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Comment by alexandercrohde | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to note that, as emotionally salient this is for HN, in terms of significance compared to other problems out there it might be lower.

It's a bit of a flaw in human nature that easily-pictured problems scare us much more than abstract/distant problems.

Is it silly to press for a moral value of striving to make our morality align with numeric measure of significance rather than sensational emotions?

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I think this 737 MAX issue resonates with the HN crowd because, along with the emotional factors, it’s a high-stakes technical problem.

The two fatal crashes were caused by an interplay of hardware, software design, and human factors, and studying things like this is fascinating to those of us who are interested in building systems so that catastrophes don’t happen.

It's a high stakes technical problem that is caused by not addressing technical debt - something that the many of the HN readership sees on a daily basis in other domains.

MCAS was created as a way to compensate for instability caused by strapping large engines onto an aircraft not originally designed for it, as opposed to doing a redesign.

Also there's the "sales/business people made the problem worse" angle as well that developers just love.

But there's also risk in designing a whole new plane, which had been Boeing's original plan. I'm not convinced MCAS is the wrong engineering decision. And who's to say a new plane wouldn't have a similar type of pilot assist system... the trend is in that direction.

Ok but the implicit assumption here is that a new design would not itself include all sorts of engineering trade offs between systems, maintenance, and pilot training, when in fact it would. The 787 was a ground-up new design and yet holds the distinction of the most recent previous instance of a full model grounding, over battery issues.

Iterating on a proven airframe has a lot of advantages for aircraft design and it is common in the industry.

> along with the emotional factors,

It's also entertainment in the same sense as catastrophe movies.

I think it resonates with the HN crowd because many of us are on the 737-800 when we are on the nerd bird and many other Southwest flights.

People love catastrophe and ignore larger problems all the time. During the 2017-2018 flu season, almost a million people were hospitalized and ~80,000 people died from the disease (1), a record high and a huge burdon on healthcare for everyone sick or not, yet we aren't getting 2-3 threads a day on influenza popping up on HN like we are with these 150 or so tragic deaths. Maybe part of it is who died. In the case of this flight, it was people affluent enough to afford jet travel. The news is filled with stories of their lives cut short and the tragedy of it all. In the case of deaths from the flu, it is often the old and those in poor health like the homeless who die from the disease, an invisible population for most people. We wont be seeing any articles in national news documenting the lives of those 80,000.

1. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2017-2018.htm

> "~80,000 people died from the disease"

This number sounds highly questionable to say the least: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/how-cdc-estimates.htm

With no way to compare it to a gold standard how could anyone know how accurate it is?

The point is that it's a lot more people than a couple of plane crashes.

Not sure if I know which thing you mean. You mean plane crashes themselves (which kill far fewer people than the cars people drive every day), or this new "link" between the two crashes (which I agree seems spurious at first glance but they may yet confirm it)?

If you do that last thing, you may be a psychopath.

Edit:

The basis for the “trolley problem” is precisely how you handle accounting for the numeracy of death versus the emotional involvement and personal culpability.

People who rationally perform cost benefit analysis about lives and well-being seem to have more psychopaths: see CEOs and other leaders. This isn’t necessarily bad, but it’s worth noting.

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