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Comment by barbazoo | Hacker News Reader

> and his son, Suleman Dawood, 19 [...] died in the incident.

I wonder what the liability waiver said that made the father think this wasn't a terrible idea.

The waiver was apparently quite thorough in communicating the risk of death. From my reading of coverage of this though it sounds like while the waiver was probably correct from a legal standpoint, the communication of the likelihood and factors contributing to that were not communicated to customers.

Paul-Henri Nargeolet, and Hamish Harding, two of the other victims, were somewhat experienced in this, the former having travelled to the Titanic on other deep sea submersibles with basically flawless track records (Mir? I think, and Alvin), and the latter having travelled to the challenger deep in DSV Limiting Factor which seems much better built.

Should they have known better? Maybe. This makes me wonder if they were actively mislead, rather than being left to make their own mind up.

I think that waiver fatigue is a real thing.

I get warned about the dangers of death on basically every waiver I sign. I just checked, and I was warned about death on the waivers I signed for: bumper cars, a sauna, the local rec center, etc... I get that death is technically possible at any of these activities, but how are you to differentiate between the actual likelihood in the real world.

The waivers have gotten so comprehensive as to not actually warn you of the real dangers you might face.

waiver are not here to explain why you should die or not. Just that you won't sue the compagny

Waivers are there to keep you from suing the company BY explaining the realistic risks you are facing.

If the waiver for visiting the Titanic in an untested submersible is the same as the waiver for getting a spa package I haven’t actually understood the risks.

"you may die, more explicitly by instantaneous crushing of the hull on the passenger due to pressure, or alteratively a slow death by lack of oxygen if the sub get stranded at the bottom"

Sure changes everything to know !

Method of death isn't the relevant bit here. Likelihood is. A waiver for a one-in-however-many chance of having a heart attack in a sauna is of different orders of magnitude than a waiver for a one-in-maybe-a-dozen chance of having the poorly built experimental submarine implode.

How would you even start assessing likelihood for that ? You just don't have data for

If you don't have any idea how dangerous something is, you're probably going to want to estimate it as pretty damn dangerous. Of course there's enough data here to make an estimate, though IMO that estimate would still end up being quite dangerous.

> DSV Limiting Factor which seems much better built.

Understatement of the year. Limiting Factor is the only manned sub to make multiple dives (4!) into the Challenger Deep.

There’s a good documentary on YouTube from a year or two ago on the design and building of the sub, and overall it just seemed like such a professional operation, whereas OceanGate felt like a DIY operation.

The company that built the LF also seems to have vastly more experience building subs.

Here's the video I think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pb5j9oeZCm0

Thanks, that’s the one! Sorry was on the move on mobile.

Really cool, had never heard of this before. I just watched the documentary on James Cameron and his Deepsea Challenger and was similarly impressed by the extraordinary lengths the team went to in engineering it. My takeaway was that OceanGate likely didn't have anywhere close to the same level of design and testing.

>Should they have known better? Maybe. This makes me wonder if they were actively mislead, rather than being left to make their own mind up.

This is why true believers are the most dangerous kind of idiot. They will lead otherwise reasonable people off a cliff.

If you believe the NY Post, the CEO straight up said the sub was “safer than crossing the street” - https://nypost.com/2023/06/23/doomed-sub-ceo-said-it-was-saf...

I think it was probably that they were told the submersible had made a number of previous successful trips so assumed it would continue to do so--not realizing that the carbon fiber material could get weaker and weaker each trip.

If I’m not mistaken, James Cameron said in his CNN interview from last week (maybe the first of many) that carbon fiber is able to seem like its fine after a number of trips and then have all of the previous stress cause it to fail, making the sensors the company used to monitor hull failure useless because such an accumulated failure can happen in milliseconds.

Actually they heard it cracking on each dive, but there was less each time so they assumed the problem was going away.

When even a theme park will have you "be aware" that "death can occur", how seriously will you take the same warnings in another waiver?

People similarly have signed their souls (ie literally) through EULAs as a demonstration that nobody cares.

Hell, we can't even get people to read and acknowledge a one sentence error message in software.

Afaik the waiver talked about death and trauma and so on.

The CEO and company also put in a lot of effort to make it look safe. The "waiver is for liability but you are totally safe" kind of game.

Going by stories of people who went, company was plain manipulative in this regard. I genuinely think that millionaires on board were victims prayed on by the overconfident guy who died with them.

I wouldn’t have done this not because I knew anything about the company but think it’s inherently risky at those depths. But trampoline parks, indoor skydiving, kids school 5k run and ropes course all are wavers I signed that stated there was chance of death for the activity.

> I wonder what the liability waiver said that made the father think this wasn't a terrible idea.

Fathers often subject their sons to unnecessary risks in the interests of making them more "manly"...

Liability wavers don't give you an idea of how likely death and injury are.

Right, they only let you know about possible outcomes, not the likelihood of any particular event happening during your dive. Russian roulette with 1 vs 5 chambers loaded have the same set of possible outcomes, but very different odds w.r.t. which is most likely when you pull the trigger.

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