Comment by jwithington | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jwithington | Hacker News Reader

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I think you're identifying one of the strongest argument against my claims. Automated, or computer assisted, reviews will only increase error rate because humans will assume that computers took care of it all.

You're probably on to something. When radar was first rolled out to all Navy ships to assist navigation (post WWII), accident rates actually increased.

My hunch is that Sailors drove ships riskier thinking that radar would save them. A bit like the findings of seat-belt safety laws: no impact on fatalities.

But I'm not agitating for full-blown computer reviews. It just feels like the software should have the computing capabilities of Excel lol

That thing about seat belts - really? https://www.cdc.gov/transportationsafety/seatbeltbrief/index...

It's a tradeoff. Trusting computers too much gets you into trouble (loss of navigation skills, over reliance on a potentially faulty system), but having to do things manually and depending on discipline also doesn't scale. You need to maintain enough discipline (validate the computer's results) but still have a better source than "Well, myself and three others looked at this chart for an hour and couldn't find anything above 350FT".

Discipline works until time pressure causes discipline to relax, and then the loosened discipline becomes the norm (normalization of deviance). There is no reliable way to restore discipline (in a timely fashion) after that happens, and then a collision would become inevitable. If you only rely on discipline, you're bound to fail. If you have means of relieving the reliance on discipline and don't use them, you're making a tragic mistake.

Fair enough. Perhaps something like doing checks after the plans have been manually computed, and then errors/warnings are flagged and used for evaluations and training. But then again, how is the culture of the Navy? Would such data be used exclusively to punish people?

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