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Comment by tacitusarc | Hacker News Reader

But that’s actually lends great support to his point! Seatbelts are insufficient. That’s why we have traffic control and licensing and occasionally guard rails. If the only safety for vehicles was seatbelts, it would be quite reasonable to point out that all accidents involved seatbelts.

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But there's a difference between saying "you know what's true about every fatal car accident where everyone was wearing a seatbelt? Everyone was wearing a seatbelt!" I could then continue, "this means that seatbelts aren't 100% safety devices. Yes, they save lives, but it's still important to drive safely _and_ we're still on the lookout for better safety devices."

However, Rich Hickey's talk was the equivalent of "you know what's true about every fatal car accident where everyone was wearing a seatbelt? Everyone was wearing a seatbelt! [Laughs] Thus seatbelts suck."

When I saw that lecture, my takeaway was basically your example- we have some tools which help, but they are insufficient. In my experience, there are certainly developers who turn their brains off and rely exclusively on tests or code review.

I'm not sure the argument you are extracting here is the right one? Traffic control and licensing also don't prevent all accidents, either. You'd need to look into numbers to make an argument.

And by the way, you don't necessarily want accidents to go to zero either. If we wanted that, that would be trivial to achieve: just ban driving. What we want to achieve is a particular trade-off between costs and benefits. In practice we behave as-if human life has a rather finite value, and trade off against it when making traffic decisions.

However, it is irresponsible to present facts without sufficient additional context in order to avoid leading an audience to a faulty conclusion. There is such a thing a misleading an audience by omission and to do so purposefully is dishonest.

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