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Comment by Dowwie | Hacker News Reader

There are commenters here who in usual HN form speak as if they would have acted differently than the team at NASA did if they had been in involved. The reality is that it is unlikely.

Business schools use variations of the Challenger launch as a case study in group decision making and organizational behavior. I experienced one while at business school. The crucial parts of Challenger were applied to another scenario. Risk and safety were brought up in discussion but were outlier considerations by the group. The group agreed to proceed with the plan.

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I took that case study in business school at Cornell. I was one of the 4 people in the class that day (there must have been 30-40 folks in the room) whose recommendation was to NOT launch. I felt so pleased when the prof revealed that the case was a disguised version of the Challenger incident.

EDIT: In response to the suggestion, below I've removed the reference to actual case study, to allow future students to enjoy it as much as I did.

Yep. That's the one. The author of the case was my professor. You might want to omit the details of the case in your comment because folks here might experience it one day. :)

I was the only dissenter in my class. You and I should connect.

We should definitely connect! :-) Removed the reference to the actual case, as you suggested.

Aw, come on. I'm never going to go to business school. Let me spoil it for myself if I so choose... Just use a URL shortener so the link doesn't give away information for those who don't want it spoiled.

I don't know why you are getting downvotes, I'm not going to be heading to business school and wouldn't mind reading it either.

That's interesting, in statistics they show the challenger case as an example of poor statistical judgment if you omit data points.

In particular they showed the data points of failed launches, you could hardly derive a correlation between temperature and failed launch from those. If you add the data points of all the successful launches you can clearly see that successful launches happened at higher temperatures. Not a single students who has had yet to take that class would've allowed that launch to go.

But risk of life, especially when everyone is watching, is the ultimate business risk. That's why self-driving cars will be an upstream battle for the next few decades - two steps forward, five steps back every time there's a death. This is simply how we are programmed as humans, our goals and motivations take center stage until risk of death is imminent, then we factor in safety.

Car deaths happen constantly. The problem with self driving tech is nobody seems to be bearing the responsibility when they happen. There is a perverse disconnect of responsibility that will not easily be mitigated to the likings of ethics and profit at once.

You're missing the point. "Car deaths happen constantly" isn't a good enough rebut. People will always think they would have been able to avoid the accident if they were in control.

It's worse because so far the few really bad accidents caused by "self driving" cars would have been stopped if a human was in control (see: Tesla + truck accident).

On the other hand, I know I'm a shitty driver, and self-driving cars can't come soon enough :)

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