?" he said.

"Yes," I answered.

"You were just drunk," he said. There was that anger in his voice. Contempt, too. I stared at him in confusion. I'd been perfectly sober at the time of that hallucination experience. No drugs, either. But he took my silence as acquiescence.

"This appointment is over," he said. He ushered me to the door.

It took me a long time to understand that tone. Eventually I realized that that doctor's anger and contempt were secondary emotions. The primary emotion was anxiety in the face of uncertainty. My symptoms didn't fit.

The education of an American doctor is a marathon. To survive to the finish line, a human being must become an intellectual athlete of prodigious proportions. A person becomes a steely machine of correct answers. It's a triumph. From kindergarten through medical school, American doctors learn to take in a firehose of information and spit it back out in the form of correct answers. Everything in their world is about getting themselves to the point where they can produce correct answers.

And then one day, in their office, at what ought be the height of their triumph — they've made it! They're a doctor now! — I sit down. The tissue paper crinkles. I begin to speak. Suddenly there's no rubric. There's no clear cut way to get an A. That's not what American doctors signed up for. That's when the anger comes.