Unknown unknowns also is a reason for the opposite - to be more careful releasing things that might be dangerous.
Often dangerous failures that happen are unknown unknowns. Fukushima is just one example for this.
Often dangerous failures that happen are unknown unknowns. Fukushima is just one example for this.
http://mdcsystems.com/fukushima-dai-ichi-black-swan-event-or...
How do you explain the fact that this exact scenario was predicted in advance then? E.g.: https://news.usc.edu/86362/fukushima-disaster-was-preventabl...
TEN PRINCIPLES FOR A BLACK-SWAN-ROBUST WORLD
"4. Do not let someone making an “incentive” bonus manage a nuclear plant – or your financial risks. Odds are he would cut every corner on safety to show “profits” while claiming to be “conservative”. Bonuses do not accommodate the hidden risks of blow-ups. It is the asymmetry of the bonus system that got us here. No incentives without disincentives: capitalism is about rewards and punishments, not just rewards."
source: Nassim Nicholas Taleb on Accepting Uncertainty, Embracing Volatility
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/nassim-nicholas-t...
http://www.bbc.com/news/10385853
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Wilson
Several dozen amateur physicists have accomplished it.
We are currently wrestling with questions that can be personal catastrophes due to the existence of personal tech, such as teens sexting each other and sending each other sexy photos and being charged with promoting child pornography or crap like that. If the phones and apps did not exist, they would probably be showing each other their bits in person instead and (in many cases) this would be perfectly legal. Get a phone involved, suddenly one or both of them can potentially go to jail.
But you just keep believing that software development is harmless, good clean fun. Yeah.
"Releasing early", in the sense of getting these things into the real world as early as possible so they can be iterated on with real-world data is actually pretty crucial if you think about it.
Before self-driving cars hit public urban areas, self-driving trucks have been working on private mining roads (https://qz.com/874589/rio-tinto-is-using-self-driving-416-to...). Auto-pilot on airplanes can still today be turned off or on as desired.
The key here is figuring out how to release gently. The greater the risk, the more iteratively and more gently you should be releasing. If you were building landing gear controllers for passenger planes and your plan for release was to spend a really long time planning really carefully, testing like crazy in non-real-world conditions and finally doing a world-wide, all-commercial flight roll-out at once, I'm likely to pass on air travel for a while (and keep a lookout overhead).
When people talk about releasing early, they're not talking about big bang releases at all. There are alphas, betas, feature toggles, a/b tests, and dark paths for a reason.