Remembering Allan McDonald, who refused to approve the Challenger launch
text.npr.org
text.npr.org
He was not shy at all about saying whatever was on his mind. It was pretty awesome to hear him dunk on his VP, right in the middle of lying to the Rogers commission's face. He was also really open about the fact that nobody at Morton Thiokol trusted him for the better part of a decade after he did that. He said something to the effect of, "It definitely made my career harder, but on the bright side, I never had any major crises of conscience for lying about it.
He also didn't give a single fuck about getting a lunch beer at a student gathering. I wish I'd joined him in drinking beer at noon on a Tuesday on IEEE dime.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/99th-congress/house-joint-reso...
This event almost doesn't matter because he didn't care he would have gotten demoted - he was driven by being able to do the right thing.
I believe there's a moment before he doesn't sign off on the launch or maybe just before he speaks out against his employer in front of the presidential commission... what will happen to me? what will happen to my family, 4 children? What work will I do? How do I make money? this is all I know...
If you've ever worried about your future, job prospects, the unknown, the fear of not being able to provide, these thoughts are heavy. He made this decision and would gladly make it again regardless of outcome.
I wish I could say the same for myself.
And I can imagine him wondering, as any introspective person would, “what if I’m wrong?” That has to add to the stress.
Care to elaborate a little? Seems like your experience could help others in a similar situation.
But am I willing to stick my neck out? Risk my career, who will hire me? Maybe someone will, but I just put a huge black mark in many's eyes. I have 2 children, a wife, and myself who rely on my income stream. Am I willing to let that go? Do I have to sell my house to make ends meet if I can't get a job?
I want to be able to say I could do what McDonald or Snowden did, but if I'm honest, probably not.
The fact is that this is a distinct feature of our society, we have to "earn our living" or be left behind.
Do we really want to keep such a negative incentive in place?
That's what ultimately makes our society turn. If we could get to a true StarTrek replicator, then I think we're off to a good start!
Regarding Italy:
We have social housing that is crippled by bureocracy and corruption, you have to wait years in line to get a flat, so I can't really say we guarantee that.
We guarantee education, but we couldn't guarantee the same (good) level of education to everyone yet. Also we don't guarantee post high school education. If you need to work because you're poor and you don't have time to pursue a degree, that's mostly your problem.
Food is not guaranteed either, although we have several monetary aids to partially reduce the issue.
Healthcare is guaranteed, and excluding waiting times that are a bit long, I can say that healthcare really worked well for us. Nothing is perfect, but nobody is left to die because of preventable disease. No matter how poor you are, you will be treated.
So I wouldn't say in Italy we ever experienced what I propose, just a tiny taste of it.
It's pretty hard to test that out, though, when one side of the political spectrum is so convinced it will happen that they devote a significant amount of political effort to making sure it happens, preventing us from ever finding out what a well-funded and run socialist experiment would look like in the US.
But it's false.
Vietnam works for example, it even handled covid much better than other turbo capitalist powers.
And every socialist experiment has been characterized by different approaches and circumstances.
Rather than a factual argument, it's more an uninformed generalization, that sounds too close to the propaganda we are pushed on by media/politicians.
Do you want a strong factual argument?
Despite their claims, not a single capitalist nation has managed to solve poverty. And they won't ever, because without poverty there can't be the hierarchy much needed to force people to behave like cogs into the capitalist machine.
For example, at the end of the current month I "spent" five chicken and twenty bushes of lavender (I live in the countryside :D) and acquired two dogs and fifty kilos of grain. Was that good? Can I keep doing the same thing next month, or should I change my "prices"?
Do not dismiss money lightly, it's far more important than you might think.
> Was that good?
Only you can tell. Has your quality of life improved? Do you have what you need to live well? Then it was good, otherwise not. Money won't help you at all to understand this. Only you can tell the value something has for you.
And I'm sure you do this already all the time. How many times were you advertised a great deal (in terms of price/product value) that you decided wasn't necessary?
That was you overriding the value money gives to something. Even though just looking at the price it seemed like a great deal, you realized that maybe you didn't need a third washing machine.
There is a self-selecting process where people promote other people who make those small decisions in a particular way.
If you climb well or are unlucky enough to look under the wrong rocks you get to an inflection point where your option is to become a whistle blower, leave, ask for a promotion, or become the patsy.
Often you can avoid this (if that's your desire) by frequently and vocally asking about the audit requirements of a particular business process...
Whistleblowing is and will always be considered an act of treason, or direct disloyalty, against those who are expecting you to support the enterprise.
Ultimately it comes down to your own conscience and being able to sleep at night.
I think that's actually a much bigger factor in some of these situations than any profit motive. Profit motive doesn't push rational people to keep doubling down no matter what; there is room for risk management concerns. But a corporation is not a single mind, it's a bunch of individuals acting in their own interest. Individuals' concern for their social capital within their teams tends to be a much more immediate and pressing motive than relatively remote and abstract things like shareholder profit.
Seems like you're trying to say something in a roundabout way.
These tropes make for easy internet virtue points but "just shun all risk" is a terrible heuristic for decision making and it's rarely clear without hindsight if/when/to what extent the risks are meaningfully greater than some previously agreed upon acceptable level. (Challenger blew up because the decision makers didn't understand how risky things actually were during a normal low temperature launch and decided to cut things even closer)
If everyone in the supply chain padded their estimates to reduce risk and cover their ass we wouldn't have space flight.
I heard this sentence so many times, that by now I'm convinced people who believe we are free don't really know what freedom means.
Today, you are free to choose in the same sense that you are free to commit crime. You can kill the next random person you meet on the streets, you can do that as long as you're ready to pay the consequences.
Does that mean we have freedom to commit homicide?
For the same reason, we aren't free to choose between keeping a job or starving our family and ending under the bridge.
Especially in a corrupt economy that relies entirely on people being in debt to live under modern standards.
Abolish debt, guarantee the basic needs to everyone, then we can talk about freedom of leaving a job.
You can quit and find a new job. Most would do it in a heartbeat for a tiny change in total comp, but struggle to make the decision when lives matter but might come at an economic cost?
That seems problematic and extremely self serving.
An interesting insight into the tech industry and its lack of 1. moral character 2. engineer accountability in general.
If by "you" you mean tech/white collar skilled worker, perhaps. But you're failing to consider the majority of low wage workers who don't really have this privilege.
I also believe in personal responsibility, like you do, but the biggest issue is in the system, rather than in individual behaviour.
It takes courage to take actual risks and make actual sacrifices to do the right thing.
You are right that it takes a lot less courage if you are sure you can just "quit and find a new job" and end up just fine. I'm sure most people would do the right thing when there is no cost to them at all of doing so and they are confident that is so, that's not the issue.
Honestly your confidence that of course you would do the right thing always just makes me think you've never faced a hard decision, or have always convinced yourself that no decision that would involve a significant personal sacrifice or loss was ever the right thing.
The latter is what lots of people do, it's not that they say "oh yeah I'm going to kill the astronauts because my career is more important", all those other people who overruled McDonald convinced themselves that it's not gonna kill the astronauts at all, so they didn't have to face the choice.
But its not a zero sum game, its a game that ecourages corruption
You can always justify it to yourself -- well, I'm not sure the thing will blow up, all these other smart people disagree, do I really want to risk being unemployed and my family living in poverty for it? We have an immense capacity to convince ourselves that doing the right thing coincides with our personal advantage and convenience.
What can do we do to make it more likely that we'll do the right thing when it matters? Only practice. One can ask oneself, when was the last time I risked personal advantage or security to do the right thing, when was the last time I gave up something to do the right thing for others? If one hasn't been practicing it when the stakes are smaller, one possibly hasn't built up the muscle to do so when the stakes are huge.
What if it's simply a probability though? 1%? .1%? .01%? Look at auto companies. They make decisions all the time that will kill 1 out of 1,000,000 people. Hell, the EPA and other regulators do this math every day. A coal power plant will kill x number of people over it's lifetime. Every time they make a regulation, they do this math and determine that saving a life is worth the economic cost.
And so we mortgage our agency every time we believe them. Advertising was part of the military industrial complex during world war 2. Maybe we should take umbrage at that.
This right here is one of the main reasons why I've worked so hard to achieve financial independence.
Every time someone in my life has told me that I have to do something I'm uncomfortable with, 'or else', they've simply been trying to cover the fact that I'm being exploited. Every. Time.
I'm quite happy to have reached a place in my life where I can tell someone 'No' with whatever level of politeness they deserve.
The employee had a reputation for being... particular... before he was willing to sign off on certain things.
I suspect that same can be said of most people. In cases like this, it is incredibly hard to make the right decision before the fact since there are only two scenarios in which you will be redeemed: you're ignored and disaster ensues, or you're acknowledged and further inspection reveals the component failure. A successful launch or inspection does not change the fact that it was the right decision, yet it will most likely have a deeply negative personal impact. The bit about being trusted to make decisions is apparently irrelevant.
That should be criminal charges.
https://turnto10.com/news/local/woonsocket-city-clerk-seen-d...
Where I work no one would even blink. I typically turn my camera off when eating, but I don't think anyone would care if I didn't.
It mostly centers around driving company vehicles in writing but the company makes no effort to hide the religious roots right on the public website.
Buying companies is hard. I'm pretty sure this was a big net negative for the buyer.
Also drinking on lunch break is unprofessional (even if you don't do it to excess) in a lot of blue collar fields. How many white collar people lamenting the lack of beer at lunch would turn around and lose their shit if their crane operator had a couple beers? That's a double standard no workplace needs.
Whats hypocritical is that safety critical work pays worse than being a useless busybody with an inflated title.
The Puritans influence seems to have a long reach. (?)
The guy whose job it was to send the fax because he happened to be the one who knew how to operate the fax machine is to this day utterly devastated; weeping.
The MTI VP who signed off (although the decision was made above his head) admits that he agreed with it at the time, but acknowledges it was a mistake. He’s being interviewed in a large room full of very expensive furniture.
The NASA manager who bullied them into agreeing to launch because they couldn’t prove that it was unsafe basically says that if he had his time over he would kill all of the astronauts again. Truly terrifying.
A lot of people can't tell the difference between fact movies and fiction movies.
And that doesn't even get into clearly biased documentaries (but I assume that most documentaries are at least trying to be factual instead of entertainment...)
Given the recent thread on adam curtis documentaries I'm inclined to believe the opposite. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25880448
By the way, I thought Inside Job was a vastly better film about the crisis that was criminally under-rated. Definitely worth checking out.
Not perfect by any means, but far more informative than The Big Short, and not as dumbed down.
If a BBB tranche goes under, the investors in the BBB tranche get nothing to protect the AAA tranche (and above). In effect: BBB tranche can fail safely, that's the entire point of them.
That's why they only shorted the BBB tranche (with exception of Brownfield Capital, who did go all the way to the AA tranche). AA was safer and more reliable: so for a short its a riskier move to short.
------
The scene does in fact lay the ground basis of tranches and CDOs, which is better than most Hollywood movies. But its still filled with misconceptions, and the Jenga tower (though dramatic) isn't helping at all.
---------------
Synthetic CDOs was very poorly described. The "rating agency" scenes were pretty much purely fiction and just designed to enrage the audience and IMO unhelpful to the general discussion. Etc. etc.
----
CDOs of CDOs were accurately described IMO. Hammed up by explaining the "yesterday's fish in today's soup), but that at least is somewhat of an accurate analog.
------
I mean, it was a solid movie. But look, I know how reality works. I've actually taken the time to look at (some) of the Congressional Hearings and read some of the papers for how that whole thing worked back in 2008. And there are also some good Frontline Documentaries on the whole 2008 crisis in general.
They were further hurt by the fact they kept a huge amount of their assets in AAA MBS. Which had now become illiquid and (temporarily) lost value.
AIG's bailout by the government was a critical inflection point; if they hadn't, the entire insurance/financial services industry was at risk.
https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b150qdkrd30ggk...
That's how crappy of a movie it was from a documentary perspective. They're missing the perspective of one of the major players entirely.
A lot of banks saw what was going on in the market, and decided to "cover their ass" just in case the mortgage industry collapsed. They didn't quite go short like Burry (and everyone else in the movie), they just "hedged", to protect themselves just in case of a collapse.
Any bank that was worried about what was going on would have bought a few credit-default swaps from AIG (not that everyone knew that AIG was the main CDO counterparty: they bought CDS from the market and AIG happened to be one of those sellers).
If AIG went bankrupt, a huge number of shorts (well, "protection buyers") on the mortgage market would have gone bankrupt with them.
AIG isn't covered in the movie because it runs entirely counter to the narritive the movie is trying to build. A huge number of banks did in fact see the mortgage crisis and take moves to protect themselves.
-----------
That's the thing about CDS and going short on the mortgage market: even if you were right about it, you had to also be right about the so called "counterparty risk". The bank who took up the long-side of the bet against you still needed to be around to make the payout.
That's why AIG was bailed out. Also: because the collapse of Lehman Brothers / Washington Mutual and other financial companies was wreaking havoc on the economy.
The movie wanted to focus on the narrative that "Bailouts are bad". Well, sure. But its pretty easy to build that narrative by ignoring the AIG situation, as well as Lehman Brothers / Washington Mutual.
If you go back and look at the actual history and debate of the bailout, the question is way more ambiguous.
>> the upshot that the AAA's were in a position to be unstable and possibly cause an economic collapse was in fact very true
That's not what the Jenga scene implied.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hG4X5iTK8M
You know what a number of my friends took from that scene?
"Wow, the banks are so stupid. Why would AAAs rely upon the B-tranche?"
Yeah, cause that scene is misinformed. The Jenga Tower is upside-down. America's Mortgage market wouldn't really collapse until the AAAs were being threatened (which eventually, they were, but because of CDO-squared and Synthetic CDO leverage).
But yeah, its a long story. You'd expect that the core of the story would be covered by a reasonable documentary. But "The Big Short" isn't one, its an entertainment movie.
Note: genuine question, never having purchased any CDSs! ;-)
What I can say is that a CDS wasn't purchased directly in most cases. It was indirect.
----------------
So for example: if you're a bank looking at a bunch of CDOs (and therefore: CDO-squared, which people didn't realize was a problem yet). You're seeing default rates creep up in 2006 and you're worried that things might collapse.
You then see a CDO that's insurance-protected. It has a lower %yield, but that's because some of the % is going towards CDS / insurance to protect your basket of mortgages. You check with the ratings agencies and they rate the bond at AAA (because even if the underlying mortgage fails, you have a big-bank providing the CDS protecting the mortgage).
You purchase the CDO (aka: buy a bunch of mortgages on the market), WITH CDS insurance. The CDS portion is sold to the highest-bidder at a separate time. The CDO-buyer didn't care "who" insured the CDO, they just wanted some kind of insurance.
That turned out to be a problem when AIG was revealed to be the owner of $500+ Billion in CDS. As such, the "insurance payout" protecting those CDOs ended up being vaporware.
--------------
So now you're the US Government, looking at this problem. Do you let AIG collapse? If you do, all $500 Billion worth of AIG's CDSes fail (and therefore the CDOs fail). But if you let that happen, other banks also fail (and these other banks made the CORRECT decision: buying insurance to cover their ass).
This is the "Toxic Debt" problem. The toxic debt was passed from company-to-company: everyone "related" to AIG was going to be affected, and no one really had an idea of who AIG was related to.
Note: Bush let the first few banks (ex: Lehman Brothers) fail. They saw in realtime as the "toxic debt" of Lehman Brothers brought down the rest of the market.
By the time AIG was at risk, George Bush had seen enough. When one bank collapses, it causes many other banks to collapse in ways that cannot be foreseen.
-------------
I admit that one could make the argument that it was the smaller-bank's fault for forgetting about counterparty risk (not caring who took up the other side of the CDS).
But by the time banks were falling and collapsing like dominoes in 2008, I think Bush didn't care about the morals of this particular case. It was about stopping the domino effect in general.
Its like the Options market. You can be the seller of a call option without knowing who your counterparty is. Similarly: you don't necessarily know who the counterparty to your CDS is.
The CDS was not a standard instrument like the options market. The details of each-and-every CDS changes with each prospectus. This is very common in the bond market: bonds change (callable vs non-callable vs puttable, vs tax free vs taxed, in a CDO or CDO-squared or Synthetic CDO, or a SLAB or an MBS or... etc. etc. Lots of differing details).
---------------
So when you buy a CDO-squared in 2006, you didn't necessarily know that AIG was providing the CDS-insurance associated with that CDO. (Hypothetically. I'm assuming that such a product existed back then...)
-------------
If it helps, consider a $600 call option on TSLA that expires a month from now. Lets say you want to be the seller of this call option (which is a kinda-sorta insurance-like product on the price of TSLA).
You can sell this Tesla-insurance on the options market. But you will NEVER figure out who is on the buyer-side of your deal.
And vice versa: the buyer of the TSLA insurance (call option) will never know that you were the one selling that insurance. A middleman handles all the details. Neither side really cares "who" is the counterparty is, they just expect that the other side can pay up.
(In the case of options: the clearing house / middleman is a very large bank who guarantees the payment. It turns out that the middlemen of the CDS deals in 2008 were less reliable)
By my understanding: people just forgot about counterparty risk in 2008.
You have to remember: banks like Lehman Brothers have been around for over 100 years. The idea that a big bank would collapse was a completely alien thought in 2007.
It was one of those "don't care" situations. Oh, they're a big bank. They wouldn't choose to take on more insurance than they can handle (or whatever). I don't care which bank is the CDS insurance, I just want some insurance from somebody. Besides, mortgages have been reliable for decades, getting CDSes to cover my ass on an already safe mortgage is the height of paranoia. Etc. etc.
-------------
You also have to remember that various banks work pretty hard to "hide their hands". If you hear that a big bank is selling CDOs, the all the smaller banks will similarly sell CDOs (trying to get a "piece of the action").
If you're a big bank deciding to make a $500 Billion bet, you really want to make sure that the details of your bet remains a secret. Otherwise, the smaller banks (who are more agile than you) will make those deals before you finish your deal.
The Jenga tower should really be inverted. The BBB tranche gets knocked off the tower to protect the AAA tranche at the base.
The ratings agency scenes are fictional in the sense that no conversation actually happened, to our knowledge, but it's 100% true that the ratings agencies played right along with the industry, and were incentivized to give higher ratings, just like the FAA was incentivized not to ground Boeing after the first 737 Max crash.
After all, I love the HBO series, watched it three times by now. Still one of the best mini series ever produced. As shown by the fact that you have to dig that deep to find deviations from reality. In most other cases, you don't even have to scratch the surface.
And in my lay man eyes, the RBMK reactor (which was also found to violate soviet requirements from the 70s) was a disaster waiting to happen. Inherently unstable, optimized for grid stability instead of safety, lacking control and monitoring, erratic behaviour under certain conditions and no clear operating procedures.
Edit: Also nice is that the first reaction was to blame the operators and not the system as a whole. Kind of what always happens with aviation accidents as well, it always the pilots fault first.
Is there something glaring I am missing?
https://en.hromadske.ua/posts/chernobyl-expert-serhii-plokhi...
Edit: oh and that’s without mentioning all the factual errors in the story itself. Like the three volunteers who went into the plant to open the drains didn’t die, but are alive today, cancer free and collecting their pensions. So are most of the people who watched the plant burn the first night on the bridge.
The biggest steam boiler explosions in history were still many orders of magnitude less than that, and those were purpose-built pressure vessels. The core wasn't going to drop into a pressure vessel, just whatever makeshift containment they had enacted at that time. Had the core come in contact with the water it would have converted a large chunk of it into steam, which would within moments blow open whatever cracks or leaks existed in the containment, blowing a lot of radioactive rubble into the surrounding environment.
That would have been a huge setback, but nothing near a multi-megaton nuclear explosion.
Chernobyl still managed to poison large areas of Europe, but the effects were mercifully localised and temporary.
A steam explosion would have increased those effects and the areas they affected by some orders of magnitude.
See: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14752799/ and many other studies done with similar objectives such as https://www.medpagetoday.org/meetingcoverage/ata/54237?vpass... . It is not something that sits well with various politicians because the liability question was never really answered and so this is just another inconvenient truth.
It does, thank you.
There are other things I don't like about the mini series, but really just minor ones. The last episode was a wasted opportunity, so. Using the Vienna meeting would have been the perfect setting to cover the international reaction as well.
That being said, I saw a lot of similar decision processes in my career in purely capitalist jobs to the ones that lead to the screwed up test in Chernobyl.
Also, I believe the Soviet authorities at the time may have incorrectly believed that a large explosion was possible - in that respect the show may be correctly repeating a mistake that was made at the time.
This crappy trait isn’t limited to that time and place. The incident that comes to mind is gulf war 2 Bush “We don’t do body counts”.
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/we-count-they-dont...
It is worth listening to the podcast that accompanied the TV show. One of the things they mention quite a bit is where they deliberately deviated from the truth for practical/dramatic/pacing reasons[†], had to pick a narrative path from conflicting records, or had to make bits up to fill gaps in the (publicly available) records, and one or two cases where they toned down rather than ramped up an issue for tonal or "no one would believe it was quite that way" reasons.
It is both an enlightening insight into the process of making a show like that, and gives useful context to start on your journey if you want to delve deeper into the real reality of the events.
[†] merging many people into a single character, exaggerating immediate effects, reordering/repurposing actual events (a helicopter did crash but not at that point), pretty much that entire courtroom scene in the final episode, ...
That's why I don't like entertainment that stylizes itself as factual. For general audience, there are only two modes of understanding: either something is obviously fiction, or obviously reporting. There's no middle line.
From the shows that try to blend the two, you get things like people believing fictionalizations in HBO's Chernobyl and then becoming opinionated on nuclear energy; people learning history from docudramas; people thinking Top Gear is factual and not staged; people thinking all those performers on talent shows are actually doing these things for real...
I love docs but often research the subject after watching and it's INCREDIBLY rare to see a doc that doesn't play fast and loose with the facts for the sake of creating a dramatic arc or thrilling moments.
It's ESPECIALLY true in "true crime" docs. The director has an idea of painting the subject as either sympathetic guy who was wronged by a corrupt system (Making a Murderer) or evil mastermind (The Jinx) just to give two recent examples.
Turned out years later the giant reveal at the center of The Jinx which made it such a viral hit was 100% manufactured by the director cutting up audio to make Durst say things he didn't. He also lied to the police about the audio so it wouldn't spoil the ending of the doc.
Jarecki never had to apologize for the blatant dishonesty in the doc, never had to give back the Emmy. It's still universally acclaimed.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/24/arts/television/robert-du...
Sorry to rant, but the "documentary" film industry is a fucking joke. I have so many more examples...
It's because with documentaries, the target audience is someone who is expecting to get some semblance of truth from the thing. But the issue is that given two documentaries, A and B, if A is more narratively/cinematically/etc titillating, it will get produced over B. Which means that the cost function of engagement will drive a documentary right up to the constraint of "not lying" as it can possibly go.
If you really care about accuracy, don't watch documentaries. And please if you are one of my friends stop recommending that I watch them to get informed about something.
The incentives are definitely misaligned. Viewers want and expect accuracy, but most of all what they want is to be entertained and most aren't going to look to hard to see how accurate a really entertaining doc is.
And as you said the incentive for filmmakers is to produce the most entertaining doc possible to get more butts in seats and more streams which means funding and continued work in the industry. Accuracy doesn't really play much into what gets produced and released.
It shook the assumptions and foundations of modernity and we lurched closer to overvaluing the virtual accomplishments of economic growth and financialization. Wealth is being used to create more wealth, it is not serving any productive purpose, directly or indirectly:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization#Roots
>In the United States, probably more money has been made through the appreciation of real estate than in any other way. What are the long-term consequences if an increasing percentage of savings and wealth, as it now seems, is used to inflate the prices of already existing assets - real estate and stocks - instead of to create new production and innovation?
We kept trying after the Apollo 1 fire, we didn't really keep trying after Challenger or Chernobyl. Instead of trying to accomplish truly great and difficult things, we became satisfied with making numbers go up on a Bloomberg terminal.
(This is not a good thing, to be clear, and whoever figures out a systematic solution to this problem will save countless lives in many generations to come.)
It's all well and good to celebrate Allan McDonald for courageously speaking up, but the hard question is this: had Larry Mulloy or George Hardy ever been in the position where they had to make a decision about whether to courageously speak up, at any point between when they joined NASA and when they got their management roles?
If your promotion criteria says that someone's qualified for a higher-level job because they've been doing good work in fair weather, you have absolutely no way to know whether they listen to their conscience - you simply have no data about what happens when they have to make tough calls. And in fact your process is slightly biased against people who do, because sometimes people who don't will take an unwise risk and get lucky. And so over time, as long as disasters remain less common as worries about disasters, the folks who don't listen to their consciences get a little bit more done during their career compared to their peers.
We know that Thiokol demoted McDonald for speaking up and sidelined the others who also did. This is a system that systematically avoids empowering the good guys.
(And, from all evidence, Mulloy and Hardy were highly capable engineers. I'm not saying NASA should have never hired them - they should have had senior IC roles to fit their strengths and NASA should have looked for folks more like McDonald to make the launch decisions.)
How can we possibly know if someone else listens to their conscience? Their conscience is not accessible to anyone else.
We're looking for whether someone is empirically willing to make a decision that's unpopular but right, whatever the reason. If they did something like McDonald did, where they were under pressure (including career pressure) to do something, they refuse to do it, and the data eventually shows they had good reason for it, then you've got some data. If they do like his colleague Bob Ebeling did and they write a memo to upper management because they don't feel their direct management is taking concerns seriously, you've got some data, too.
What I'm saying is that, if the person you're considering promoting has never faced a hard decision, and you're promoting them because they had the good fortune to face years of easy decisions through which they could do high-quality work, you know you don't have any data. I agree that it's hard to get the data (and there are obvious problems with that metric turning into a target), but if you don't even try, you're certainly not going to succeed.
All the engineering process in the world will not save you if your hiring and promotion processes incentivize the wrong things. Hence my question: did NASA have a process for deciding that Mulloy and Hardy were good at making life-or-death decisions, or did it simply have a process that determined that they were good engineers?
Some might, and just not care. Psychopaths aren't that rare (although how frequent the incidence is within Nasa is I have no idea)
Any evidence for that statement? Wikipedia and its sources suggest otherwise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy#Frequency
> 1.2% of a US sample scored 13 or more out of 24, indicating "potential psychopathy"
Those 1.2% are only "potential psychopaths" so the real number might be even less. An illness that only affects <1% of a population can definitely be seen as rare.
The fact that so many people believe this is true, however, is why avoidable accidents like this happen. Being willing to compromise your ethics isn’t bravery.
If you want to say that my "You don't" is technically false because, if you listen to your conscience, you might get proven right after seven people die and a major investigation happens that remains world news for decades afterwards, and even then you'll get demoted and sidelined until the US Congress intervenes, then ... yes, you can. I will rephrase to "You usually don't." (But even so, that just gets you promoted at Thiokol, and my statement stands for NASA.)
Why didn't anyone scrub Columbia's launch? Why did the investigation board say that NASA had most of the same cultural and leadership flaws that the Rogers Commission had raised concerns about?
The SREs have a saying, "Hope is not a strategy." You can hope that the person you promote will have a sense of ethics, and maybe they will, but that does nothing to ensure that you'll have ethical decision-making.
How many people do C-levels have to kill for heads to roll?
He had two choices: cowardly pretend it's not his fault or admit that given all he knew, he took a risk to break it or make it and broke it.
You don't know how liberating hearing a guy like that say that. In my company, no way someone says that, they'd rather do absolutely nothing than risk anything.
Of course it comes across as quite callous considering it’s not his life that’s at risk, but he does have a point (not necessarily a valid one for the o-ring issue, but more generally speaking).
Management thought the risk of lost was 1 in 100,000 which is launching everyday for 274 years. Engineers polled was 1:50 to 1:200. Obviously a massive disconnect.
The thing that gets me is they broke their own protocol operating below 53'F. This wasn't a calculated risk where it's 1-2 degrees out of spec, it's wildly out of spec, below freezing into a completely unknown, untested and un-spec'ed space.
This is what frustrates me.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Commission_Report#Role_...
The first thing we sent into space wasn't alive. The first living thing we sent into space wasn't a human. Taking risks is for idiots, not researchers or engineers.
I'm sure he rewrote it in his mind later, so he could live with himself. Because, of course, he was the kind of guy that rewrote things to suit his agenda.
It's also worth understanding the difference in risks and incentives.
Do you work in an industry where someone failing to speak up about issues with the work will directly risk other coworkers lives?
Where I work, the worst that happens from bad decisions is reduced profits. Besides the personal glory of "being right", there's no upside to sticking ones neck out. Especially if your manager is vindictive, and takes your "being right" over him as a reason to punish you. Better to let bad things happen, and then help fix the inevitable clusterfuck.
At the end of the day, reduced profits aren't great, but they're not an existential threat for the biz where I work.
I only know two people who spent their careers at NASA, but with my small sample size this isn't surprising at all. Both of them have never been wrong in their lives. Their hubris is off the charts.
I don't work at NASA, and I know a few arrogant people who also don't work at NASA.
https://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v2appf.htm
Short and readable.
It appears that there are enormous differences of opinion as to the probability of a failure with loss of vehicle and of human life. The estimates range from roughly 1 in 100 to 1 in 100,000. The higher figures come from the working engineers, and the very low figures from management. What are the causes and consequences of this lack of agreement? Since 1 part in 100,000 would imply that one could put a Shuttle up each day for 300 years expecting to lose only one, we could properly ask "What is the cause of management's fantastic faith in the machinery?"
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.2) Massive respect to NPR, for continuing to publish news in HTML with minimal markup, quick loading for anyone to view.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHS_Connecting_for_Health that
It's like a nightmare where you can't move and nobody can hear you scream. You can only watch the inevitable disaster unfold.
Probably not many. (Probably I couldn't either.)
It's one thing to praise a hero like him... but how can we be that guy while having a stable job?
If you want to remain true, you have to have FU money and know where that line is. Some peopled don't need that moral cushion, others do, it isn't a value judgement. We need to construct a world where Allan McDonald's can flourish.
https://youtu.be/FQDe8Y9BBMo?t=100 Be the foundation for the future.
I'm in currently in the valley of death phase of startup life working on a tiny piece of the climate problem, but when the day comes that I'm in a position to hire teams I want them to be able to look me in the eye and oppose me when I'm going off the ethics track. How we got here to needing the climate problem fixed was people making their peace with consequences of their actions, and it's not going to be solved by doubling down on that approach.
You know, for all its evils, it is sometimes surprising that the world is relatively peaceful (for 60% of the globe), full of donators, people fighting for women, people refusing to participate to bad schemes. Even in opposing views, most people are doing it because they believe the world will be better like this. Also, absolute stupid people have always been the norm, and the bad ones have always been assertive and powerful and yet, the world is not so bad, so we are on a good streak.
I do not think it has anything to do with "move fast and break things" way of doing things though. You can't expect the same approach and investment in safety in generic company vs some nuclear power plant or likes.
McDonald is on a whole other level though. That’s not just your employer, that’s the entire space program. I hope I never have to find out whether I’m made of the same stuff he was.
In my experience, this is not how it works. Very rarely can you say definitively that “people will die”. Reliability is shrouded in uncertainty and the best you can say is, “people may die, eventually ”. If you make too absolute of a claim and it didn’t occur you will gradually erode credibility. Look at Columbia... they knew the foam shedding was out of spec but had so many instances of probability being on their side, if you claimed people would die act each of those launches soon you just become noise. Over a long enough timeline you may be right, but phrasing in that way is unlikely to help in low probability events.
He changed his attitude when the elders explained to him that while the chance was very low, the hunters took a lot of naps in the forest throughout their lives and over decades, the low chance translated to almost-certainty.
And a short video in context of challenger accident : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tC0qkVf5SmE
The real difficulty is accurately gauging risk, especially when there isn’t substantial data.
1988. Damage to orbiter Atlantis.
Not the same foam that shedded (pieces from SRB rather than external tank). But still demonstrated failure modes.
The mindset is different when building truly critical systems.
There's not really anything unethical about moving fast and accepting the risk that comes with that for most of the things people are building here.
Your broader point is correct, I'm just not so sure everyone is as good at judging where that line is as they think they are.
(Throwaway account because making a difference doesn't necessarily mean making a public show.)
You decide that ethics and life are more important that your next few paychecks years before the event that makes you stand up and speak out. Sort of the stoic version of dress for the job you want.
For many businesses, from the regular employee perspective, a lot of the hard ethical questions unfortunately got answers and built into policy years agoz often well before platforms and products got big for those that succeeded. Getting old discussions resurrected is and likely will remain a hard problem in human organizations forever.
Perhaps counterintuitively, working on systems with clear life safety concerns often makes it easier since there are very clear consequences. It's one of the reasons for very harsh regulatory penalties, to be big and shocking enough for those that don't have strong ethical paradigms. In the industries I deal with there are several "million dollar per day" fine structures I hear people going on about that I never correct with more accurate information because if they're oblivious enough to not understand they're also oblivious enough to need that fear.
This gets into the argument about whether people who write software should be called engineers. There is good reason why nearly every engineering body out there has something along the lines of "Hold paramount their duty to public welfare" as the first item in the code of conduct. "Move fast and break things" is pretty much incompatible with engineering.
With software how it is today the “outer software” engineering has created a little virtual realm where things can go haywire and fail but it’s in a mostly padded room. And of course it’s all running within very well regulated and stable hardware.
Maybe coding itself isn’t engineering anymore than welding or running cables is but both computer and software engineering was required for coding and to make the code do anything significant it takes some engineering, or you could just start welding shit together!
>There is good reason why nearly every engineering body out there has something along the lines of "Hold paramount their duty to public welfare" as the first item in the code of conduct. "Move fast and break things" is pretty much incompatible with engineering.
Those aren't mutually excluisive.
Move fast and break things when it comes to crud apps is totally different thing.
You can also use "move fast and break things" in order to achieve "Hold paramount their duty to public welfare"
Move fast and... does not imply unsafe.
The word "break" is in the phrase...
About the closest I came was when working in telecom, for a new tech deployment I had my hands pretty deep in the lab environment, so when things were broken in the lab, bad config, etc I would get pulled in troubleshoot and solve the problems.
Well one day 911 wasn't working in the lab and the problem got thrown my way, and it wasn't an obvious problem like someone miss configured something or broke some config somewhere. In telco at the time it was all vendor driven solutions, so I intentionally left the system broken to bring in the vendor to troubleshoot, and it was clear, this is a lab, let's not treat it like production and as such we don't need immediate recovery, we want to get to the root cause so it doesn't happen in production.
The next day, the handset verification team was on me, saying they need this to work immediately since they need to validate some device by such and such date. And I basically said listen, there's a software problem in this product, and we don't want it to go to production. And if I don't get it fixed it could blow up in production on us. I also told them if I don't make progress in a day or two, I would try and reconfigure another environment for them so they would get unblocked, but otherwise was not willing to just reset this system so the problem went away.
I was also doing my own investigation as much as I could since the vendor wasn't always the most reliable, and I encountered something unexpected. It looked like a node was rebooted, so I tracked that down, and found a senior architect who new I was working on solving the issue had rebooted one of the blades. His answer was basically the device team was complaining so he just went in and rebooted the node so they would stop complaining to him.
Luckily, he didn't know enough on how to really reboot the system, so it just synced back with it's backup and still had the problem for us to investigate.
The vendor comes back and goes ah yea, the 911 handler is using the wrong memory region for storing emergency calls, so instead of being able to allocate a hundred thousand records or whatever it was for active emergency calls it was using an administrative region that could only allocate something like 5 calls. This was enough years ago that I forget the exact number, but it was less than 10. Not just that, but there was a second bug, a certain 911 call flow would allocate the call but not release it, which is why we couldn't make any 911 calls in the lab, we had leaked all of the reserved memory for emergency calls.
I just remember being so livid, because the culture for anyone who dealt with that system was it's failure is just in their way, so lets just escalate and try and make it go away so we can continue on with our jobs.
And it would've been so easy to just reset the whole thing so that people would stop complaining. It was just a lab after all.
But.. I am not in the position of being responsible for signing the design which makes my life easier. If an accident happens I have my conscience for myself and proof that I objected.
However, it is much more difficult to gain attention when you cry foul to something unethical being done (diesel gate comes to mind here), even though it can remotely leads to deaths.
Major respect to Allan McDonald.
> usually not up to the task
Hmm, "usually"? It sounds like you've done at least something sometime, even though you may not have been satisfied. Kudos for doing what you could under the circumstances. Not everyone needs to go full martyr.
I respect and honor this man for what he did. RIP Allan McDonald, and thank you for what you left behind.
This quote from the article helped me, right here, right now:
--- excerpt ---
"What we should remember about Al McDonald [is] he would often stress his laws of the seven R's," Maire says. "It was always, always do the right thing, for the right reason at the right time with the right people. [And] you will have no regrets for the rest of your life."
--- end excerpt ---
When people say that it is not just about about what you do, or why you do it, but who you do it with, it is so easy to gloss over that sometimes, it's about doing your part with the right people.
For me, this served as a reminder of high value.
right
right
reason
right
right
regrets
rest
Paris
In The
The SpringNASA engineers gave information about O-ring only to Sally Ride (a member of Rogers commission). Sally Ride then gave the information to her friend General Donald Kutyna (an another member of Rogers commission) who she trusted to not to implicate her or the engineers. Then Kutyna found way to inform Feynman so that Feynman could "discover it independently" without the risk of revealing the real source.
Alan McDonald spoke up in the first closed meeting as the article says and told that they have suggested not launching. Focus of the commission started to change but it didn't happen overnight. He didn't "blow whistle to congress".
No, I don't think it is, and it's the pervasive belief that they do that gives the few who do license to continue doing so.
At most you can say that greed causes leaders to promote and hire this kind of person, but that’s a tenuous argument in my opinion. The real world observation of WW2, the Milford experiments, Stanford prisoner experiments, Asch conformity experiments, and so many cases of corporate malfeasance, at least to me, show pretty directly that people like Allan McDonald are the exception. The reason also makes sense to me. Social conformity, if you’re in the “in” group yields a lot of benefits and being in the “out” group has a lot of costs. You’re talking not just about societal conformance pressures through things like being a pariah at work or being passed over for promotion. This can be personal pressures where you suddenly have financial pressures you didn’t have before because no one is willing to give you a break. You’ve got your family either putting pressure on you to ease their lives or your own guilt that your family is paying a price for your actions. To withstand that is a minority of people, like those who have strong support from family and trusted friends for whom the societal bonds aren’t as important.
I do agree that ethics seems to take a saddeningly low priority in most powerful leaders in the world, but there are some areas in society where this isn't the case: I remember reading a thread a little while ago here on HN about how seriously safety is taken in nuclear power and how anyone involved in the process can object.
That being said, (and as a person with a pro-nuclear bias) I will note though that Fukushima had engineers raising dissent about it and warning/begging/pleading with the bureaucracy to harden the defenses against a tsunami. Admittedly maybe you’re talking about Western policies.
We absolutely need more men and women like Allan McDonald, in all areas of government, science, education, and industry.
I would bet good money that every disaster movie could also be tied to a Nostradamus prediction. It doesn't make it relevant.
I count 6 R's, did somebody mangle the quote?
FAA safety engineer goes public to slam agency’s oversight of Boeing’s 737 Max
Lessons learned and forgotten, or perhaps not learned at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia#Final_m...
A particularly relevant snippet: The report delved deeply into the underlying organizational and cultural issues that the board believed contributed to the accident. The report was highly critical of NASA's decision-making and risk-assessment processes.
This is the frame that idea needed.
>Refuse to sign, and he'd risk his job, his career, and the good life he'd built for his wife and four children.
It is subtle but still—the man had _four_ kids.
The decision was risking the life he and his wife were building _together_.
I'd say that as a rule, a good engineer will always be concerned. With his knowledge and experience, he will know everything that can go wrong. And asking him to make life-and-death decisions must be really hard when you know that your contraption can always be made safer, given enough time you don't have.
How many big milestones were made possible because some clueless executive decided to risk the life of people? How to make the difference, without the benefit of hindsight, between an overly cautious engineer and a savior?
Launching under freezing weather was no particular achievement. They could have delayed the launch for better weather with no loss of “big milestones”.
And I never said engineers concerns were unfounded, quite the opposite in fact, engineers know what can go wrong. If your engineers don't say "no", either they are incompetent or they are heartless. And because Allan McDonald was a great engineer and human being, he said "no".
My point was more general than the Challenger disaster. When to listen to engineers and when to take unreasonable risks? Here, the answer is obvious, and we know that in general, Allan McDonald was someone to listen to but we have hindsight. How do we make the difference between chances you can't take and over-caution that can drag project forever?
It would be interesting to know how risk was calculated in the space shuttle program since we have problems going both ways: two catastrophic accidents, and runaway costs which are, for a large parts, safety-related in response to these accidents.
I looked at the videos of the previous days a bit, and can't find the moment which he describes in the article. Can anyone?
The NY Times article of the next day doesn't describe the moment either: https://www.nytimes.com/1986/02/26/us/man-in-the-news-tenaci...
For a while I though that press was that mechanism, however after 'embedded press' in Iraq War and governments going after press sources with impunity, or White House refusing to deal with it all together, we know that press can be coopted. We need something better, perhaps a law...or a gofundme for whistleblowers?
Especially as I was young at the time it occurred and am not from the US, so probably less exposed to it as well.
[1] https://www.encyclopedia.com/books/politics-and-business-mag...
So basically, he's walking a line between making the right scientific decisions and protecting his position enough (in his estimation) that he gets to make decisions at all, which is compromising some of the decisions he's making.
Wise words, very wise words
But one thing that just came to my mind: were the allowed launch temperatures specified at design time? Yes, Florida is hot but it does get chilly sometimes (not rarely, sometimes).
Of course my cartoon solution to that launch would be to hold the launch with engines running for 1 or 2 seconds while giant baffles would divert the massive amounts of vapour back into the orbiter and heat it a bit
I feel like there are a lot of parallels in modern-day situations. The common wisdom around PR is to get control of this kind of situation to prevent it.
Can we learn from other professions such as doctors on how to handle these better? I believe it's very rare for a hospital administrator to over rule a doctors decision when it comes to patients health.
Did he sign off on STS-61-C?
My understanding is that there were numerous warnings about the Challenger, but the same warnings had been made constantly for every single launch. Sometimes they resulted in delays, etc., but the engineers and managers in charge of the launches had ample evidence of predictions of failure not being borne out because the system was resilient to them.
Similar to warnings about 9/11, or Fukushima, or the 2008 GFC, there were people who predicted them. But, like the saying goes "they predicted 25 of the last 7 recessions".
I can't say whether McDonald fits this mold, but if he did not -- if he made an unusual prediction -- then that should be front and center here.
The Thiokol SRB design wasn’t safe in very cold weather, and the Challenger launch was on the coldest weather ever attempted.
That’s why the warnings for this flight.
https://emptysqua.re/blog/who-broke-the-challenger-investiga...
So crazy.
"Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it" --Einstein (b. 1879)
What rubbish logic. I think we can agree that Einstein was a generally incredibly intelligent and remarkable human. That is enough of an argument to pause for 5 seconds and hear this one sentence out. Then you can discard it as you see fit.
In other words, Einstein's status is what has you listening, but the content of what is said has to stand on its own two legs and does not necessarily rely on an argument from authority.
In the case of Boeing it actually started right from the beginning with the decision to create a kludge based on very dated designs to try to meet new requirements and save a buck rather than create a new design.
Engineers should be in charge of engineering companies and they should also continue to be incentivised to operate as engineering supervisors in those roles rather than just salespeople or accountants.
I actually think it's not just the people or the incentives but the nature of money. It's a fundamental technology but I think we should find ways to upgrade it as a high technology so that it integrates better all of our values that might not currently be in the bottom line.