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Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

> They do not ensure that operators adhere to proper operating procedures and decision-making processes – two areas that are much more important for mitigating risks at sea.

plane_with_red_dots.jpeg

This sounds an awful lot like survivorship bias.

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It is exactly survivorship bias: its taking the population produced by a selection filter (to wit, classing/certification) and assuming that the traits of that population are representive of what would exist without the filter.

It also sounded to me like dodging the question.

Giving them the benefit of the doubt, they're saying the biggest problem with submersibles is operator error. Of course it is, when the classing system effectively eliminates the majority of mechanical failures. That doesn't mean the classing system is failing, on the contrary, it means its working.

Reminds me of some code that I've written which got passed off to other teams who ripped it out because all they saw was the complexity and they didn't recognize what issues it was preventing (Chesterton's Fence).

Code like that needs a 10 ft comment. I have been save by seeing those on otherwise “why the fuck is this needed” code.

If they if ignore the comment, well that is hubris.

I'm pretty good about doing that. I've gotten compliments before for a massive 10 line code comment above a-single-line-that-shall-not-be-deleted.

And yet they allowed passengers to control the sub. Theres a video out there where one of the passengers hit the ground with a loud thud while at the controls

"We don't need to vaccinate against measles because hardly anyone gets measles."

I have a friend who is a professor of history. He jokes that human history is basically us creating systems to solve problems, then time passes and we remove those systems causes “those types of problems never happen.”

Rinse repeat

This seems related to Chesterton's Fence

> Chesterton’s Fence is a principle that says change should not be made until the reasoning behind the current state of affairs is understood. It says the rash move, upon coming across a fence, would be to tear it down without understanding why it was put up.

To be fair, as a general rule, removing the systems makes sense. You don't want to accumulate them forever even after they become useless.

But in theory, people are smart, and shouldn't evolve their culture by blind trial and error.

Yeah, mechanical failure was not a major problem with subs...until someone started gluing dissimilar materials together to make one!

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