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Comment by umvi | Hacker News Reader

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umvi

> Two things can be true at the same time

Heck, three things can be true at the same time. For example, in the Uber self-driving car death:

- uber's safety systems failed to recognize a human in the road

- the backup human driver failed to pay attention

- the woman in the middle of the street failed to pay attention

There can be N failures that all contributed to a given disaster, and it's important to consider all points of failure which can be mitigated in the future, not just the most controversial point of failure.

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I believe there's still another failure: Uber's systems didn't ensure that the backup driver was paying attention, when it was highly foreseeable that their attention would lapse (although granted watching a show on your phone is more than a lapse of attention).

Why stop at three? What about Arizona's lawmakers for allowing this in the first place, or not demanding that certain safety measures are met?

Careful. If you think about this too much, you might end up realizing how absurd “justice” systems everywhere are.

Maybe say everything has one cause: the initial conditions on the differential equation that governs all existence.

Or even the voters for voting for said lawmakers.

That assumes that the state has a responsibility to micro-manage every activity, with prohibitions on activity that doesn't follow the prescribed regiment, to prevent negligence.

The individuals involved in an activity are the only ones responsible for avoiding negligent behavior in a society based on the liberal democratic principles of individual rights and responsibilities.

However, to give due credit to your musing, the Uber situation is somewhat different in being on public roads, which lawmakers do have some responsibility to govern an individual's use of, for the safety of others who share public roads with the individual.

We allow the state to micromanage the activities of individuals all the time, such as with drug, prostitution, and porn laws.

I learned recently this is sometimes visualized by something called the "Swiss Cheese Model": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model

Regarding self driving cars: I was once told that a big reason for the safety of fly-by-wire systems (when planes first moved from directly attached controls) is that the engineers who built those systems had to take the first flights, so they made sure their systems were good. That is probably the case for self-driving cars too, but falling out of the sky feels more viscerally unsafe than driving on a highway, and the gradual nature of the changeover probably isn't helping either.

This is the reason for “root cause analysis” being obsolete and against best practices for complex systems. The practice seems to be something that less sophisticated management wants for a political scapegoat rather than to actually solve problems.

> There can be N failures that all contributed to a given disaster, and it's important to consider all points of failure which can be mitigated in the future, not just the most controversial point of failure.

For the Uber thing, what incentive does the management have to do the right thing?

Money damages, potential criminal lawsuits, and reputational harm which is real and costly (though I know HN is skeptical of it).

Funny that being ethical and prioritizing to not do harm is not on the list.

'Prioritizing to not do harm' is an ethical consideration, and ethics are subjective, so I didn't consider them 'incentives'. If the question had been about 'motives' or 'considerations', I would have included 'potential ethical beliefs'.

The reason why is that presenting facts and concrete logic is more compatible with a greater array of people, whereas ethics and morals are subjective. Using a moral argument is not going to be as persuasive in business (particularly if, generally speaking, leadership is largely comprised of sociopaths, which is just a reality of this world)

Thats pretty much what I meant with "funny".

> reputational harm which is real and costly (though I know HN is skeptical of it).

Largely because the world keeps demonstrating that reputational harm just doesn't happen to large companies. Uber included in this particular case.

Here's the Uber trips per quarter (in millions) since Q2 2017 (source https://www.businessofapps.com/data/uber-statistics)

Q2 2017 889

Q3 2017 985

Q4 2017 1,088

Q1 2018 1,136

Q2 2018 1,242

Q3 2018 1,348

Q4 2018 1,493

Q1 2019 1,550

Q2 2019 1,677

Q3 2019 1,770

Q4 2019 1,907

Q1 2020 1,658

The probable reason for the Q1 dip was the pandemic. The number of riders just keeps on rising.

You can see the same with Target etc. Large breaches happen, major negative incidents, and at best you might see a blip. The large majority of people just don't give a shit, so companies are given permission to not give a shit either.

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