The problem w/ Boeing is not the inability of people to manage complexity but of management's refusal to manage complexity in a responsible way.

For instance, MCAS on the 737 is a half-baked implementation of the flight envelope protection facility on modern fly-by-wire airliners (all of them, except for the 737). The A320 had some growing pains with this, particularly it had at least two accidents where pilots tried to fly the plane into the ground, thought it would fail because of the flight envelope protection system, but they succeeded and crashed anyway. Barring that bit of perversity right out of the Normal Accidents book, people understand perfectly well how to build a safe fly-by-wire system. Boeing chose not to do that, and they refused to properly document what they did.

Boeing chose to not develop a 737 replacement, so all of us are suffering: in terms of noise, for instance, pilots are going deaf, passengers have their head spinning after a few hours in the plane, and people on the ground have no idea that the 737 is much louder than competitors.

Boeing is a kickbacks company in a really strange way. They get contracts based on including agreements to source partly from the contracties local area. Adding complexity for contracts and management bonus sake, not efficiency, not redundancy, not expertise. Add onto that a non-existent safety culture and a non-manufacturing/non-aerospace focused management philosophy grafting on from a company that failed and had to be merged into Boeing replacing the previous Boeing management philosophy. Enshitifaction in every area of the company. Heck they moved headquarters from Seattle to Chicago, and now from Chicago to DC. Prioritizing being where the grift is over, you know, being where the functions of the company are so that management has a daily understanding of what the company does. Because to management what the company does is win contracts, not build aerospace products. 'Someone else' takes care of that detail, according to Boeing management. Building those products in now secondary/tertiary to management.

I did ERP/MPR/EBOM/MBOM/BOM systems for aerospace. We have that stuff down. We have systems for this kind of communication down really well. We can build within a small window an airplane with thousands of parts with lead times from 1 day to 3 months to over a year for certain custom config options, with each parts design/FAA approval/manufacturing/installation tracked and audited. Boeing's issue is culture, not humanity's ability to make complex systems.

But I do agree that there is a complexity issue in society in general, and a lot of systems are coasting on the efforts of those that originally put them in place/designed them. A lot of government seems to be this way too. There's also a lot of overhead for overheads sake, but little process auditing/iterative improvement style management.

>Example: a junior Jiffy Lube high school dropout in 1960 c

Nowadays the company wouldn't hire a junior to train. They'll only poach already experienced people from their competitors.

Paying for training isn't considered worthwhile to the company because people wont stay.

People won't stay because the company doesn't invest in employees , it only poaches.

Ironically I think you got that almost exactly wrong.

Avoiding "cowboyism" has instead lead to the rise of heuristics for avoiding trouble that are more religion than science. The person who is most competent is also likely to be the person who has learned lessons the hard way the most times, not the person who has been very careful to avoid taking risks.

And let me just say that there are VERY few articles so poorly written that I literally can't get past the first paragraph, and an article that cherry-picks disasters to claim generalized incompetence scores my very top marks for statistically incompetent disingenuous bullshit. There will always be a long tail of "bad stuff that happens" and cherry-picking all the most sensational disasters is not a way of proving anything.

A more fundamental reason is that society is no longer interested in pushing forward at all cost. It's the arrival at an economical and technological equilibrium where people are comfortable enough, along with the end of the belief in progress as an ideology, or way to salvation somewhere during the 20th century. If you look closely, a certain kind of relaxation has replaced a quest for efficiency everywhere. Is that disappointing? Is that actually bad? Do you think there might be a rude awakening?

Consider: It was this scifi-fueled dream of an amazing high-tech, high-competency future that also implied machines doing the labour, and an enlightened future relieving people of all kinds of unpleasantries like boring work, therefore prevented them from attaining high competency. The fictional starship captain, navigating the galaxy and studying alien artifacts was always saving planets full of humans in desolate mental state...

Thank you for summarizing (I actually read the whole article before seeing your reply and might have posted similar thoughts). I get the appeal of romanticizing our past as a country, looking back at the post-war era, especially the space race with a nostalgia that makes us imagine it was a world where the most competent were at the helm. But it just wasn't so, and still isn't.

Many don't understand that the Civil Rights Act describes the systematic LACK of a meritocracy. It defines the ways in which merit has been ignored (gender, race, class, etc) and demands that merit be the criteria for success -- and absent the ability for an institution to decide on the merits it provides a (surely imperfect) framework to force them to do so. The necessity of the CRA then and now, is the evidence of absence of a system driven on merit.

I want my country to keep striving for a system of merit but we've got nearly as much distance to close on it now as we did then.

I think this is the wrong takeaway.

Everything has become organized around measurable things and short-term optimization. "Disparate impact" is just one example of this principle. It's easy to measure demographic representation, and it's easy to tear down the apparent barriers standing in the way of proportionality in one narrow area. Whereas, it's very hard to address every systemic and localized cause leading up to a number of different disparities.

Environmentalism played out a similar way. It's easy to measure a factory's direct pollution. It's easy to require the factory to install scrubbers, or drive it out of business by forcing it to account for externalities. It's hard to address all of the economic, social, and other factors that led to polluting factories in the first place, and that will keep its former employees jobless afterward. Moreover, it's hard to ensure that the restrictions apply globally instead of just within one or some countries' borders, which can undermine the entire purpose of the measures, even though the zoomed-in metrics still look good.

So too do we see with publically traded corporations and other investment-heavy enterprises: everything is about the stock price or other simple valuation, because that makes the investors happy. Running once venerable companies into the ground, turning merges and acquisitions into the core business, spreading systemic risk at alarming levels, and even collapsing the entire economy don't show up on balance sheets or stock reports as such and can't easily get addressed by shareholders.

And yet now and again "data-driven" becomes the organizing principle of yet another sector of society. It's very difficult to attack the idea directly, because it seems to be very "scientific" and "empirical". But anecdote and observation are still empirically useful, and they often tell us early on that optimizing for certain metrics isn't the right thing to do. But once the incentives are aligned that way, even competent people give up and join the bandwagon.

This may sound like I'm against data or even against empiricism, but that's not what I'm trying to say. A lot of high-level decisions are made by cargo-culting empiricism. If I need to choose a material that's corrosion resistant, obviously having a measure of corrosion resistance and finding the material that minimizes it makes sense. But if the part made out of that material undergoes significant shear stress, then I need to consider that as well, which probably won't be optimized by the same material. When you zoom out to the finished product, the intersection of all the concerns involved may even arrive at a point where making the part easily replaceable is more practical than making it as corrosion-resistant as possible. No piece of data by itself can make that judgment call.