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Comment by Dalewyn | Hacker News Reader

>One must not bend the facts to draw a desired conclusion. One must review the data without bias, or else recuse oneself.

There are essentially two ways to solve a mystery:

A) Consider the evidence and draw a conclusion from them.

B) Consider the conclusion and draw the evidences for it.

Neither is the correct methodology, especially when politics, power dynamics, and social justice are involved.

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With all due respect, (B) is logically unsound in my mind. You may have meant considering the hypotheses, and then using available data and only available data to rule in or rule out certain scenarios. In my mind, based on decades of studying engineering defects and failures, starting with a conclusion is not a way to solve a mystery at all. Rather, it is only a way to convince oneself of a falsehood. To give an example that is familiar to the HN audience, how many times have you had to debug a bug or problem in a complex system that you initially thought was caused by one thing only to discover it was caused by something completely different?

>With all due respect, (B) is logically unsound in my mind.

That's because you're concerned about finding out what happened. Not everyone thinks like that, namely some (many) are concerned about creating what happened.

Very interesting. Thank you for making the distinction explicit and for helping me to understand the other mindset. You are totally right, in that my mindset is closer to a forensics mindset in such instances, trying to get as close as possible to the "truth", so as to avoid future similar defects and improve system reliability. I do agree that some people prefer to manufacture truth. Any advice on how to get along with these?

Much like how you can't convince a businessman to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it, it's next to impossible to "find out" a mystery if the powers-that-be do not want that and/or want a more desirable-for-them conclusion.

I was afraid you were going to say that ;). Thanks for the sage advice. I think that "safety inspector" would not be a good career choice for people like myself, then. Methinks Boeing and OceanGate had been in the news recently with similar safety attitudes. Oh, well. Live and learn.

Notably, the type of people who do B are extremely dangerous around anything involving engineering, science, etc - anything where reality actually matters.

Because type A people are what are required to actually fix problems, or learn more things.

Type B people exist when those are ‘not desirable’. Which should indeed scare you, if you care about actual reality (or actual reality matters) in that domain.

Especially when type A people are working in an environment where the leadership with the guns is type B people. Then type A will proactively switch to type B reasoning to stay alive.

Could someone explain when A) it’s not the correct methodology, unless B) is preferable?

B) appears preferable only under duress and then only to the benefit of saving one’s own skin temporarily, however long that may be.

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