Titan sub CEO dismissed safety warnings as 'baseless cries', emails show | Hacker News Reader

Titan sub CEO dismissed safety warnings as 'baseless cries', emails show

bbc.com

64 pointsmoose_man88 comments

An excerpt from an email Stockton Rush sent out, according to the article (emphasis mine):

>I have grown tired of industry players who try to use a safety argument to stop innovation and new entrants from entering their small existing market. Since Guillermo and I started OceanGate we have heard the baseless cries of "you are going to kill someone" way too often. I take this as a serious personal insult.

Just... wow.

A bet gone wrong.. Many innovations started off in a similar manner, ignoring or challenging the status quo..

That said, it's mighty spectacular and sad the way he was proven wrong.

rip.

more to the point, taking safety warnings as a personal insult is a red flag for literally dangerous narcissism

> taking safety warnings as a personal insult is a red flag for literally dangerous narcissism

It certainly can be, but I have worked with people that absolutely use "safety" as a reason not to do anything, or as a reason to shoot down ideas from people they are competing against (different departments, possible promotions, etc). Like most things in life, this is not black or white, it's some shade of gray.

Are you talking about life safety or some other kind of safety? “Safety” is a word having many different senses. Your mentioning of promotions and competing ideas makes it seem to me you are using safety in a much broader sense than the sense of safety one would have in mind when talking about submarines occupied by humans.

> I have worked with people that absolutely use "safety" as a reason not to do anything, or as a reason to shoot down ideas from people they are competing against

this is literally the exact same argument used by the CEO before he and several others died due to it

he was so insulted that experienced and qualified personnel were just trying to shoot down his idea

even if you believe this is the case in a given hypothetic, it's still not a valid reason to take it as an attack on you as a person, vs. a concern about a thing

If cutting corners is considered an innovation, then it needs to be treated differently than other types of innovation. And not fall under this umbrella of "oh well he tried, nothing ventured nothing gained."

Was using carbon fiber cutting corners? It seems like it is a more exotic and expensive construction than just using steel. It was innovation for innovation's sake.

When you're talking about 6,500psi of pressure carbon fiber is cheaper than titanium. Also the fact that they skipped non-destructive testing, void checking, nor did they have the hull inspected after each dive means they were certainly cutting corners.

It is challenging the status quo when it's an economic or sociology argument against your product. When there is a mechanical engineering argument against your product, that is something else.

They didn't need to take a bet though. It's not like early aircraft, where someone had to be there to steer. They could have run unmanned trials.

Apparently that was the plan. The CEO scrapped the idea and fired the engineer who suggested it was a safety problem (he filed a whistleblower lawsuit).

That is what a degree in Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University gives you...

I keep wondering if that person thought about the cut corners and his general attitude while going through his final moments, or perhaps it never occurred to him as he was simply focused on survival.

With an implosion of a carbon fiber hull, there probably wasn't enough time to even think of his mistakes let alone the words "oh fuck".

Apparently the crew commissioned an emergency ascent right before implosion, suggesting they had a warning of some kind (hearing the ongoing delamination, maybe? scary thought).

When CEOs make statements like this I assume they know they are lying for sake of the company.

What makes this more interesting is that he clearly believed it was safe. So he wasn’t necessarily unethical. It is more that he was a bad engineer and a poor judge of risk.

I'd argue it's still unethical to put others at risk due to your own incompetence. I wouldn't offer to rewire someone's home because I'm not an electrician, and their house could burn down if I do it incorrectly.

> due to your own incompetence.

Are you still unethical when you don't know about your incompetence?

Can you be unethical if you had no ability to know that what you do is unethical?

Can you still commit a crime if you don't know that what you're doing is against the law?

Not usually, no.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea

You can definitely be convicted of one, though!

Lol thought experiment. Your driving in a new area and don't see a change in speed limit because a large truck blocked your view of the sign as you passed it. You get pulled over a short period later for going 20 above the speed limit. Do you think you can be fined or not? Should you be fined or not?

You can be fined, the fine might be reversible in court, you shouldn't be fined.

The cop should just give you a warning.

> Are you still unethical when you don't know about your incompetence?

You're correct that reality can be more complicated, and it depends. I can imagine a scenario, e.g. the plot of "Manchester by the Sea" which doesn't seem completely unethical. I find it hard to believe in this case that he was that incompetent. I think he took what he believed to be a calculated risk, and I'm guessing he didn't go around broadcasting that information to the other people on the tour.

They signed a waiver that mentioned the risk of "death" 3 times on the first page. I'd call that broadcasting.

Edit: I mean just read the waiver: https://nypost.com/2023/06/23/read-the-death-waiver-doomed-t...

It speaks for itself.

I think this is only partially true. Generally,

Risk = probability x severity.

From that link, they characterized the severity (death) but not the probability. Saying "you may die" is different from saying "your have a 50% chance of dying." My guess is nobody had a good estimate for the probability so nobody could have accurately communicated the risk.

"2. A portion of the operation will be conducted inside an experimental submersible vessel. The experimental submersible vessel has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body and may be constructed of materials that have not been widely used in human occupied submersibles."

I don't know. This implies a high probability to me.

It's not quantified though. Also, it's pretty bad engineering practice to rely on implied risk; it's much more preferred to explicitly state your risk assumptions.

E.g., one of the problems with the Shuttle disasters is that the implied risk was understood differently at various levels. (Making numbers up here but directionally accurate) After the fact, managers thought there was a 1/1000 risk of catastrophic failure while engineers put it a 1/172.

The sub had already completed a few dives to the titanic and the CEO downplayed the risks in the texts that came out between him and a guy that pulled out. Taking both of those together I can see why a non-technical person might be taken in and therefore dismiss the waiver as typical legalese.

If you ever do anything "risky" you'll fill out a similar form. Go look into skydiver liability forms, they also mention the possibility of death or injury. I suspect most people embarking on expensive & risky adventures are used to these and based on previous adventures being alright just sign the paperwork without reading or thinking about it deeply.

I'd be running the moment I read this paragraph:

>2. A portion of the operation will be conducted inside an experimental submersible vessel. The experimental submersible vessel has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body and may be constructed of materials that have not been widely used in human occupied submersibles.

If you don't, you knew and accepted the risk.

I sign waivers that mention the risk of "serious injury or death" for my kids to play little league. People just see it as legalese.

Do those waivers also mention the experimental vessel, explicitly disclaim that any regulations or certifications were followed, and that the construction materials are untested for the intended use?

A local burger place in my town makes you sign a waiver before consuming certain burgers.

Fair enough.

If someone else clearly warns you, yes.

Similar story:

> Authorities say a 28-year-old Texas man was attacked and killed by an alligator “almost immediately” after being warned by a bystander not to swim in the water, replying “fuck that alligator” before jumping in.

https://www.gawker.com/fuck-that-alligator-man-killed-second...

This is called criminal negligence

It's why the standard for negligence is "known or should have known" i.e. the person has enough experience or education to have known better. It's probably harder to prove than it sounds.

should have known IE the person is operating in a subject/domain where they're expected to know certain things, regardless of their own experience, like deep sea diving

based on communique both to and from the CEO, the CEO did, in fact, know, that the vessel was not certified to do what it was doing, and that there were safety risks to it

He had actual experts telling him that this thing was unsafe. He fired people who said the thing was unsafe and that it wasn't ready for manned dives.

I would argue it is always unethical to ignore the advice of experts when putting other people's safety on the line.

Lol yes. Ethics judgements aren't exactly made by one's self on one's self (unless you really do bad and you live your life in regret). But are generally made by your peers and those around you. Your ignorance plays no bearing on their judgement of your actions being ethical or not. You can be the dumbest deadshit in the world and they can still judge your actions as unethical. So yes you can certainly be unethical, even if your too dumb to understand why.

Is it unethical if you don't know you're incompetent?

Hence standards of safety to weed out the incompetent. As usual, written in blood.

There has to be some amount of competency becoming a founder, CEO and a millionaire, with the various ventures he was involved.

It probably still is if you fired a competent person for saying it is too dangerous.

Yes, maybe he just suffered from some sort of human bias. What’s the one where people are very good at lying to themselves?

Unfortunately, he killed those other people because no one could convince him that he was wrong.

Yeah I think some people with big egos get so wrapped up in their goals that they just dismiss anything or anyone that is trying to point out problems or concerns. They would deny they are lying and I'm sure genuinely believe they are right. After all he got into the contraption and it killed him. He would not have done that if he didn't believe it was safe.

Not really.

He thought it was safer than it was.

But I don't think he thought it was close to a 0% chance of death.

It's clear that he knew it was somewhat risky.

It failed after like 25 dives which means around a ~4% failure rate.

I'd hope he thought it had less than a 1% failure rate.

Who knows what the true failure rate is. Maybe they got really lucky, and it actually had a higher failure rate. Maybe they got extra unlucky. Who knows.

I just can't fathom people would pay $250k for a miserable time and a decent shot at death.

> I'd hope he thought it had less than a 1% failure rate.

1% is horrible. You'd hope for robust systems where individual failures are mitigated by support systems. And even then, five nines doesn't feel so great when the cost could be so severe.

> I just can't fathom people would pay $250k for a miserable time and a decent shot at death.

That poor kid didn't even want to go. He was terrified of the thing and was going to make his dad happy for father's day.

> I just can't fathom people would pay $250k for a miserable time and a decent shot at death.

Rich folks pay upward of 70k for Everest expedition, where local personal Sherpas babysit them from basecamp/Kathmandu all the way to the top with oxygen, unless SHTF in some form. That's 2+ months of more or less suffering, living above 5000-6000m long term ain't fun for most. Metabolism goes to hell, wounds heal slower, body is clearly struggling and so is mind. I did experience empty mindness above 6k myself and you just focus on getting goals done asap and survival.

Everest has some 2-3% fatality rate, consistently. I'd say it may not be the exactly same crowd but similar mindset that gets attracted to these things.

I'm struggling to find real statistics to back this up, but my suspicion is that other deep-submergence vehicles used to travel to this depth (and further) have a failure rate of 0% for manned missions.

My suspicion is based on the fact that I can't find any other stories of deep sea vehicles failing and killing their passengers in the last 40 years. DSV Alvin for example has completed 5,000 dives with 0 fatalities.

According to this interview with Bob Ballard, there have been no fatalities or catastrophic accidents in the deep sea submersible/exploration world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jJ_SSU-ocU

He mentioned since 1960, but unclear if that was because that's when the deep sea submersible exploration started, or something happened in 1960.

That makes OceanGate's sub seem like a uniquely incompetent design.

Dr Ballard seems like as authoritative of a source as any.

OceanGate just ruined a 60 year perfect track record for an entire field of engineering.

>I'd hope he thought it had less than a 1% failure rate.

When failure means instant death that would be a pretty awful failure rate for a commercial product meant to take paying customers from the general public. And even if meant to take well informed researchers and engineers.

If failure meant "Oops, the ballast dropped prematurely, looks like we're going to have to cut this dive short", that's one thing, but when it means "You're going to be crushed by immense pressure in a millisecond", that's quite another.

"It failed after 25 dives" is not a 4% failure rate if the failure was caused by deterioration over time (as it likely was here). It's a 100% failure rate over the full life of any given Titan sub. They'll all implode, given enough trips.

Moreover, both 1% and 4% are horrible failure rates for anything meant to carry passengers. Example: the risk of dying in a commercial plane crash is 1 in 11 million [1]. The risk of dying while skydiving is less than 1 in 300,000 per jump.

This guy was taking extremely unreasonable risks.

[1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/planecrash/risky.html

[2] https://dzoneskydiving.com/articles/how-many-people-die-skyd...

> This guy was taking extremely unreasonable risks.

It's easy to agree post-ex, after he went and killed himself and 4 other people.

He probably thought the failure rate might've been closer to 1 in 1000. That still seems WAY too high for me, but maybe for him that was fine.

Either way, he was almost certainly wrong, and it was much higher than that.

Would he have done it if he thought it had a 4% chance of failure? Maybe once. But I doubt 25 times...

> I'd hope he thought it had less than a 1% failure rate.

I take your meaning, but I'm just laughing at the idea of a 1% failure rate. If airliners had a 1% failure rate, there would be hundreds of thousands of crashes every year. Experimental craft don't need airliner failure rates of course, but 1% still seems too high for anything with human passengers.

Given that he was in the submersible himself, I don't think he was lying, I think he really believed he was taking reasonable risks with cutting edge engineering.

I have this vague idea that a person’s beliefs are not truly known until they use them as the basis to bet something of value. This guy bet his own life, so I agree with you. He believed what he was saying.

> "We have heard the baseless cries of 'you are going to kill someone' way too often," he wrote. "I take this as a serious personal insult."

Surrounded by people telling him the right answer, and somehow managed to take it as an insult.

Pretty much every CEO.

Regulation exists for a reason and is not always a bad thing; sadly OceanGate is providing one of those periodic reminders.

Red tape is red with the blood of our collective lapses.

For me this is a complicated example with regard to regulation. I agree it's a reminder of why it can be a good thing but am not sure how I feel about it as an example of the need for regulation.

I'm outraged at OceanGate and feel as if the CEO and the company were grossly irresponsible. Any wrongful death lawsuits would be more than appropriate.

On the other hand, OceanGate and its CEO were very open about not seeking certification or classing. They didn't try to hide it. Elsewhere on HN now there's a post to an OceanGate blog page arguing about why they didn't seek certification.

So why would anyone sign up for anything involving that submersible? If you were going to go on a mission to the bottom of the ocean, wouldn't you do a lot of research? Wouldn't you demand it be third-party certified if that is industry practice?

I guess there's regulation and then there's regulation, so it's possible that international regulations could be codified to just formalize what is considered standard practice (that is, classing the vessel by an appropriate third party). But I worry that whenever regulations are drafted, they start to become the sort of monster the OceanGate CEO was falsely suggesting.

I'm not sure what I'm saying, because I'm not really even meaning to argue against this as being a good example of where there should maybe regulations. It probably is. But I could also envision this as maybe a case where the reminder is to take risks seriously and be deeply skeptical of persons and institutions not willing to have their work scrutinized by independent bodies.

I do have family who work in this specific area professionally; I haven't spoken to them yet about the incident but I suspect they would see this more as a case of gross negligence and irresponsibility rather than as an area in need of heavy regulation, but I could be wrong. As I think of it, from what I know from their professional experiences, there should have been a lot of red flags that I suspect will come to light in the near future.

Maybe I'm biased in that regard, because everyone I know doing oceanic and deep sea work have been deeply enmeshed in all things ocean and marine their entire lives, and probably would be aware of all these issues. My guess is this family member would have thought it irresponsible to bring those particular passengers anywhere in the deep sea in the first place, on any vessel.

In that regard it would be good to see this turn into some reflection on what it means about society that real world wisdom, expertise, and skills are somehow superceded by monetary net worth. Has it always been this way?

I feel as if society is trapped in some hall of mirrors maze, between fake and real expertise, and worthless and essential certifications and regulations. I'm not sure what's worse: OceanGate CEO Rush's dangerous and absurd arguments against certification, or the fact that his arguments resonate enough as truth with ostensibly successful individuals, that they can be conned by them.

"The OceanGate CEO who is trapped on a 22-foot submersible on an ill-fated voyage to see the Titanic wreck once explained how he didn’t hire “50-year-old white guys” with military experience to captain his vessels because they weren’t “inspirational.”

The CEO, Stockton Rush, added that “expertise was unnecessary” because “anybody can drive the sub” with a $30 video game controller." [0]

[0] https://www.outkick.com/trapped-oceangate-ceo-refused-to-hir...

> Questioning the consensus and exposing the destructive nature of “woke” activism, OutKick is the antidote to the mainstream sports media that often serves an elite, left-leaning minority instead of the American sports fan. Owned by Fox Corporation, OutKick was founded by Clay Travis in 2011 and is based in Nashville.

This being the same Clay Travis who claimed, on his right-wing talk radio show, that COVID would kill “a few hundred people”.

Is MSN left enough for you to believe it?

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/oceangate-ceo-didn-t-wa...

Concentrate on the message instead of the messenger.

Aside from that it should be clear to even the most blind-sided activists that this type of exclusionary policy as advocated by the former CEO is a recipe for disaster; selecting on race, gender and age is not the way to get the most competent u-boat commanders and intentionally excluding those with a proven track record in this field is an even worse policy.

Hey! It looks like you are trying to shoehorn <recent story> into your culture war narrative! Don't you think this is tedious yet?

Said shoehorning seems very relevant.

May Stockton Rush become a synonym for dangerous hubris, for the benefit of future generations.

Move fast and catastrophically implode things.

Too bad he never read the stories of the De Havilland Comet which crashed due to metal fatigue.

Its OK to take risks, but stupid to ignore facts. Science would have told him that multiple trips would sooner or later make the vessel fail.

These emails and related will be used for the upcoming wrongful death lawsuits to show negligence.

I wonder if Rush had a death wish or other motive for potentially dying while on a dive.

Or this is really an extreme example of past successes fueling further trips. However, it seems like basic knowledge Rush should have known is to inspect the vessel after each dive. Since people have said it’s extremely difficult and expensive to inspect carbon fiber, then maybe Rush/Oceangate couldn’t afford it. Maybe do enough trips until they could afford and build a new vessel. Who knows, but it seems like deeper internal decisions were being made here.

Clearly nobody stopped this guy, so what was he whining about? It sounds like he was opposed to some completely illusory regulation.

I think that you’re on to something. There is a certain angst that it seems like he possessed, not so much as hubris.

If I may adjust my metaphorical armchair and say that I’m patiently waiting for the feature piece on his life to be published in the next few months to a year or so, that will uncover something to the tune of anxiety, self-doubt, estranged familial ties or an addiction to an obscure pharmaceutical commonly used on narcoleptic koala bears.

I agree with the CEO generally but taking a submarine to the bottom of the ocean is not the right domain for this message.

James Cameron was saying years ago that carbon composite is bad: "you're going to get killed in that thing."

https://youtu.be/5XIyin68vEE?t=559

Names are important. If your name is Rush (as is the CEOs), you are gonna do stuff too fast and cut corners.

This is just simple prejudice.

Either nothing is significant or everything is. As a matter of faith I chose the later. You are welcome to chose the former.

I wouldn't go a surgeon named Butcher or a financial advisor named Broke, would you?

> Either nothing is significant or everything is

Alternatively: some things are significant and other things aren’t? As a matter of living in reality, I choose that middle option :P

I wonder, if his ghost could talk to us now, I’d he would have done anything differently.

Maybe that seems like an absurd question to ask because... he’s dead. But his position seems to be: some things can never happen unless someone just risks it.

And that math doesn’t really change with the knowledge “he dies”. It’s possible there are some alternative timelines out there where “he risks it and survives” and maybe there are zero timelines where “he plays it safe and makes it to the Titanic” and if that’s the case then maybe he did it exactly as he intended.

There are many pursuits like this: mountaineering, car racing, etc, where the choices (at a certain level of aspiration anyway) are: A) risk death or B) don’t do it.

I’m certainly not risking death, but I don’t really judge people who do.

I do judge that dad who convinced his teenage son to risk his life. That was absolutely evil.

We could talk to his ghost in a way. If we could gather up all the text and transcripts of things he wrote and said, we could feed it to an LLM and interrogate it with questions.

brb applying to the next hn batch w/ this idea

gives a whole new meaning to post-mortem

> I do judge that dad who convinced his teenage son to risk his life. That was absolutely evil.

Moreso, he was likely foolish in considering the actual extent of the risk, like everyone on the sub.

The sad thing is he's taking risks for no benefit. It's not like what he's doing is going to increase the body of knowledge or rescue some puppies trapped at the bottom of the sea. He's just taking stupid risks to run an expensive amusement park ride.

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