[HN Gopher] Remembering Allan McDonald, who refused to approve t...
___________________________________________________________________
Remembering Allan McDonald, who refused to approve the Challenger
launch
Author : everybodyknows
Score : 1325 points
Date : 2021-03-07 23:30 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (text.npr.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (text.npr.org)
| GuB-42 wrote:
| While Allan McDonald was obviously right, for one case where it
| was justified, how many other instances there are where an
| engineer/scientist expressed concerns, was ignored, and
| everything went fine.
|
| I'd say that as a rule, a good engineer will always be concerned.
| With his knowledge and experience, he will know everything that
| can go wrong. And asking him to make life-and-death decisions
| must be really hard when you know that your contraption can
| always be made safer, given enough time you don't have.
|
| How many big milestones were made possible because some clueless
| executive decided to risk the life of people? How to make the
| difference, without the benefit of hindsight, between an overly
| cautious engineer and a savior?
| jiofih wrote:
| I think you're being very, very generous in your interpretation
| of roles. You don't just risk "innovating" when human lives are
| at stake, and in this case the danger was very well known: the
| engineers knew exactly what, and how, it could fail, due to the
| temperature being way out of spec.
|
| Launching under freezing weather was no particular achievement.
| They could have delayed the launch for better weather with no
| loss of "big milestones".
| GuB-42 wrote:
| You do risk innovating when human lives are at stake, we
| wouldn't have a moon landing otherwise.
|
| And I never said engineers concerns were unfounded, quite the
| opposite in fact, engineers know what can go wrong. If your
| engineers don't say "no", either they are incompetent or they
| are heartless. And because Allan McDonald was a great
| engineer _and_ human being, he said "no".
|
| My point was more general than the Challenger disaster. When
| to listen to engineers and when to take unreasonable risks?
| Here, the answer is obvious, and we know that in general,
| Allan McDonald was someone to listen to but we have
| hindsight. How do we make the difference between chances you
| can't take and over-caution that can drag project forever?
|
| It would be interesting to know how risk was calculated in
| the space shuttle program since we have problems going both
| ways: two catastrophic accidents, and runaway costs which
| are, for a large parts, safety-related in response to these
| accidents.
| jacquesm wrote:
| You have not understood the main lesson from the Challenger
| accident: the fact that everything went fine is not proof that
| everything _is_ fine. That 's exactly what normalization of
| deviance is all about.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance
| adamc wrote:
| Makes me think of the song "Eminence Front".
| Clewza313 wrote:
| > _" his laws of the seven R's ... always do the right thing for
| the right reason at the right time with the right people. [And]
| you will have no regrets for the rest of your life."_
|
| I count 6 R's, did somebody mangle the quote?
| abhorrence wrote:
| I count seven: right, right, reason, right, right, regrets,
| rest.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| dnqthao wrote:
| 7 actually: right, right, reason, right, right, regrets, rest
| derekp7 wrote:
| I did too the first several times I read through it -- until I
| read every word individually. Most of the "r's" are on words at
| the beginning of a word group, but two of them are on words
| right next to each other.
| fggg444 wrote:
| it's recursive, the first "r" is from "the seven R's"
| dylan604 wrote:
| It's not GNU
| Razengan wrote:
| What _is_ GNU?
| Clewza313 wrote:
| A recursive acronym of "GNU's Not Unix". (Seriously.)
| tim-- wrote:
| But if it's not Unix, what is it?
| teddyh wrote:
| GNU is a computer operating system _compatible_ with
| Unix.
| monkeypizza wrote:
| The actual Feynman personal take on risk & his investigation:
|
| https://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v2appf.htm
|
| Short and readable. It appears that there are
| enormous differences of opinion as to the probability of a
| failure with loss of vehicle and of human life. The estimates
| range from roughly 1 in 100 to 1 in 100,000. The higher figures
| come from the working engineers, and the very low figures from
| management. What are the causes and consequences of this lack of
| agreement? Since 1 part in 100,000 would imply that one could put
| a Shuttle up each day for 300 years expecting to lose only one,
| we could properly ask "What is the cause of management's
| fantastic faith in the machinery?"
|
| ... For a successful technology, reality must
| take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be
| fooled.
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| The Rogers comission was also just going to bury the problem
| and almost absolve NASA of guilt, Feynman fought to get his
| appendix in the report, and he also later said that he was
| being gently lead to discover the O-rings issue during his
| investigations.
| dmos62 wrote:
| Feynman had a way with words. I might look him up for some
| light reading.
| tyleo wrote:
| I highly recommend doing so. I had a great time with his
| book, "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman"
| maxwelldone wrote:
| I enjoyed reading that. Feynman doesn't sugar coat things.
| I also recommend "what do you care what other people think"
| book. The second half covers Challenger investigation wich
| is quite amusing to read.
| MichaelMoser123 wrote:
| Did Allan McDonald also give a tip to Richard Feynman? He was the
| first one who talked about the O-Rings, and everyone was
| wondering how he got the idea in the first place (or wasn't
| wondering, since Feynman was an undisputed genius)
| softwhale wrote:
| Sally Ride had insight into the O-ring failures, and tipped
| general Donald Kutyna. Kutyna subtly tipped Feynman. Kutyna had
| invited Feynman over dinner where they talked about Kutyna's
| car and the O-rings inside of them.. So the story goes.
|
| https://emptysqua.re/blog/who-broke-the-challenger-investiga...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19032574
| xbar wrote:
| Godspeed, Allan McDonald.
| zb wrote:
| The film "Challenger: The Final Flight" on Netflix includes
| interviews with the most important participants in the launch
| decision, including McDonald. (It also has interviews with many
| of the astronauts' families and does a great job at putting their
| experience front and centre.)
|
| The guy whose job it was to send the fax because he happened to
| be the one who knew how to operate the fax machine is to this day
| utterly devastated; weeping.
|
| The MTI VP who signed off (although the decision was made above
| his head) admits that he agreed with it at the time, but
| acknowledges it was a mistake. He's being interviewed in a large
| room full of very expensive furniture.
|
| The NASA manager who bullied them into agreeing to launch because
| they couldn't prove that it was unsafe basically says that if he
| had his time over he would kill all of the astronauts again.
| Truly terrifying.
| ngngngng wrote:
| > The NASA manager who bullied them into agreeing to launch
| because they couldn't prove that it was unsafe basically says
| that if he had his time over he would kill all of the
| astronauts again. Truly terrifying.
|
| I only know two people who spent their careers at NASA, but
| with my small sample size this isn't surprising at all. Both of
| them have never been wrong in their lives. Their hubris is off
| the charts.
| garmaine wrote:
| Well I did work at NASA, although I left for the private
| sector to finish my career, and this does not describe 99% of
| the people I met. In the circles I ran in there was a great
| deal of humility and respect for process as something which
| saves lives. Maybe it depends on the center? Which part of
| NASA did your friends work at?
| JesseMeyer wrote:
| I'm at GSFC, and arrogance is definitely not a character
| trait of those on my team. Earth science may select for a
| different type of persona.
| Daho0n wrote:
| Now the question is, is he wrong? Or are you proving his
| point? If he is indeed correct your post could still be
| true seen with your eyes.
| JesseMeyer wrote:
| If my personal experience is helpful to those trying to
| answer those questions then great, but I don't know the
| answer to them.
| Qwertious wrote:
| For the sake of completeness:
|
| I don't work at NASA, and I know a few arrogant people
| who also don't work at NASA.
| starpilot wrote:
| For perspective, 17,000 people work for NASA.
| snissn wrote:
| While we're dunking on nasa , I gave my resume to a recruiter
| for the nasa jet propulsion lab at a career fair and he said
| they'd call me and they never called me. Bunch of liars!
| xwolfi wrote:
| I saw the interview you're talking about and I admit I respect
| it.
|
| He had two choices: cowardly pretend it's not his fault or
| admit that given all he knew, he took a risk to break it or
| make it and broke it.
|
| You don't know how liberating hearing a guy like that say that.
| In my company, no way someone says that, they'd rather do
| absolutely nothing than risk anything.
| oarsinsync wrote:
| > You don't know how liberating hearing a guy like that say
| that. In my company, no way someone says that, they'd rather
| do absolutely nothing than risk anything.
|
| It's also worth understanding the difference in risks and
| incentives.
|
| Do you work in an industry where someone failing to speak up
| about issues with the work will directly risk other coworkers
| lives?
|
| Where I work, the worst that happens from bad decisions is
| reduced profits. Besides the personal glory of "being right",
| there's no upside to sticking ones neck out. Especially if
| your manager is vindictive, and takes your "being right" over
| him as a reason to punish you. Better to let bad things
| happen, and then help fix the inevitable clusterfuck.
|
| At the end of the day, reduced profits aren't great, but
| they're not an existential threat for the biz where I work.
| refurb wrote:
| I had the same takeaway. The guys attitude was "if you want
| to travel in space you need to take risks and based on what I
| knew this was a risk worth taking".
|
| Of course it comes across as quite callous considering it's
| not his life that's at risk, but he does have a point (not
| necessarily a valid one for the o-ring issue, but more
| generally speaking).
| irjustin wrote:
| That's what Feynman's issue was as he reported it in the
| Roger's Commission[0]. Is they _didn't_ understand the risk
| when they thought.
|
| Management thought the risk of lost was 1 in 100,000 which
| is launching everyday for 274 years. Engineers polled was
| 1:50 to 1:200. Obviously a massive disconnect.
|
| The thing that gets me is they broke their own protocol
| operating below 53'F. This wasn't a calculated risk where
| it's 1-2 degrees out of spec, it's wildly out of spec,
| below freezing into a completely unknown, untested and un-
| spec'ed space.
|
| This is what frustrates me.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Commission_Report#
| Role_...
| hef19898 wrote:
| Since we are already comparing Challenger to Chernobyl,
| that fact is a common thread isn't it? Ignoring temp
| specs, and at Chernobyl they ignored power and operation
| specs. In case of Challenger to get a launch, and in case
| of Chernobyl to conduct a test.
| zb wrote:
| He had no idea whether it was a risk worth taking or not,
| because they rejected any evidence short of certainty that
| the O-rings would fail on a given flight. The results of
| the Rogers Commission make this abundantly clear to anybody
| who cares to pay attention, yet he professes to have
| learned nothing.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| So easy to gamble with other people's lives and money.
| Let's admit it was really about his position and career,
| not 'wanting to travel in space'. He wasn't travelling; he
| was approving dangerous vehicles. He was trusted to delay
| launches when necessary. It was a complete fail on the VP's
| part, and all to improve his own 'numbers'. Not some noble
| goal.
|
| I'm sure he rewrote it in his mind later, so he could live
| with himself. Because, of course, he was the kind of guy
| that rewrote things to suit his agenda.
| josefx wrote:
| > "if you want to travel in space you need to take risks
| and based on what I knew this was a risk worth taking"
|
| The first thing we sent into space wasn't alive. The first
| living thing we sent into space wasn't a human. Taking
| risks is for idiots, not researchers or engineers.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| It's interesting to contrast this with the Chernobyl HBO
| documentary. Both are engineering disasters, both have very
| complicated cultural and political underpinnings to why they
| were allowed to happen. It's not to say the Challenger disaster
| is comparable to the scale of the Chernobyl disaster, but more
| crucially: what if the same poor incentives and decisions in
| place that cause Challenger caused other engineering disasters
| in the US.
| minikites wrote:
| I think both of these events together undermined people's
| general faith in governments to accomplish large scale
| projects. The two largest superpowers each failed in a big
| way at a task which should have been within their
| capabilities.
|
| It shook the assumptions and foundations of modernity and we
| lurched closer to overvaluing the virtual accomplishments of
| economic growth and financialization. Wealth is being used to
| create more wealth, it is not serving any productive purpose,
| directly or indirectly:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization#Roots
|
| >In the United States, probably more money has been made
| through the appreciation of real estate than in any other
| way. What are the long-term consequences if an increasing
| percentage of savings and wealth, as it now seems, is used to
| inflate the prices of already existing assets - real estate
| and stocks - instead of to create new production and
| innovation?
|
| We kept trying after the Apollo 1 fire, we didn't really keep
| trying after Challenger or Chernobyl. Instead of trying to
| accomplish truly great and difficult things, we became
| satisfied with making numbers go up on a Bloomberg terminal.
| sixdimensional wrote:
| In fact, in the social sciences, this is a known phenomenon
| called "normal accidents" [1].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_Accidents
| hashkb wrote:
| We all deal with the "normalization of deviance" all the
| time, in large and small ways. Like being in a group where
| it's "ok to take off your mask" or basically any form of
| teenage peer pressure. These flaws are basic to humans for
| obvious reasons (we want to be cool / successful / not
| problematic) and it takes massive courage to blow the
| whistle.
| oivey wrote:
| HBO's Chernobyl is more of a dramatization than a
| documentary. It certainly doesn't contain interviews of
| people who were actually involved. There are quite a few good
| bits highlighting the dangers of nuclear energy, particularly
| in the context of the Soviet bureaucracy, but there also a
| few liberties taken with the science and reality of the
| event. The fact that people think of it is a documentary
| despite that is also concerning.
| xapata wrote:
| I had assumed from the comment that there were two shows,
| one a dramatization and one a documentary. Surely no one
| thinks that fiction was a documentary?!
| dragontamer wrote:
| I have friends who keep citing 'The Big Short' for what's
| wrong with our financial system.
|
| A lot of people can't tell the difference between fact
| movies and fiction movies.
|
| And that doesn't even get into clearly biased
| documentaries (but I assume that most documentaries are
| at least trying to be factual instead of
| entertainment...)
| gruez wrote:
| >but I assume that most documentaries are at least trying
| to be factual instead of entertainment
|
| Given the recent thread on adam curtis documentaries I'm
| inclined to believe the opposite.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25880448
| headmelted wrote:
| Same.
|
| By the way, I thought Inside Job was a _vastly_ better
| film about the crisis that was criminally under-rated.
| Definitely worth checking out.
|
| Not perfect by any means, but far more informative than
| The Big Short, and not as dumbed down.
| URSpider94 wrote:
| The book "The Big Short" is a documentary. The movie is
| based reasonably closely on the book. The movie is a
| fictional re-telling, but the people are real and their
| motivations and actions are accurate.
| dragontamer wrote:
| The Jenga scene to describe CBOs is quite cringe to me.
|
| If a BBB tranche goes under, the investors in the BBB
| tranche get nothing to protect the AAA tranche (and
| above). In effect: BBB tranche can fail safely, that's
| the entire point of them.
|
| That's why they only shorted the BBB tranche (with
| exception of Brownfield Capital, who did go all the way
| to the AA tranche). AA was safer and more reliable: so
| for a short its a riskier move to short.
|
| ------
|
| The scene does in fact lay the ground basis of tranches
| and CDOs, which is better than most Hollywood movies. But
| its still filled with misconceptions, and the Jenga tower
| (though dramatic) isn't helping at all.
|
| ---------------
|
| Synthetic CDOs was very poorly described. The "rating
| agency" scenes were pretty much purely fiction and just
| designed to enrage the audience and IMO unhelpful to the
| general discussion. Etc. etc.
|
| ----
|
| CDOs of CDOs were accurately described IMO. Hammed up by
| explaining the "yesterday's fish in today's soup), but
| that at least is somewhat of an accurate analog.
|
| ------
|
| I mean, it was a solid movie. But look, I know how
| reality works. I've actually taken the time to look at
| (some) of the Congressional Hearings and read some of the
| papers for how that whole thing worked back in 2008. And
| there are also some good Frontline Documentaries on the
| whole 2008 crisis in general.
| phonon wrote:
| AIG insured many of the AAA tranches. Once those started
| becoming at risk, AIG had to respond to a collateral call
| --which they couldn't (as the AAA tranches were so huge).
|
| They were further hurt by the fact they kept a huge
| amount of their assets in AAA MBS. Which had now become
| illiquid and (temporarily) lost value.
|
| AIG's bailout by the government was a critical inflection
| point; if they hadn't, the entire insurance/financial
| services industry was at risk.
|
| https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b150qdkrd30
| ggk...
| dragontamer wrote:
| AIG wasn't even in "The Big Short".
|
| That's how crappy of a movie it was from a documentary
| perspective. They're missing the perspective of one of
| the major players entirely.
| phonon wrote:
| That's beside the point...the movie is only two hours and
| can't include everything...the upshot that the AAA's were
| in a position to be unstable and possibly cause an
| economic collapse was in fact very true, and your comment
| is not very accurate.
| dragontamer wrote:
| AIG is very important to the story.
|
| A lot of banks saw what was going on in the market, and
| decided to "cover their ass" just in case the mortgage
| industry collapsed. They didn't quite go short like Burry
| (and everyone else in the movie), they just "hedged", to
| protect themselves just in case of a collapse.
|
| Any bank that was worried about what was going on would
| have bought a few credit-default swaps from AIG (not that
| everyone knew that AIG was the main CDO counterparty:
| they bought CDS from the market and AIG happened to be
| one of those sellers).
|
| If AIG went bankrupt, a huge number of shorts (well,
| "protection buyers") on the mortgage market would have
| gone bankrupt with them.
|
| AIG isn't covered in the movie because it runs entirely
| counter to the narritive the movie is trying to build. A
| huge number of banks did in fact see the mortgage crisis
| and take moves to protect themselves.
|
| -----------
|
| That's the thing about CDS and going short on the
| mortgage market: even if you were right about it, you had
| to also be right about the so called "counterparty risk".
| The bank who took up the long-side of the bet against you
| still needed to be around to make the payout.
|
| That's why AIG was bailed out. Also: because the collapse
| of Lehman Brothers / Washington Mutual and other
| financial companies was wreaking havoc on the economy.
|
| The movie wanted to focus on the narrative that "Bailouts
| are bad". Well, sure. But its pretty easy to build that
| narrative by ignoring the AIG situation, as well as
| Lehman Brothers / Washington Mutual.
|
| If you go back and look at the actual history and debate
| of the bailout, the question is way more ambiguous.
|
| >> the upshot that the AAA's were in a position to be
| unstable and possibly cause an economic collapse was in
| fact very true
|
| That's not what the Jenga scene implied.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hG4X5iTK8M
|
| You know what a number of my friends took from that
| scene?
|
| "Wow, the banks are so stupid. Why would AAAs rely upon
| the B-tranche?"
|
| Yeah, cause that scene is misinformed. The Jenga Tower is
| upside-down. America's Mortgage market wouldn't really
| collapse until the AAAs were being threatened (which
| eventually, they were, but because of CDO-squared and
| Synthetic CDO leverage).
|
| But yeah, its a long story. You'd expect that the core of
| the story would be covered by a reasonable documentary.
| But "The Big Short" isn't one, its an entertainment
| movie.
| arethuza wrote:
| Out of interest, when you buy a CDS don't know get to
| know who the actual counterparty is?
|
| Note: genuine question, never having purchased any CDSs!
| ;-)
| dragontamer wrote:
| Hmmm... that's a good question. Its been a while since I
| studied the 2008 collapse.
|
| What I can say is that a CDS wasn't purchased directly in
| most cases. It was indirect.
|
| ----------------
|
| So for example: if you're a bank looking at a bunch of
| CDOs (and therefore: CDO-squared, which people didn't
| realize was a problem yet). You're seeing default rates
| creep up in 2006 and you're worried that things might
| collapse.
|
| You then see a CDO that's insurance-protected. It has a
| lower %yield, but that's because some of the % is going
| towards CDS / insurance to protect your basket of
| mortgages. You check with the ratings agencies and they
| rate the bond at AAA (because even if the underlying
| mortgage fails, you have a big-bank providing the CDS
| protecting the mortgage).
|
| You purchase the CDO (aka: buy a bunch of mortgages on
| the market), WITH CDS insurance. The CDS portion is sold
| to the highest-bidder at a separate time. The CDO-buyer
| didn't care "who" insured the CDO, they just wanted some
| kind of insurance.
|
| That turned out to be a problem when AIG was revealed to
| be the owner of $500+ Billion in CDS. As such, the
| "insurance payout" protecting those CDOs ended up being
| vaporware.
|
| --------------
|
| So now you're the US Government, looking at this problem.
| Do you let AIG collapse? If you do, all $500 Billion
| worth of AIG's CDSes fail (and therefore the CDOs fail).
| But if you let that happen, other banks also fail (and
| these other banks made the CORRECT decision: buying
| insurance to cover their ass).
|
| This is the "Toxic Debt" problem. The toxic debt was
| passed from company-to-company: everyone "related" to AIG
| was going to be affected, and no one really had an idea
| of who AIG was related to.
|
| Note: Bush let the first few banks (ex: Lehman Brothers)
| fail. They saw in realtime as the "toxic debt" of Lehman
| Brothers brought down the rest of the market.
|
| By the time AIG was at risk, George Bush had seen enough.
| When one bank collapses, it causes many other banks to
| collapse in ways that cannot be foreseen.
|
| -------------
|
| I admit that one could make the argument that it was the
| smaller-bank's fault for forgetting about counterparty
| risk (not caring who took up the other side of the CDS).
|
| But by the time banks were falling and collapsing like
| dominoes in 2008, I think Bush didn't care about the
| morals of this particular case. It was about stopping the
| domino effect in general.
| arethuza wrote:
| Wasn't AIG the _seller_ of the insurance, sorry I meant
| CDS? ;-)
| dragontamer wrote:
| Yes but...
|
| Its like the Options market. You can be the seller of a
| call option without knowing who your counterparty is.
| Similarly: you don't necessarily know who the
| counterparty to your CDS is.
|
| The CDS was not a standard instrument like the options
| market. The details of each-and-every CDS changes with
| each prospectus. This is very common in the bond market:
| bonds change (callable vs non-callable vs puttable, vs
| tax free vs taxed, in a CDO or CDO-squared or Synthetic
| CDO, or a SLAB or an MBS or... etc. etc. Lots of
| differing details).
|
| ---------------
|
| So when you buy a CDO-squared in 2006, you didn't
| necessarily know that AIG was providing the CDS-insurance
| associated with that CDO. (Hypothetically. I'm assuming
| that such a product existed back then...)
|
| -------------
|
| If it helps, consider a $600 call option on TSLA that
| expires a month from now. Lets say you want to be the
| seller of this call option (which is a kinda-sorta
| insurance-like product on the price of TSLA).
|
| You can sell this Tesla-insurance on the options market.
| But you will NEVER figure out who is on the buyer-side of
| your deal.
|
| And vice versa: the buyer of the TSLA insurance (call
| option) will never know that you were the one selling
| that insurance. A middleman handles all the details.
| Neither side really cares "who" is the counterparty is,
| they just expect that the other side can pay up.
|
| (In the case of options: the clearing house / middleman
| is a very large bank who guarantees the payment. It turns
| out that the middlemen of the CDS deals in 2008 were less
| reliable)
| arethuza wrote:
| Thanks, I had assumed that the banks organising CDSs were
| setting things up but the actual final transaction was
| directly between the two parties. So were they really in
| the middle selling the CDS and offloading the risk onto
| the likes of AIG - who was presumably thought to have
| zero counterparty risk?).
| dragontamer wrote:
| > who was presumably thought to have zero counterparty
| risk?
|
| By my understanding: people just forgot about
| counterparty risk in 2008.
|
| You have to remember: banks like Lehman Brothers have
| been around for over 100 years. The idea that a big bank
| would collapse was a completely alien thought in 2007.
|
| It was one of those "don't care" situations. Oh, they're
| a big bank. They wouldn't choose to take on more
| insurance than they can handle (or whatever). I don't
| care which bank is the CDS insurance, I just want some
| insurance from somebody. Besides, mortgages have been
| reliable for decades, getting CDSes to cover my ass on an
| already safe mortgage is the height of paranoia. Etc.
| etc.
|
| -------------
|
| You also have to remember that various banks work pretty
| hard to "hide their hands". If you hear that a big bank
| is selling CDOs, the all the smaller banks will similarly
| sell CDOs (trying to get a "piece of the action").
|
| If you're a big bank deciding to make a $500 Billion bet,
| you really want to make sure that the details of your bet
| remains a secret. Otherwise, the smaller banks (who are
| more agile than you) will make those deals before you
| finish your deal.
| arethuza wrote:
| Thanks for the patient explanations! :-)
| gumby wrote:
| softwaredoug (GP poster) used the word "documentary"
| xapata wrote:
| And I was confused by that word choice, thinking I was/am
| unaware of HBO's Chernobyl documentary, which they must
| have produced to accompany the excellent film/miniseries.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I would have said it highlights the dangers of Soviet
| bureaucracy and tyranny, particularly in the context of
| nuclear energy.
| hef19898 wrote:
| The only "soviet" factor was, IMHO, the reactor design
| and the fact that the behaviour during shut down was kept
| secret. All other decisions can happen exactly like that
| in any other environment. Upper management ignoring risks
| for promotion? Yep. Bad risk management and safety
| culture? Check. Ignoring procedure to meet deadlines?
| Check. That emphasis on the "soviet" angle is the one
| criticism I have against the HBO series. Small things
| like getting the evacuation of Pripyat wrong (they
| evacuated before the west knew what happened, not after),
| and especially during the final episode which completely
| ignored the international reaction, or non-reaction. Also
| the over dramatic death toll, nobody knows how many
| people died because nobody wanted to know, not the
| Soviets nor the West.
| hef19898 wrote:
| I am in the middle of INSAG-7, the revised Chernobyl
| accident report from the 90s. And the positive reactivity
| effect of the control rods was, as shown in the HBO
| series, known since 83. The RBMK chief engineer suggested
| changes, technical and in procedure, immediately after
| that. These have not been implemented, because it was
| considered to be an extreme edge case. Might have been
| nice to portray it that way.
|
| After all, I _love_ the HBO series, watched it three
| times by now. Still one of the best mini series ever
| produced. As shown by the fact that you have to dig that
| deep to find deviations from reality. In most other
| cases, you don 't even have to scratch the surface.
| hef19898 wrote:
| INSAG-7 includes a soviet report as annex. That report is
| really fascinating. Already in 1976 the soviet
| authorities and relevant institutes were aware of the
| design related issues of RBMK reactors and had identified
| necessary changes and modifications. Obviously, none were
| taken, but all these recommendations were included in the
| initial soviet report on the Chernobyl disaster.
|
| And in my lay man eyes, the RBMK reactor (which was also
| found to violate soviet requirements from the 70s) was a
| disaster waiting to happen. Inherently unstable,
| optimized for grid stability instead of safety, lacking
| control and monitoring, erratic behaviour under certain
| conditions and no clear operating procedures.
|
| Edit: Also nice is that the first reaction was to blame
| the operators and not the system as a whole. Kind of what
| always happens with aviation accidents as well, it always
| the pilots fault first.
| siculars wrote:
| A docudrama might be a more appropriate description.
| Nevertheless, Chernobyl on HBO was haunting and forces you
| to stop and think how a similar tragedy could be avoided.
| More broadly speaking it forces you to think about systemic
| power structures and perverse inventives that lead to these
| situations. These two are outliers, you need to ask
| yourself how many millions of times does this happen with
| localized/limited consequences.
| jboog wrote:
| I'd go even further and say that the way most people treat
| "documentary" to be equivalent to "unbiased recitation of
| factual events" is problematic itself.
|
| I love docs but often research the subject after watching
| and it's INCREDIBLY rare to see a doc that doesn't play
| fast and loose with the facts for the sake of creating a
| dramatic arc or thrilling moments.
|
| It's ESPECIALLY true in "true crime" docs. The director has
| an idea of painting the subject as either sympathetic guy
| who was wronged by a corrupt system (Making a Murderer) or
| evil mastermind (The Jinx) just to give two recent
| examples.
|
| Turned out years later the giant reveal at the center of
| The Jinx which made it such a viral hit was 100%
| manufactured by the director cutting up audio to make Durst
| say things he didn't. He also lied to the police about the
| audio so it wouldn't spoil the ending of the doc.
|
| Jarecki never had to apologize for the blatant dishonesty
| in the doc, never had to give back the Emmy. It's still
| universally acclaimed.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/24/arts/television/robert-
| du...
|
| Sorry to rant, but the "documentary" film industry is a
| fucking joke. I have so many more examples...
| hardwaregeek wrote:
| Agreed that people don't understand that documentaries
| are still narrative. My cinema studies professor
| emphasized that it's impossible to make an unbiased
| documentary. You could take security cam footage and it'd
| still have some bias from where the camera was placed and
| which footage you decided to show.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Serhii Plokhy's Chernobyl: History of Tragedy seems a great
| text on the subject, and while the tv series is undoubtedly
| dramatised and many characters are morphed into one, the tv
| series seems to broadly follow the history of events as
| described in the book. Serhii seems to have a favourable
| view of the tv series.
|
| Is there something glaring I am missing?
|
| https://en.hromadske.ua/posts/chernobyl-expert-serhii-
| plokhi...
| garmaine wrote:
| There are quite a few scientific or technical aspects of
| the HBO show which are completely fantastical and typical
| Hollywood tropes. Like that the core might blow up like a
| megaton bomb, or render all of Ukraine uninhabitable.
|
| Edit: oh and that's without mentioning all the factual
| errors in the story itself. Like the three volunteers who
| went into the plant to open the drains didn't die, but
| are alive today, cancer free and collecting their
| pensions. So are most of the people who watched the plant
| burn the first night on the bridge.
| jacquesm wrote:
| From what I know about it whether or not the core blew up
| (again, a small part of it blew up in the beginning of
| the incident and spewed radioactive graphite all over the
| site) was a dime on its side, the core was well underway
| towards landing in the water underneath it, the resulting
| steam explosion could have thrown all of the core all
| over the surrounding site. That it didn't happen is due
| to the heroics of a couple of people who never really
| made a big deal of it, they went underneath the reactor
| core to manually open the valves that drained the basin.
| garmaine wrote:
| This is correct. However the writers for the show played
| it up to be much larger than that. In one of the episodes
| Gorbachov asked how big the explosion would be, and the
| reply was somewhere in the multi-megaton range IIRC,
| complete with a description of the predicted damage to
| the surrounding area equivalent to a major nuclear blast.
|
| The biggest steam boiler explosions in history were still
| many orders of magnitude less than that, and those were
| purpose-built pressure vessels. The core wasn't going to
| drop into a pressure vessel, just whatever makeshift
| containment they had enacted at that time. Had the core
| come in contact with the water it would have converted a
| large chunk of it into steam, which would within moments
| blow open whatever cracks or leaks existed in the
| containment, blowing a lot of radioactive rubble into the
| surrounding environment.
|
| That would have been a huge setback, but nothing near a
| multi-megaton nuclear explosion.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Indeed, in fact if that steam explosion had happened it
| would have likely _reduced_ the chance of the core going
| critical rather than increased it. It still would have
| been pretty bad though, especially given that they didn
| 't really have a good way of cleaning up the highly
| radioactive graphite other than to have guys pick it up
| by hand...
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| The problem wasn't the immediate explosion but the huge
| cloud of hyper-radioactive fallout it would have
| produced.
|
| Chernobyl still managed to poison large areas of Europe,
| but the effects were mercifully localised and temporary.
|
| A steam explosion would have increased those effects and
| the areas they affected by some orders of magnitude.
| garmaine wrote:
| I'm not debating that. I'm just saying it would not have
| been a multi-megaton hydrogen-bomb-like explosion
| physically destroying not just the plant, but the
| surrounding city as well, like the characters said it
| would be on the show.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Temporary is a bit of an understatement, to this day
| there are large numbers of people in the Ukraine and in
| Eastern Poland as well as areas of Russia that ended up
| with Thyroid cancer due to this.
| garmaine wrote:
| Nobody knows that. That's pure speculation based on the
| linear no-threshold model.
| hef19898 wrote:
| I have to read the official reports yet, both of them.
| But from what I understood, while it turned out the
| massive steam explosion was no real threat, the sincerely
| believed it would happen. And the three guys draining the
| reservoirs lived, one died in 200X (I can't remember),
| the other two are still alive.
|
| There are other things I don't like about the mini
| series, but really just minor ones. The last episode was
| a wasted opportunity, so. Using the Vienna meeting would
| have been the perfect setting to cover the international
| reaction as well.
|
| That being said, I saw a lot of similar decision
| processes in my career in purely capitalist jobs to the
| ones that lead to the screwed up test in Chernobyl.
| arethuza wrote:
| The epilogue of the show makes it very clear that the
| three survived and at the time of broadcast two were
| still alive.
|
| Also, I believe the Soviet authorities at the time may
| have incorrectly believed that a large explosion was
| possible - in that respect the show may be correctly
| repeating a mistake that was made at the time.
| unicornfinder wrote:
| If memory serves this is confirmed in the podcast - i.e.
| the soviet engineers at the time believed it, even if we
| now know that it was unlikely.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Thanks for pointing the bridge thing out. For starters,
| nobody knows who was there that night. And since nobody
| counted deaths, because nobody wanted to know, the series
| final just put a lot of urban legends out there. Not that
| the fact the _nobody wanted to count_ isn 't troubling
| enough in itself.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> Is there something glaring I am missing?_
|
| It is worth listening to the podcast that accompanied the
| TV show. One of the things they mention quite a bit is
| where they deliberately deviated from the truth for
| practical/dramatic/pacing reasons[+], had to pick a
| narrative path from conflicting records, or had to make
| bits up to fill gaps in the (publicly available) records,
| and one or two cases where they toned down rather than
| ramped up an issue for tonal or "no one would believe it
| was quite that way" reasons.
|
| It is both an enlightening insight into the process of
| making a show like that, and gives useful context to
| start on your journey if you want to delve deeper into
| the real reality of the events.
|
| [+] merging many people into a single character,
| exaggerating immediate effects, reordering/repurposing
| actual events (a helicopter did crash but not at that
| point), pretty much that entire courtroom scene in the
| final episode, ...
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _The fact that people think of it is a documentary
| despite that is also concerning._
|
| That's why I don't like entertainment that stylizes itself
| as factual. For general audience, there are only two modes
| of understanding: either something is obviously fiction, or
| obviously reporting. There's no middle line.
|
| From the shows that try to blend the two, you get things
| like people believing fictionalizations in HBO's Chernobyl
| and then becoming opinionated on nuclear energy; people
| learning history from docudramas; people thinking Top Gear
| is factual and not staged; people thinking all those
| performers on talent shows are actually doing these things
| for real...
| itronitron wrote:
| The BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill and Boeing 737 Max, both
| of which have killed more people, come to mind.
| geofft wrote:
| You don't manage to get that high up the ladder if you let a
| silly thing like your conscience bother you.
|
| (This is not a good thing, to be clear, and whoever figures out
| a systematic solution to this problem will save countless lives
| in many generations to come.)
| xapata wrote:
| I doubt the people high up the ladder think themselves
| without conscience. Quite the opposite.
| M2Ys4U wrote:
| > I doubt the people high up the ladder think themselves
| without conscience. Quite the opposite.
|
| Some might, and just not care. Psychopaths aren't that rare
| (although how frequent the incidence is within Nasa is I
| have no idea)
| bostonsre wrote:
| I think there are people in both the camps. There are some
| with consciences that believe in doing the right thing, but
| also those that are in the sociopath camp. The news is full
| of the bad leaders that take ridiculous risks (e.g. Boeing)
| but the good guys don't make the news often.
| geofft wrote:
| If there had been good people in power at NASA at the
| time, the most important thing they could have done to
| save lives (not to mention run an effective organization)
| would be to refuse to promote folks without a
| demonstrable conscience to management positions.
|
| It's all well and good to celebrate Allan McDonald for
| courageously speaking up, but the hard question is this:
| had Larry Mulloy or George Hardy ever been in the
| position where they had to make a decision about whether
| to courageously speak up, at any point between when they
| joined NASA and when they got their management roles?
|
| If your promotion criteria says that someone's qualified
| for a higher-level job because they've been doing good
| work in fair weather, you have absolutely no way to know
| whether they listen to their conscience - you simply have
| no data about what happens when they have to make tough
| calls. And in fact your process is slightly biased
| _against_ people who do, because sometimes people who don
| 't will take an unwise risk and get lucky. And so over
| time, as long as disasters remain less common as worries
| about disasters, the folks who don't listen to their
| consciences get a little bit more done during their
| career compared to their peers.
|
| We know that Thiokol demoted McDonald for speaking up and
| sidelined the others who also did. This is a system that
| systematically avoids empowering the good guys.
|
| (And, from all evidence, Mulloy and Hardy were highly
| capable engineers. I'm not saying NASA should have never
| hired them - they should have had senior IC roles to fit
| their strengths and NASA should have looked for folks
| more like McDonald to make the launch decisions.)
| burrows wrote:
| > If your promotion criteria says that someone's
| qualified for a higher-level job because they've been
| doing good work in fair weather, you have absolutely no
| way to know whether they listen to their conscience
|
| How can we possibly know if someone else listens to their
| conscience? Their conscience is not accessible to anyone
| else.
| geofft wrote:
| I mean, we can go back to the original article for that.
| Why are we praising McDonald? Why did his obituary get
| posted here, and why did Mulloy, who passed in October,
| not get any press? Their consciences were unknowable,
| yes, but fortunately we're not actually looking for the
| ineffable conscience. McDonald did a praiseworthy thing,
| which we wish to encourage. And maybe Mulloy had a
| stronger conscience, but he just was more deferential to
| the pressure on him to launch. Maybe he did listen
| carefully to his conscience, but he had too much of a
| sense of optimism and so didn't internalize the worry.
| Who knows? In the end, whatever the reason, he pushed for
| _Challenger_ to launch.
|
| We're looking for whether someone is empirically willing
| to make a decision that's unpopular but right, whatever
| the reason. If they did something like McDonald did,
| where they were under pressure (including career
| pressure) to do something, they refuse to do it, and the
| data eventually shows they had good reason for it, then
| you've got some data. If they do like his colleague Bob
| Ebeling did and they write a memo to upper management
| because they don't feel their direct management is taking
| concerns seriously, you've got some data, too.
|
| What I'm saying is that, if the person you're considering
| promoting has never faced a hard decision, and you're
| promoting them because they had the good fortune to face
| years of easy decisions through which they could do high-
| quality work, you know you _don 't_ have any data. I
| agree that it's hard to get the data (and there are
| obvious problems with that metric turning into a target),
| but if you don't even try, you're certainly not going to
| succeed.
|
| All the engineering process in the world will not save
| you if your hiring and promotion processes incentivize
| the wrong things. Hence my question: did NASA have a
| process for deciding that Mulloy and Hardy were good at
| making life-or-death decisions, or did it simply have a
| process that determined that they were good engineers?
| spacemanmatt wrote:
| Funny thing about power ladders and sociopaths, though...
| they do love to climb.
| 177tcca wrote:
| Don't have 300 rung ladders.
| simonh wrote:
| Alan McDonald, the subject of this thread, is clear proof
| that this is obviously false.
|
| The fact that so many people believe this is true, however,
| is why avoidable accidents like this happen. Being willing to
| compromise your ethics isn't bravery.
| geofft wrote:
| Not a single person with McDonald's sense of ethics had the
| authority to scrub the launch. And multiple ICs, not just
| McDonald, had serious reservations.
|
| If you want to say that my "You don't" is technically false
| because, if you listen to your conscience, you might get
| proven right after seven people die and a major
| investigation happens that remains world news for decades
| afterwards, and _even then_ you 'll get demoted and
| sidelined until the US Congress intervenes, then ... yes,
| you can. I will rephrase to "You usually don't." (But even
| so, that just gets you promoted at Thiokol, and my
| statement stands for NASA.)
|
| Why didn't anyone scrub _Columbia_ 's launch? Why did the
| investigation board say that NASA had most of the same
| cultural and leadership flaws that the Rogers Commission
| had raised concerns about?
|
| The SREs have a saying, "Hope is not a strategy." You can
| hope that the person you promote will have a sense of
| ethics, and maybe they will, but that does nothing to
| ensure that you'll have ethical decision-making.
| jiofih wrote:
| Is it though? The company demoted him and his career was
| only saved by direct intervention from the congress.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| It it were true, the management would face consequences and
| McDonald would have been put in charge, instead he was
| sidelined.
|
| How many people do C-levels have to kill for heads to roll?
| boringg wrote:
| Great read about something I never knew about. I tip my hat to
| those people who are able to stand up for whats right (and not
| grandstanding) given intense pressures to do otherwise. It's also
| somewhat shocking that NASA would push forward given the very
| strong push back. Seems like some incredibly strange decision
| logic for such a high risk situation.
| neilv wrote:
| Hopefully, we're in a new era, in which the next Allan McDonalds
| of various fields will be listened to _before_ tragedies occur.
| FpUser wrote:
| Politics can benefit greatly from people like him I think.
| dylan604 wrote:
| How does Dr Fauci fair for his field?
| hprotagonist wrote:
| Mad respect for him; also, he's untouchable. The level of
| bureaucratic insulation around his position is ...
| impressive.
| bzbarsky wrote:
| Middling. He keeps making decisions based on how he thinks
| (and I emphasize _thinks_, because this sort of evaluation of
| mass public reaction is not really his core expertise) they
| will play out in the media and politically. The most recent
| example is him basically saying "yeah, it makes sense for the
| UK to do first-doses-first, but it doesn't make sense for the
| US, because people here would not stand for it" and
| completely dodging the actual question at hand, which is
| which vaccination regime is better for most rapidly
| decreasing SARS-Cov-2 infection and COVID-19 deaths. Which is
| first-doses-first, from everything I can tell of the actual
| scientific evidence, and I am quite sure he knows that.
|
| So basically, he's walking a line between making the right
| scientific decisions and protecting his position enough (in
| his estimation) that he gets to make decisions at all, which
| is compromising some of the decisions he's making.
| rdtwo wrote:
| Poorly, don't mask fauci is wrong thing for the right reason
| refurb wrote:
| Why would we be in a new era? What different from this tragedy
| versus all the ones that came before it?
| monster_group wrote:
| I applaud your optimism. (Boeing Max Jets, duh!).
| rectang wrote:
| I'm not seeing it. The fundamental dynamic is the balance of
| power between the individual and the organization, and in the
| US at least, thanks to a number of Supreme Court decisions, the
| organization is at an extreme advantage.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| May we all have the courage to stand up against bureaucracy to
| protect others at risk to our careers and personal security.
| CuriousNinja wrote:
| Are there any guidelines on how to prevent such incidents in the
| future where management overrules engineers /subject matter
| experts because of deadlines / profit etc ?
|
| Can we learn from other professions such as doctors on how to
| handle these better? I believe it's very rare for a hospital
| administrator to over rule a doctors decision when it comes to
| patients health.
| po wrote:
| I think what's interesting about this is that his ethical action
| was against his own company's interest. He spoke up for his
| engineering team and what he believed to be true, to an external
| body, at the expense of the executives and business partners at
| his company.
|
| I feel like there are a lot of parallels in modern-day
| situations. The common wisdom around PR is to get control of this
| kind of situation to prevent it.
| diminish wrote:
| I remember as a young expat engineer, I've worked for one large
| consulting job doing UK's NHS's NPfIT project in 2005. I've
| refused to signoff the architecture due to one of the providers
| not meeting requirements. One year later I've written a 6 point
| warning to the C-level of the company, that it's going to fail.
| Then quit the project and left. Years later, I read that the
| project was a failure for UK. I still keep my warning letter as a
| badge of honor, showing to my family and friends.
|
| - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHS_Connecting_for_Health that
| Banderly wrote:
| +1 here on an ongoing UK government project.
|
| It's like a nightmare where you can't move and nobody can hear
| you scream. You can only watch the inevitable disaster unfold.
| PhantomGremlin wrote:
| Tragically, Space Shuttle Columbia was also lost, many years
| later.
|
| Lessons learned and forgotten, or perhaps not learned at all.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia#Final_m...
|
| A particularly relevant snippet: _The report delved deeply into
| the underlying organizational and cultural issues that the board
| believed contributed to the accident. The report was highly
| critical of NASA 's decision-making and risk-assessment
| processes._
| DuskStar wrote:
| I wouldn't bet against SLS having a launch failure for the same
| reasons. (If it ever has more than 5 launches, that is)
| mshroyer wrote:
| At least SLS puts its solid rocket boosters well below the
| crew capsule, though. So compared with the Shuttle, there's
| some nonzero possibility of safe abort in the event of an SRB
| explosion.
| greesil wrote:
| Testimony: https://www.c-span.org/video/?126036-1/presidential-
| commissi...
| rantwasp wrote:
| at what point does the legend speak up?
| stereo wrote:
| He's the first witness. The transcript is at
| https://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v4part7.htm
|
| I looked at the videos of the previous days a bit, and can't
| find the moment which he describes in the article. Can
| anyone?
|
| The NY Times article of the next day doesn't describe the
| moment either: https://www.nytimes.com/1986/02/26/us/man-in-
| the-news-tenaci...
| ilaksh wrote:
| There is a parallel here with Boeing and 737 MAX. In both cases
| an executive or high-level manager interfered with the engineers.
|
| In the case of Boeing it actually started right from the
| beginning with the decision to create a kludge based on very
| dated designs to try to meet new requirements and save a buck
| rather than create a new design.
|
| Engineers should be in charge of engineering companies and they
| should also continue to be incentivised to operate as engineering
| supervisors in those roles rather than just salespeople or
| accountants.
|
| I actually think it's not just the people or the incentives but
| the nature of money. It's a fundamental technology but I think we
| should find ways to upgrade it as a high technology so that it
| integrates better all of our values that might not currently be
| in the bottom line.
| webwielder2 wrote:
| The Reagan administration escaped consequences for pressuring
| NASA to launch so the schoolteacher could be mentioned in the
| SOTU. Good history here:
| https://www.amazon.com/dp/1560259809/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apip_auQ...
| valuearb wrote:
| NASA leadership escaped consequences for designing a
| ridiculously unsafe launch system, and playing politics to
| choose their 4th rated SRB design to get Utah's congressional
| vote.
| specialist wrote:
| "For All Mankind" includes both of these plot points, with
| some details changed.
| known wrote:
| "One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine
| can do the work of one extraordinary man" --Elbert Hubbard(b.
| 1856)
| pasttense01 wrote:
| There is another Hacker News article out today very relevant to
| this issue:
|
| FAA safety engineer goes public to slam agency's oversight of
| Boeing's 737 Max
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26376549
| bredren wrote:
| I'm surprised NPR wrote this today:
|
| >Refuse to sign, and he'd risk his job, his career, and the good
| life he'd built for his wife and four children.
|
| It is subtle but still--the man had _four_ kids.
|
| The decision was risking the life he and his wife were building
| _together_.
| whiddershins wrote:
| This story ... so then they hired Richard Feynman to do a
| detailed analysis and he concluded it was the o-rings?
|
| So crazy.
| antattack wrote:
| I have been wondering what law or mechanism (perhaps already
| existing in other countries) could prevent upper management
| coverups?
|
| For a while I though that press was that mechanism, however after
| 'embedded press' in Iraq War and governments going after press
| sources with impunity, or White House refusing to deal with it
| all together, we know that press can be coopted. We need
| something better, perhaps a law...or a gofundme for
| whistleblowers?
| partomniscient wrote:
| I found the history of the related company Morton-Thiokol quite
| useful as part of understanding as well. [1]
|
| Especially as I was young at the time it occurred and am not from
| the US, so probably less exposed to it as well.
|
| [1] https://www.encyclopedia.com/books/politics-and-business-
| mag...
| euske wrote:
| While I really do respect this person, I can't help but wondering
| how many people today on HN could make such a decision,
| especially those who insist to "move fast and break things" or
| "rough consensus and working code", etc, etc.
|
| Probably not many. (Probably I couldn't either.)
|
| It's one thing to praise a hero like him... but how can we be
| that guy while having a stable job?
| whynotminot wrote:
| Move and fast and break things makes perfect sense when you're
| making a dog walking app and need to win time to market.
|
| The mindset is different when building truly critical systems.
|
| There's not really anything unethical about moving fast and
| accepting the risk that comes with that for most of the things
| people are building here.
| coffeefirst wrote:
| Well, dog walking apps have pretty major safety issues.
| They've had problems with crime, serious injuries, pets have
| died, and all sorts of lawsuits documenting it.
|
| Your broader point is correct, I'm just not so sure everyone
| is as good at judging where that line is as they think they
| are.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Yet many here cheer for Tesla, Uber etc in the self driving
| space for exactly this attitude, because it they think it is
| necessaty for disruption.
| kevin_nisbet wrote:
| Yea, I don't think I've really been under that gun either.
|
| About the closest I came was when working in telecom, for a new
| tech deployment I had my hands pretty deep in the lab
| environment, so when things were broken in the lab, bad config,
| etc I would get pulled in troubleshoot and solve the problems.
|
| Well one day 911 wasn't working in the lab and the problem got
| thrown my way, and it wasn't an obvious problem like someone
| miss configured something or broke some config somewhere. In
| telco at the time it was all vendor driven solutions, so I
| intentionally left the system broken to bring in the vendor to
| troubleshoot, and it was clear, this is a lab, let's not treat
| it like production and as such we don't need immediate
| recovery, we want to get to the root cause so it doesn't happen
| in production.
|
| The next day, the handset verification team was on me, saying
| they need this to work immediately since they need to validate
| some device by such and such date. And I basically said listen,
| there's a software problem in this product, and we don't want
| it to go to production. And if I don't get it fixed it could
| blow up in production on us. I also told them if I don't make
| progress in a day or two, I would try and reconfigure another
| environment for them so they would get unblocked, but otherwise
| was not willing to just reset this system so the problem went
| away.
|
| I was also doing my own investigation as much as I could since
| the vendor wasn't always the most reliable, and I encountered
| something unexpected. It looked like a node was rebooted, so I
| tracked that down, and found a senior architect who new I was
| working on solving the issue had rebooted one of the blades.
| His answer was basically the device team was complaining so he
| just went in and rebooted the node so they would stop
| complaining to him.
|
| Luckily, he didn't know enough on how to really reboot the
| system, so it just synced back with it's backup and still had
| the problem for us to investigate.
|
| The vendor comes back and goes ah yea, the 911 handler is using
| the wrong memory region for storing emergency calls, so instead
| of being able to allocate a hundred thousand records or
| whatever it was for active emergency calls it was using an
| administrative region that could only allocate something like 5
| calls. This was enough years ago that I forget the exact
| number, but it was less than 10. Not just that, but there was a
| second bug, a certain 911 call flow would allocate the call but
| not release it, which is why we couldn't make any 911 calls in
| the lab, we had leaked all of the reserved memory for emergency
| calls.
|
| I just remember being so livid, because the culture for anyone
| who dealt with that system was it's failure is just in their
| way, so lets just escalate and try and make it go away so we
| can continue on with our jobs.
|
| And it would've been so easy to just reset the whole thing so
| that people would stop complaining. It was just a lab after
| all.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's terrifying.
| throwaway82932 wrote:
| I've never been faced with a decision so grave as McDonald, but
| I've done my best over the years and I'm content. There are
| lots of opportunities to move the needle ethically that don't
| require sacrifice at all. At least one time the organization
| actually changed -- credit due to the people who listened with
| open ears.
|
| (Throwaway account because making a difference doesn't
| necessarily mean making a public show.)
| jacquesm wrote:
| Props to you.
| netflixandkill wrote:
| > It's one thing to praise a hero like him... but how can we be
| that guy while having a stable job?
|
| You decide that ethics and life are more important that your
| next few paychecks years before the event that makes you stand
| up and speak out. Sort of the stoic version of dress for the
| job you want.
|
| For many businesses, from the regular employee perspective, a
| lot of the hard ethical questions unfortunately got answers and
| built into policy years agoz often well before platforms and
| products got big for those that succeeded. Getting old
| discussions resurrected is and likely will remain a hard
| problem in human organizations forever.
|
| Perhaps counterintuitively, working on systems with clear life
| safety concerns often makes it easier since there are very
| clear consequences. It's one of the reasons for very harsh
| regulatory penalties, to be big and shocking enough for those
| that don't have strong ethical paradigms. In the industries I
| deal with there are several "million dollar per day" fine
| structures I hear people going on about that I never correct
| with more accurate information because if they're oblivious
| enough to not understand they're also oblivious enough to need
| that fear.
| [deleted]
| Glawen wrote:
| When you work in the industry writing software which can kill
| people, it is not so difficult to raise up your voice and say
| no when it could threaten life of people. Even if you are wrong
| it is still useful to raise your concern, as this would trigger
| an in depth analysis. I would say that it is even easier when
| your company experienced deaths due to products they make.
|
| But.. I am not in the position of being responsible for signing
| the design which makes my life easier. If an accident happens I
| have my conscience for myself and proof that I objected.
|
| However, it is much more difficult to gain attention when you
| cry foul to something unethical being done (diesel gate comes
| to mind here), even though it can remotely leads to deaths.
| sitkack wrote:
| You can't, you have to be galactic citizen and do the right
| thing or best we end up like the Borg.
|
| If you want to remain true, you have to have FU money and know
| where that line is. Some peopled don't need that moral cushion,
| others do, it isn't a value judgement. We need to construct a
| world where Allan McDonald's can flourish.
|
| https://youtu.be/FQDe8Y9BBMo?t=100 Be the foundation for the
| future.
| starky wrote:
| >I can't help but wondering how many people today on HN could
| make such a decision, especially those who insist to "move fast
| and break things"
|
| This gets into the argument about whether people who write
| software should be called engineers. There is good reason why
| nearly every engineering body out there has something along the
| lines of "Hold paramount their duty to public welfare" as the
| first item in the code of conduct. "Move fast and break things"
| is pretty much incompatible with engineering.
| tester34 wrote:
| I disagree
|
| >There is good reason why nearly every engineering body out
| there has something along the lines of "Hold paramount their
| duty to public welfare" as the first item in the code of
| conduct. "Move fast and break things" is pretty much
| incompatible with engineering.
|
| Those aren't mutually excluisive.
|
| Move fast and break things when it comes to crud apps is
| totally different thing.
|
| You can also use "move fast and break things" in order to
| achieve "Hold paramount their duty to public welfare"
|
| Move fast and... does not imply unsafe.
| slingnow wrote:
| Move fast and break things _absolutely_ implies unsafe. It
| doesn't guarantee unsafe, but it most definitely implies
| it.
|
| The word "break" is in the phrase...
| luxuryballs wrote:
| I think it's kinda like how once digital photography became
| good enough you didn't have to worry about wasting film. You
| can take 20 pics and later pick the best one, rather than
| spending 20 minutes trying to get the perfect shot.
|
| With software how it is today the "outer software"
| engineering has created a little virtual realm where things
| can go haywire and fail but it's in a mostly padded room. And
| of course it's all running within very well regulated and
| stable hardware.
|
| Maybe coding itself isn't engineering anymore than welding or
| running cables is but both computer and software engineering
| was required for coding and to make the code do anything
| significant it takes some engineering, or you could just
| start welding shit together!
| hawkice wrote:
| I took a hard line on an ethical issue at work. It crushed me.
| I left when it got done anyway. I'm never working for a startup
| again.
| gjvc wrote:
| Karma is a bitch, has a long memory, and delivers
| retribution.
| laurent92 wrote:
| I've done it too. So it's you + me + McDonald + ...
|
| You know, for all its evils, it is sometimes surprising that
| the world is relatively peaceful (for 60% of the globe), full
| of donators, people fighting for women, people refusing to
| participate to bad schemes. Even in opposing views, most
| people are doing it because they believe the world will be
| better like this. Also, absolute stupid people have always
| been the norm, and the bad ones have always been assertive
| and powerful and yet, the world is not so bad, so we are on a
| good streak.
| randomly123 wrote:
| me too. IP issues - founders stealing engineers ideas,
| scanning their email for IP but not naming them as inventors
| in the patent filings.
| Fordec wrote:
| Hey, whatever it was, I appreciate people like you are out
| there regardless of whether the thing got done anyway.
|
| I'm in currently in the valley of death phase of startup life
| working on a tiny piece of the climate problem, but when the
| day comes that I'm in a position to hire teams I want them to
| be able to look me in the eye and oppose me when I'm going
| off the ethics track. How we got here to needing the climate
| problem fixed was people making their peace with consequences
| of their actions, and it's not going to be _solved_ by
| doubling down on that approach.
| bitexploder wrote:
| In my experience big tech is no more ethical than startups. I
| respect where you are coming from though, there are plenty of
| other reasons startups are hard. Much of the ethical tapestry
| at a startup is on the founders.
| FpUser wrote:
| I think people with this kind of integrity are very few in
| general. Being HN participant does not really increase the
| chances. Might even be the other way around as being smart
| asses it is easier for us to come up with the reason to keep
| our conscience quiet.
|
| I do not think it has anything to do with "move fast and break
| things" way of doing things though. You can't expect the same
| approach and investment in safety in generic company vs some
| nuclear power plant or likes.
| danaliv wrote:
| 99% of folks here don't deal with life and death matters. When
| you do, you get a lot of practice at canceling, which helps.
| There's also the fact that you can say, "if you do this, people
| will die," which is a pretty bright line when you've got
| something to back it up. I actually found it more difficult to
| take a stand in less consequential fields. But it's still very,
| very hard to look someone more powerful in the eye and tell
| them no. I've had to do it and it's not fun. (Nothing on the
| scale of a Shuttle launch. I once had to effectively revoke a
| judge's flying privileges, for instance.)
|
| McDonald is on a whole other level though. That's not just your
| employer, that's the entire space program. I hope I never have
| to find out whether I'm made of the same stuff he was.
| bumby wrote:
| > _if you do this, people will die_
|
| In my experience, this is not how it works. Very rarely can
| you say definitively that "people will die". Reliability is
| shrouded in uncertainty and the best you can say is, "people
| _may_ die, _eventually_ ". If you make too absolute of a
| claim and it didn't occur you will gradually erode
| credibility. Look at _Columbia_... they knew the foam
| shedding was out of spec but had so many instances of
| probability being on their side, if you claimed people would
| die act each of those launches soon you just become noise.
| Over a long enough timeline you may be right, but phrasing in
| that way is unlikely to help in low probability events.
| vincnetas wrote:
| aka Normalization of deviance
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance
|
| And a short video in context of challenger accident :
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tC0qkVf5SmE
| interestica wrote:
| Mullane was on STS-27 -- that _was_ a disaster on the
| level of Challenger or Columbia but by pure luck they
| avoided a deadly ending. The failures were predictable.
| And this was the second flight after Challenger 's last.
| bumby wrote:
| I think the underlying point is that there are cognitive
| biases that prevent decision makers from effectively
| understanding that risk. It's very much like financial
| crashes; after the fact it becomes obvious the risk was
| there but our biases prevent most people from
| seeing/understanding it effectively in the moment
| jacquesm wrote:
| It's enough that people _may_ die (or even get injured) as
| a consequence of your work. That 's the line you shouldn't
| cross and it actually helps to have such a clear and
| unambiguous definition of that line.
| bumby wrote:
| I understand that stance, but when humans are the
| decision makers and have all kinds of other pressures
| (cost, schedule, etc.) it's often not enough that people
| "may" die. Especially if we're talking about risky
| endeavors like human-rated space travel, "may" is only
| one level across the gradient, and that level could be
| considered an acceptable risk by some. You will never
| drive risk down to zero, so "people may die" will almost
| always be true. If that's your threshold, you will never
| launch.
|
| The real difficulty is accurately gauging risk,
| especially when there isn't substantial data.
| interestica wrote:
| Sts-27
|
| https://youtu.be/BswkvaAaqSM
|
| 1988. Damage to orbiter Atlantis.
|
| Not the same foam that shedded (pieces from SRB rather than
| external tank). But still demonstrated failure modes.
| bumby wrote:
| The failure mode was known (hence why it was considered
| out-of-spec) but it didn't translate to an accurate risk
| assessment. It was deemed "in family" meaning it was
| known to be outside of spec but not a risk. Somehow, over
| many flights, something that was originally characterized
| as a safety risk lost its credibility as a risk. It's not
| that it was unknown, but the understanding of the risk
| was changed. I wonder if STS-27 led to a false sense of
| confidence
| rdtwo wrote:
| This man understands. It's the .001% chance that kills
| people
| inglor_cz wrote:
| There was an anecdote from one of Czech researches in
| Papua-New Guinea who said he was surprised that local
| hunters absolutely refused to sleep under suspicious, not
| entirely healthy trees, and were very careful about
| examining the spot before they chose it for rest. He
| considered the chance of the trees falling down very low,
| perhaps less than one in thousand.
|
| He changed his attitude when the elders explained to him
| that while the chance was very low, the hunters took a
| lot of naps in the forest throughout their lives and over
| decades, the low chance translated to almost-certainty.
| [deleted]
| gwd wrote:
| No, it's the 10% that kills people. They knew the O-rings
| were failing because they had analyzed previously
| discarded rockets. So the engineers said, "We got lucky
| this time; eventually this is going to kill people." But
| after launching 4-5 times and having O-ring failures with
| no problems, management (and probably everyone) started
| thinking it wasn't really as dangerous as it was.
| bumby wrote:
| The percentage loses meaning without an expected number
| of opportunities to calculate the expected value. 10%
| risk x 1 flight might be deemed acceptable. 10% risk x
| 100 flights means you should plan on losing 10 shuttles.
| Neither statement about risk probability is wrong (0.001%
| vs 10%), but both are incomplete. The actual shuttle risk
| was calculated between 1/78 to 1/254, if I remember
| correctly
| cushychicken wrote:
| I got the privilege of having lunch with Mr. McDonald when I was
| an IEEE officer during college. He gave a lecture at my
| university on ethics, and the IEEE council got to take him for
| lunch afterwards.
|
| He was not shy at all about saying whatever was on his mind. It
| was pretty awesome to hear him dunk on his VP, right in the
| middle of lying to the Rogers commission's face. He was also
| really open about the fact that nobody at Morton Thiokol trusted
| him for the better part of a decade after he did that. He said
| something to the effect of, "It definitely made my career harder,
| but on the bright side, I never had any major crises of
| conscience for lying about it.
|
| He also didn't give a single fuck about getting a lunch beer at a
| student gathering. I wish I'd joined him in drinking beer at noon
| on a Tuesday on IEEE dime.
| pertymcpert wrote:
| Why would anyone care about having a beer at lunch? Is that
| unusual?
| lebuffon wrote:
| Made me chuckle too. In Montreal or Frankfurt the question
| would be "Why would you have lunch without your favourite
| beverage"?
|
| The Puritans influence seems to have a long reach. (?)
| rob74 wrote:
| Not in a casual setting, but when you're on lunch break and
| going back to work/a conference/whatever else you're doing
| professionally after that, it is unusual (and not only in the
| US, even the Germans, who love beer, tend to only indulge in
| it after "Feierabend").
| antihero wrote:
| In London it seems to be that if the pints get too many and
| your boss is with you, you don't return to work :)
| mmmmmbop wrote:
| At least in Bavaria, it's perfectly acceptable to have a
| beer mixed with lemonade ("Radler") during lunch.
| josefx wrote:
| Got taken over by a foreign company, first thing was a
| complete ban on alcohol, second was an attempt to replace
| all our systems with Windows. We produce software for
| Linux, our customers run Linux, the first few weeks were
| not very impressive.
| thornoway wrote:
| Saw another corporate takeover from another point of
| view, that of the acquiring company. The company being
| acquired used Windows, C#, MSSQL etc for everything. At
| first nothing was changed, they could use their
| technology and we could use ours (we used free open
| source technologies). But they weren't very profitable or
| efficient. They paid large amounts of money for licenses.
| Some years later they had managed to move some of their
| stuff to the cloud but they were now in that particular
| cloud vendor lock in, paying a lot of fees there. Five
| years later, almost everything there was shut down and
| development moved to headquarters to be done with almost
| a blank slate by mostly new hires.
|
| Buying companies is hard. I'm pretty sure this was a big
| net negative for the buyer.
| josefx wrote:
| I accept that it isn't easy and the requirements were
| lessened, weeks after they tried to enforce them. One of
| my dev. systems now dual boots into windows, it will
| probably be stuck in update hell if I ever need it.
| gspr wrote:
| Gotta remember, the Americans are extremely prudish.
| brassattax wrote:
| Case in point: A city clerk near where I live recently made
| the TV news for drinking a Corona during a Zoom meeting.
|
| https://turnto10.com/news/local/woonsocket-city-clerk-
| seen-d...
| Teknoman117 wrote:
| "A bad look", that's so stupid. Who the hell cares if you
| have a beer? It's not like you're chugging a bottle of
| whiskey.
|
| Where I work no one would even blink. I typically turn my
| camera off when eating, but I don't think anyone would
| care if I didn't.
| Teknoman117 wrote:
| I've lived all over the United States. The local culture
| varies drastically. Where I work, no one would even blink
| if I opened a beer in the office, let alone on a video
| call. They typically send us DoorDash vouchers whenever we
| have to do lunch calls.
| MrZongle2 wrote:
| Gotta remember, some humans will eagerly paint another
| group with a broad brush due to jealousy, fear or
| ignorance.
| Maxburn wrote:
| Seriously, this is a firing offense at my company.
|
| It mostly centers around driving company vehicles in
| writing but the company makes no effort to hide the
| religious roots right on the public website.
| jegs wrote:
| For a country that introduced the concept of talking in
| elevators and urinals? I'd say drinking in the afternoon is
| a lesser evil, if at all.
| gspr wrote:
| I guess we're digressing, but I don't think the US
| introduced urinals. And I fail to see how talking in
| elevators is incompatible with being a prude (or is there
| some subtle sexual innuendo that's flying over my head
| here?)
| namdnay wrote:
| I think they meant "talking in urinals"
| gspr wrote:
| Ah, I'm an idiot - thanks :-)
| cushychicken wrote:
| Yeah, the lunch beer is gently frowned upon in most places in
| the US.
| dionidium wrote:
| My team is in Canada. When I visited them (pre-pandemic) it
| was routine for the group to have a beer at lunch and maybe
| even two on a Friday. I've literally never seen anyone do
| that on any team I've worked on in the States and I've heard
| it both implied and stated directly, depending on the boss,
| that doing so could lead to termination. I ordered a beer a
| few times on those trips and it felt scandalous!
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Because "keeping it reasonable" doesn't scale so BigCos
| frequently dis-allow drinking during/immediately prior to
| work as a blanket policy in order to have grounds for firing
| anyone who does it to excess.
|
| Also drinking on lunch break is unprofessional (even if you
| don't do it to excess) in a lot of blue collar fields. How
| many white collar people lamenting the lack of beer at lunch
| would turn around and lose their shit if their crane operator
| had a couple beers? That's a double standard no workplace
| needs.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Well there is safety critical work, it's not hypocritical
| that we dont allow drinking where we know it kills people.
|
| Whats hypocritical is that safety critical work pays worse
| than being a useless busybody with an inflated title.
| garmaine wrote:
| In that industry, yes.
| [deleted]
| AniseAbyss wrote:
| I come from a country where lunch is a sandwich behind your
| computer. Sounds bad but it means you get to clock out at 5.
| Daho0n wrote:
| Five isn't early though..
| shaftoe wrote:
| It can be.
| Daho0n wrote:
| If it is five in the morning yes. Otherwise early would
| be earlier than the norm which in most of the world is
| four (16).
| hyperbovine wrote:
| It didn't hurt that Congress basically threatened to administer
| the corporate death penalty to Morton Thiokol if they
| retaliated against McDonald and others in any way:
|
| https://www.congress.gov/bill/99th-congress/house-joint-reso...
| yalok wrote:
| I wish they would do the same for some of the recent whistle
| blowers like Vindman.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| And yet did anything happen to the evil machiavellian middle
| managers despite outright lying to congress?
|
| That should be criminal charges.
| cushychicken wrote:
| I had it from his own mouth that Morton Thiokol had plenty of
| leeway to make his life interesting (read: miserable) before
| this, and in spite of it.
| irjustin wrote:
| That's post fact. He blew the whistle before and very
| publicly.
|
| This event almost doesn't matter because he didn't care he
| would have gotten demoted - he was driven by being able to do
| the right thing.
|
| I believe there's a moment before he doesn't sign off on the
| launch or maybe just before he speaks out against his
| employer in front of the presidential commission... what will
| happen to me? what will happen to my family, 4 children? What
| work will I do? How do I make money? this is all I know...
|
| If you've ever worried about your future, job prospects, the
| unknown, the fear of not being able to provide, these
| thoughts are heavy. He made this decision and would gladly
| make it again regardless of outcome.
|
| I wish I could say the same for myself.
| 300bps wrote:
| _If you 've ever worried about your future, job prospects,
| the unknown, the fear of not being able to provide, these
| thoughts are heavy._
|
| And I can imagine him wondering, as any introspective
| person would, "what if I'm wrong?" That has to add to the
| stress.
| 6pac3rings wrote:
| Is there a hall of fame to put him in not sponsored by
| Boing?
| dstick wrote:
| > I wish I could say the same for myself.
|
| Care to elaborate a little? Seems like your experience
| could help others in a similar situation.
| irjustin wrote:
| Nothing remotely close. I'm simply asking, that given the
| situation, would I have made the same decision? That I
| could be such a hero.
|
| But am I willing to stick my neck out? Risk my career,
| who will hire me? Maybe someone will, but I just put a
| huge black mark in many's eyes. I have 2 children, a
| wife, and myself who rely on my income stream. Am I
| willing to let that go? Do I have to sell my house to
| make ends meet if I can't get a job?
|
| I want to be able to say I could do what McDonald or
| Snowden did, but if I'm honest, probably not.
| II2II wrote:
| > I want to be able to say I could do what McDonald or
| Snowden did, but if I'm honest, probably not.
|
| I suspect that same can be said of most people. In cases
| like this, it is incredibly hard to make the right
| decision before the fact since there are only two
| scenarios in which you will be redeemed: you're ignored
| _and_ disaster ensues, or you 're acknowledged _and_
| further inspection reveals the component failure. A
| successful launch or inspection does not change the fact
| that it was the right decision, yet it will most likely
| have a deeply negative personal impact. The bit about
| being trusted to make decisions is apparently irrelevant.
| ricksunny wrote:
| At nigh-on 40 years old, I've come to believe that
| ethical violations are routinely perpetrated on the world
| because good people who would otherwise speak out 'have a
| wife and kids to feed'. As if that life decision to start
| a family, for all of the happiness and wonder that comes
| from it, plays right into the hands of the management
| structure inevitably looming over it.
| elliekelly wrote:
| I once heard an executive react with glee to the news
| that a senior compliance officer's wife was pregnant:
| "Well now he's going to have to play nice!"
|
| The employee had a reputation for being... particular...
| before he was willing to sign off on certain things.
| pietrovismara wrote:
| It's almost like we are blackmailed into doing the wrong
| things all the time (on different levels of
| "importance").
|
| The fact is that this is a distinct feature of our
| society, we have to "earn our living" or be left behind.
|
| Do we really want to keep such a negative incentive in
| place?
| layoutIfNeeded wrote:
| "A married man with a family will do anything for money"
| - Talleyrand
| beardedwizard wrote:
| We are always free to chose between cowardice and
| heroism. If you aren't sure you would blow the whistle to
| save actual human lives you may want to reassess
| priorities and realities.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| When the choice is so black and white, it's easy to make.
| I hope that no one would willingly condemn someone to
| death simply for the sake of their job.
|
| What if it's simply a probability though? 1%? .1%? .01%?
| Look at auto companies. They make decisions all the time
| that will kill 1 out of 1,000,000 people. Hell, the EPA
| and other regulators do this math every day. A coal power
| plant _will_ kill x number of people over it 's lifetime.
| Every time they make a regulation, they do this math and
| determine that saving a life is worth the economic cost.
| WindyLakeReturn wrote:
| If a society punishes people for blowing the whistle,
| then perhaps that society should reassess priorities and
| realities. Why should I blame any person for choosing
| their own lives in a society that would see them punished
| for doing otherwise? People respond to incentives and as
| a consequence of this the blame should be placed on the
| cause of those incentives.
| pietrovismara wrote:
| > We are always free to chose
|
| I heard this sentence so many times, that by now I'm
| convinced people who believe we are free don't really
| know what freedom means.
|
| Today, you are free to choose in the same sense that you
| are free to commit crime. You can kill the next random
| person you meet on the streets, you can do that as long
| as you're ready to pay the consequences.
|
| Does that mean we have freedom to commit homicide?
|
| For the same reason, we aren't free to choose between
| keeping a job or starving our family and ending under the
| bridge.
|
| Especially in a corrupt economy that relies entirely on
| people being in debt to live under modern standards.
|
| Abolish debt, guarantee the basic needs to everyone, then
| we can talk about freedom of leaving a job.
| beardedwizard wrote:
| That's an interesting zero sum game. The reality does not
| match, but it's a convenient excuse to never face a lack
| of moral character.
|
| You can quit and find a new job. Most would do it in a
| heartbeat for a tiny change in total comp, but struggle
| to make the decision when lives matter but might come at
| an economic cost?
|
| That seems problematic and extremely self serving.
|
| An interesting insight into the tech industry and its
| lack of 1. moral character 2. engineer accountability in
| general.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| "That's an interesting zero sum game"
|
| But its not a zero sum game, its a game that ecourages
| corruption
| pietrovismara wrote:
| > You can quit and find a new job
|
| If by "you" you mean tech/white collar skilled worker,
| perhaps. But you're failing to consider the majority of
| low wage workers who don't really have this privilege.
|
| I also believe in personal responsibility, like you do,
| but the biggest issue is in the system, rather than in
| individual behaviour.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| The hard part is when you aren't at all confident you can
| "quit and find a new job."
|
| It takes courage to take actual risks and make actual
| sacrifices to do the right thing.
|
| You are right that it takes a lot less courage if you are
| sure you can just "quit and find a new job" and end up
| just fine. I'm sure most people would do the right thing
| when there is no cost to them at all of doing so and they
| are confident that is so, that's not the issue.
|
| Honestly your confidence that of course you would do the
| right thing always just makes me think you've never faced
| a hard decision, or have always convinced yourself that
| no decision that would involve a significant personal
| sacrifice or loss was ever the right thing.
|
| The latter is what lots of people do, it's not that they
| say "oh yeah I'm going to kill the astronauts because my
| career is more important", all those other people who
| overruled McDonald convinced themselves that it's not
| gonna kill the astronauts at all, so they didn't have to
| face the choice.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| (It's also interesting that McDonald did NOT "quit and
| find a new job" -- he stayed there! Even though he thinks
| people treated him poorly and it harmed his career. Maybe
| it wasn't so easy for him to quit and find a new job
| either).
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >We are always free to chose between cowardice and
| heroism. If you aren't sure you would blow the whistle to
| save actual human lives you may want to reassess
| priorities and realities.
|
| Seems like you're trying to say something in a roundabout
| way.
|
| These tropes make for easy internet virtue points but
| "just shun all risk" is a terrible heuristic for decision
| making and it's rarely clear without hindsight if/when/to
| what extent the risks are meaningfully greater than some
| previously agreed upon acceptable level. (Challenger blew
| up because the decision makers didn't understand how
| risky things actually were during a normal low
| temperature launch and decided to cut things even closer)
|
| If everyone in the supply chain padded their estimates to
| reduce risk and cover their ass we wouldn't have space
| flight.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Most people believe that they'd do the right thing, and
| yet most people _don 't_ do the right thing when the shit
| hits the fan. It's like how everyone thinks they are
| above average.
|
| You can always justify it to yourself -- well, I'm not
| _sure_ the thing will blow up, all these other smart
| people disagree, do I really want to risk being
| unemployed and my family living in poverty for it? We
| have an immense capacity to convince ourselves that doing
| the right thing coincides with our personal advantage and
| convenience.
|
| What can do we do to make it more likely that we'll do
| the right thing when it matters? Only practice. One can
| ask oneself, when was the last time I risked personal
| advantage or security to do the right thing, when was the
| last time I gave up something to do the right thing for
| others? If one hasn't been practicing it when the stakes
| are smaller, one possibly hasn't built up the muscle to
| do so when the stakes are huge.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| >It's almost like we are blackmailed into doing the wrong
| things all the time (on different levels of
| "importance").
|
| This right here is one of the main reasons why I've
| worked so hard to achieve financial independence.
|
| Every time someone in my life has told me that I have to
| do something I'm uncomfortable with, 'or else', they've
| simply been trying to cover the fact that I'm being
| exploited. _Every_. _Time_.
|
| I'm quite happy to have reached a place in my life where
| I can tell someone 'No' with whatever level of politeness
| they deserve.
| cduzz wrote:
| This is the basic nature of a modern American corporation
| where the culture of the leadership implicitly believes
| there is a fiduciary obligation to shareholders to
| generate a profit.
|
| There is a self-selecting process where people promote
| other people who make those small decisions in a
| particular way.
|
| If you climb well or are unlucky enough to look under the
| wrong rocks you get to an inflection point where your
| option is to become a whistle blower, leave, ask for a
| promotion, or become the patsy.
|
| Often you can avoid this (if that's your desire) by
| frequently and vocally asking about the audit
| requirements of a particular business process...
| mumblemumble wrote:
| It goes beyond profit motive. Independent of any business
| concerns, there's a lot of cultural value placed on
| optimism, and on appearing competent and confident. Which
| means that there can be great _personal_ shame in saying
| things like, "I don't know," or, "This might not work
| out." There's constant pressure to smile, look on the
| bright side, and, at all costs, avoid doing something
| that might earn you a reputation as a debbie downer.
|
| I think that's actually a much bigger factor in some of
| these situations than any profit motive. Profit motive
| doesn't push rational people to keep doubling down no
| matter what; there is room for risk management concerns.
| But a corporation is not a single mind, it's a bunch of
| individuals acting in their own interest. Individuals'
| concern for their social capital within their teams tends
| to be a much more immediate and pressing motive than
| relatively remote and abstract things like shareholder
| profit.
| AniseAbyss wrote:
| Thats our business culture. You don't really get rewarded
| for doing the RIGHT THING. Hell your stock options will
| go down if you do the whistle blower thing. You don't get
| punished for NOT doing the right thing. Precious few CEOs
| and CFOs in jail.
|
| Ultimately it comes down to your own conscience and being
| able to sleep at night.
| vinceguidry wrote:
| It runs deeper than that. Basic human nature throughout
| history has been to demonstrate loyalty to those giving
| you your livelihood. Up to and including fighting wars
| and providing resources to war fighters, and supporting
| them when they committed what we today would consider war
| crimes. Progress as a species can be looked at as a
| progression from more violent ways to organize to less
| violent ways, and corporations are less violent than what
| they came from, royal charters.
|
| Whistleblowing is and will always be considered an act of
| treason, or direct disloyalty, against those who are
| expecting you to support the enterprise.
| hinkley wrote:
| Advertisers tell us all day every day that a living
| should cost us much more than Maslow's hierarchy would
| dictate.
|
| And so we mortgage our agency every time we believe them.
| Advertising was part of the military industrial complex
| during world war 2. Maybe we should take umbrage at that.
| irjustin wrote:
| I mean I don't disagree with you on principle, but you're
| almost asking to remove money altogether or any important
| limited resource.
|
| That's what ultimately makes our society turn. If we
| could get to a true StarTrek replicator, then I think
| we're off to a good start!
| pietrovismara wrote:
| No need to abolish money, it would be enough to guarantee
| housing, food, education and healthcare to everyone. Just
| remove the conditions for people to be blackmailed/taken
| advantage of.
| mdpopescu wrote:
| Your name hints that you had that, just as I had. It
| didn't work out so well anywhere it was tried, but I'm
| sure the next time will be different. /sarc
| pietrovismara wrote:
| If you refer to the communist dictatorship in Romania,
| well that didn't work out, but to say it failed because
| of the will to guarantee the basic needs to everyone,
| that would be a gross misconception.
|
| Regarding Italy:
|
| We have social housing that is crippled by bureocracy and
| corruption, you have to wait years in line to get a flat,
| so I can't really say we guarantee that.
|
| We guarantee education, but we couldn't guarantee the
| same (good) level of education to everyone yet. Also we
| don't guarantee post high school education. If you need
| to work because you're poor and you don't have time to
| pursue a degree, that's mostly your problem.
|
| Food is not guaranteed either, although we have several
| monetary aids to partially reduce the issue.
|
| Healthcare is guaranteed, and excluding waiting times
| that are a bit long, I can say that healthcare really
| worked well for us. Nothing is perfect, but nobody is
| left to die because of preventable disease. No matter how
| poor you are, you will be treated.
|
| So I wouldn't say in Italy we ever experienced what I
| propose, just a tiny taste of it.
| 1MoreThing wrote:
| This gets at one of the core beliefs lots of people seem
| to have about socialism: that human nature means it will
| be implemented poorly.
|
| It's pretty hard to test that out, though, when one side
| of the political spectrum is so convinced it will happen
| that they devote a significant amount of political effort
| to making sure it happens, preventing us from ever
| finding out what a well-funded and run socialist
| experiment would look like in the US.
| mdpopescu wrote:
| Money is a measure of importance. Without it you make it
| VERY hard to determine what to do next, or whether what
| you did so far is sustainable.
|
| For example, at the end of the current month I "spent"
| five chicken and twenty bushes of lavender (I live in the
| countryside :D) and acquired two dogs and fifty kilos of
| grain. Was that good? Can I keep doing the same thing
| next month, or should I change my "prices"?
|
| Do not dismiss money lightly, it's far more important
| than you might think.
| whakim wrote:
| Societies which aren't/weren't heavily monetized (and did
| most of their transactions in kind) tended to not really
| understand most of the basic theories of modern
| economics. Merchants (like you just described) actually
| tended to be held in very low esteem precisely because
| they were applying the foundations of ideas like supply
| and demand - ideas that weren't well understood, and thus
| it just seemed like merchants were preying on you and
| providing nothing of value in return. tl;dr you can't
| just undo monetization but keep everything else intact.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Wow. Where can I go to read more about all this? Especially the
| part about dunking on his VP?
| raverbashing wrote:
| > He also told NASA officials, "If anything happens to this
| launch, I wouldn't want to be the person that has to stand in
| front of a board of inquiry to explain why we launched... ."
|
| Wise words, very wise words
|
| But one thing that just came to my mind: were the allowed launch
| temperatures specified at design time? Yes, Florida is hot but it
| does get chilly sometimes (not rarely, sometimes).
|
| Of course my cartoon solution to that launch would be to hold the
| launch with engines running for 1 or 2 seconds while giant
| baffles would divert the massive amounts of vapour back into the
| orbiter and heat it a bit
| [deleted]
| nabla9 wrote:
| There was amazing amount of fear and ass covering after the
| accident.
|
| NASA engineers gave information about O-ring only to Sally Ride
| (a member of Rogers commission). Sally Ride then gave the
| information to her friend General Donald Kutyna (an another
| member of Rogers commission) who she trusted to not to implicate
| her or the engineers. Then Kutyna found way to inform Feynman so
| that Feynman could "discover it independently" without the risk
| of revealing the real source.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| The article tells a different story, with Alan McDonald blowing
| the whistle to congress.
| nabla9 wrote:
| They are part of the same story.
|
| Alan McDonald spoke up in the first closed meeting as the
| article says and told that they have suggested not launching.
| Focus of the commission started to change but it didn't
| happen overnight. He didn't "blow whistle to congress".
| vlovich123 wrote:
| That's not amazing to me. This is how many/most people behave
| when confronted with real consequences.
| nitrogen wrote:
| _This is how many /most people behave when confronted with
| real consequences._
|
| No, I don't think it is, and it's the pervasive belief that
| they do that gives the few who do license to continue doing
| so.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| I mean you are free to believe whatever you want, but,
| unless you also believe that it's a large secret conspiracy
| to fill the important positions with incompetence just in
| time for a crisis (or to create a crisis down the road),
| you're going to have a tough time explaining similar
| disasters that show similar behavior from your fellow man.
|
| At most you can say that greed causes leaders to promote
| and hire this kind of person, but that's a tenuous argument
| in my opinion. The real world observation of WW2, the
| Milford experiments, Stanford prisoner experiments, Asch
| conformity experiments, and so many cases of corporate
| malfeasance, at least to me, show pretty directly that
| people like Allan McDonald are the exception. The reason
| also makes sense to me. Social conformity, if you're in the
| "in" group yields a lot of benefits and being in the "out"
| group has a lot of costs. You're talking not just about
| societal conformance pressures through things like being a
| pariah at work or being passed over for promotion. This can
| be personal pressures where you suddenly have financial
| pressures you didn't have before because no one is willing
| to give you a break. You've got your family either putting
| pressure on you to ease their lives or your own guilt that
| your family is paying a price for your actions. To
| withstand that is a minority of people, like those who have
| strong support from family and trusted friends for whom the
| societal bonds aren't as important.
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| To be fair, situations were the objector is listened to
| are non-events the public will never know of, so it is
| hard to know the true ratio.
|
| I do agree that ethics seems to take a saddeningly low
| priority in most powerful leaders in the world, but there
| are some areas in society where this isn't the case: I
| remember reading a thread a little while ago here on HN
| about how seriously safety is taken in nuclear power and
| how anyone involved in the process can object.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| I think we're in agreement. All I'm saying is that that's
| the default behavior for most people - no one wants to be
| left holding the bag. If you actually strive to create a
| different culture you can have different results. I don't
| think this is a lack of ethics in the political class per
| se. It's really hard to build this kind of structure,
| there's no credit involved (since you're preventing
| hypothetical future catastrophes), and politically
| difficult to defend to constituencies that don't agree
| with your caution ("repeal regulations"). You might also
| be wrong and your opponents could be right so you're
| taking a gamble on something that has little to no upside
| and lots of risk.
|
| That being said, (and as a person with a pro-nuclear
| bias) I will note though that Fukushima had engineers
| raising dissent about it and warning/begging/pleading
| with the bureaucracy to harden the defenses against a
| tsunami. Admittedly maybe you're talking about Western
| policies.
| BalinKing wrote:
| Personally, I assume that these kinds of people, by and
| large, _do_ get away with it (although I guess that 's just
| a way of restating the original assumption).
| pdonis wrote:
| I don't think this is true as an unqualified statement. But I
| think it is true that many/most people _who are making
| technical decisions without the proper technical
| understanding_ behave. The technical experts in all of the
| organizations involved were doing the right thing, raising
| alarms and recommending against flying the Shuttle under
| risky conditions. But the managers over them were not
| listening or overruling them, because the managers did not
| understand the actual impact of the technical decisions they
| were making until _after_ the disaster occurred.
| [deleted]
| andrewla wrote:
| I don't know specifics here, except to say that the important
| thing is not whether or not he warned of the disaster or withheld
| his consent, but how _infrequent_ that event was.
|
| Did he sign off on STS-61-C?
|
| My understanding is that there were numerous warnings about the
| Challenger, but the same warnings had been made constantly for
| every single launch. Sometimes they resulted in delays, etc., but
| the engineers and managers in charge of the launches had ample
| evidence of predictions of failure not being borne out because
| the system was resilient to them.
|
| Similar to warnings about 9/11, or Fukushima, or the 2008 GFC,
| there were people who predicted them. But, like the saying goes
| "they predicted 25 of the last 7 recessions".
|
| I can't say whether McDonald fits this mold, but if he did not --
| if he made an unusual prediction -- then that should be front and
| center here.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-61-C
| valuearb wrote:
| Knowing the specifics matters.
|
| The Thiokol SRB design wasn't safe in very cold weather, and
| the Challenger launch was on the coldest weather ever
| attempted.
|
| That's why the warnings for this flight.
| lsb wrote:
| 1) Massive respect to Allan McDonald, for piping up in the
| hearing when he could have very easily kept quiet.
|
| 2) Massive respect to NPR, for continuing to publish news in HTML
| with minimal markup, quick loading for anyone to view.
| spudwaffle wrote:
| Love that public radio where the incentives are aligned.
| Drunk_Engineer wrote:
| This is the same NPR which says the internet permits
| information to spread to easily, and that the whole internet
| needs to be redesigned to more easily censor.
|
| https://www.npr.org/2021/03/04/973791961/with-trump-out-
| of-o...
| adolph wrote:
| Almost as if large organizations are made of people with
| different viewpoints.
|
| Almost as if the technical appreciation of unbloated web
| pages is orthogonal to the writing within them.
| mrunkel wrote:
| Do you think that this four minute interview is somehow a
| policy statement from NPR?
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| Can you point me to where in that article the NPR (or an
| NPR reporter) says that (NOT anywhere they clearly report a
| third party's thoughts)?
|
| Please include the entire sentence in your quote for
| context.
| simonh wrote:
| There is only one place in that article where an actual
| course of action is discussed, and this is it.
|
| > That has her less focused on moderation policies and more
| on actually educating young people because they're going to
| be the ones who have to fix this mess.
|
| So no to censorship, yes to educating the public. Nowhere
| do they advocate any form of censorship, and they even
| argue against moderation. So where exactly did you get that
| opinion from if it's not actually in the article?
| [deleted]
| gyzmau wrote:
| So you compare the words of someone on the website with the
| format of this website. OP just praised them for their page
| layout. Tomato and apple comparison.
| consumer451 wrote:
| Standing up to your org is such a rare and difficult thing. Most
| of us, myself included, are usually not up to the task.
|
| Major respect to Allan McDonald.
| sixdimensional wrote:
| It is so true. I've done it, not out of ego, but out of passion
| and belief that it was the right thing, and I've paid the price
| physically and mentally for it.
|
| I respect and honor this man for what he did. RIP Allan
| McDonald, and thank you for what you left behind.
|
| This quote from the article helped me, right here, right now:
|
| --- excerpt ---
|
| "What we should remember about Al McDonald [is] he would often
| stress his laws of the seven R's," Maire says. "It was always,
| always do the right thing, for the right reason at the right
| time with the right people. [And] you will have no regrets for
| the rest of your life."
|
| --- end excerpt ---
|
| When people say that it is not just about about what you do, or
| why you do it, but who you do it with, it is so easy to gloss
| over that sometimes, it's about doing your part with the right
| people.
|
| For me, this served as a reminder of high value.
| dash2 wrote:
| I only count 6 Rs, has one been missed out?
| handoflixue wrote:
| " "It was always, always do the _R_ ight thing, for the _R_
| ight _R_ eason at the _R_ ight time with the _R_ ight
| people. [And] you will have no _R_ egrets for the _R_ est
| of your life.""
|
| right
|
| right
|
| reason
|
| right
|
| right
|
| regrets
|
| rest
| throwaway82932 wrote:
| It's difficult for sure. It will draw out every ounce of your
| political skills. It sometimes means leaving your job, and
| although it doesn't necessarily mean sacrificing your whole
| career, optimizing for ethics may impede your ability to
| optimize for other things like compensation or power.
|
| > _usually not up to the task_
|
| Hmm, "usually"? It sounds like you've done at least something
| sometime, even though you may not have been satisfied. Kudos
| for doing what you could under the circumstances. Not everyone
| needs to go full martyr.
| consumer451 wrote:
| Thank you for your kind words. I have done my best, when I
| can. Not always comfortable, but I am doing just fine. Still
| feels like I could have done more.
| known wrote:
| My brother faced similar situation while working for a Govt
| project in University; He refused to sign and instead resigned;
|
| "Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands
| it" --Einstein (b. 1879)
| burrows wrote:
| Is Einstein an expert on "listening to one's conscience"? If
| not, then it's just mumbo-jumbo.
| gspr wrote:
| > Is Einstein an expert on "listening to one's conscience"?
| If not, then it's just mumbo-jumbo.
|
| What rubbish logic. I think we can agree that Einstein was a
| generally incredibly intelligent and remarkable human. That
| is enough of an argument to pause for 5 seconds and hear this
| one sentence out. Then you can discard it as you see fit.
|
| In other words, Einstein's status is what has you listening,
| but the content of what is said has to stand on its own two
| legs and does not necessarily rely on an argument from
| authority.
| burrows wrote:
| Einstein was remarkable within his domain of expertise.
| Outside of it he's a jackass just like everyone else.
| spacemanmatt wrote:
| That is a great story. I am so used to hearing Richard Feynman
| credited with leading the blue-ribbon panel that spoke truth to
| power in a plain-as-dirt method, as well as exposing the
| mechanism of the O-ring's thermal characteristic.
| motohagiography wrote:
| _" Regret for things we did is tempered by time," McDonald said,
| his expression firm. "But regret for things we did not do is
| inconsolable."_
|
| This is the frame that idea needed.
| hoseja wrote:
| While it is undoubtedly tragic, I kinda wish it were more
| acceptable for people to die exploring space, now and then. This
| focus on absolute safety seems crippling.
| hertzrat wrote:
| Are you volunteering? People can be quick to offer other humans
| as sacrifices for some greater good
| throw123123123 wrote:
| There are plenty of volunteers offering their life for a lot
| less - a whole army of them.
| hoseja wrote:
| And they get into a LOT of preventable accidents, without
| anybody seeming to care very much.
| jiofih wrote:
| The difference is you don't need 20 years of training and
| multiple post-doc diplomas to join the army. Every loss
| there is insanely expensive in terms of human capital.
| [deleted]
| bluntfang wrote:
| Have you considered the value that an astronaut represents?
| AFAIK, they are basically genetic anomalies along with extreme
| learned discipline and intelligence. They're like an asset.
| Replacement cost of an engineer in tech is estimated to
| something like 3x their pay, think about how much money it
| costs to replace an astronaut.
| gjvc wrote:
| "Every disaster movie begins with a scientist being ignored."
|
| We absolutely need more men and women like Allan McDonald, in all
| areas of government, science, education, and industry.
| slingnow wrote:
| Except that there are millions of scientists being ignored
| every day in just about every field you could imagine. Being
| ignored doesn't make you wrong or right. It's part of being a
| scientist. It's in the noise.
|
| I would bet good money that every disaster movie could also be
| tied to a Nostradamus prediction. It doesn't make it relevant.
| jack_riminton wrote:
| This is going to be the start of 'Pandemic, the Movie' too
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