Hacker News Reader

Comment by itronitron | Hacker News Reader

>> The average number of failures for those who failed at least once before success was 2.03 for NIH, 1.5 for startups and 3.90 for terrorist groups.

Regarding counter-terrorism, that would suggest that rather than more surveillance we instead need better reporting of and responding to failed terrorist incidents/attacks.

View on HN

This reminds me of (I think) Richard Feynman's comment about the Challenger, to the effect that when the o-rings were eroded by 1/3 or whatever, they called that a safety factor of 3, whereas they should have stopped and said "wait, it wasn't supposed to do that at all, something is seriously wrong".

I'm not sure if it was him or someone else that pointed out when you do a post-mortem on a disaster, you generally find a history of near-misses, but people don't take near-misses as seriously as they should.

The book Apollo by Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox shows a similar concept. In the investigation after the fire in Apollo 1, they found many possible near misses. But when each of those items did not lead to a failure, they became accepted. They poor designs or installations were allowed to slide and the accumulation of trouble spots kept increasing.

You're right, it was part of his opinion filed with the Rogers Commission:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Commission_Report#Role_...

There was once a mathematician who got caught at the airport with a bomb. They took him in for questioning. When asked why he had a bomb in his suitcase he stated "the odds of there being a bomb on your airplane are less than one in ten million. So I figured what are the odds of there being two bombs on my flight?"

Do you see why this is similar? When an outcome (terrorism) becomes an input to its own predictor (past terrorism failures), the logic breaks.

I don't see the connection, no. There are lots of cases of feedback in the real world, where the output becomes an input to predicting the next output. What do you mean by "the logic breaks"?

Thank goodness startup founders aren't as determined as terrorists.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com