6 ms·

It is bound to happen again and again considering humans are so oblivious to safety.

by actimod 6mo ago

danesparza 6mo ago
Then explain the Apollo program, and the actual printed literature that came out of the program that summarized how they were successful.
- mathgeek 6mo ago
  If you're looking for programs where mistakes were not made, Apollo is not the program to choose. I highly recommend visiting Kennedy Space Center some time where they go in-depth on how close it came to never happening after Apollo I. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1 That being said, I'm a big proponent of "you can't make ICBM's carrying humans 100% safe", but you sure can try your best.
- mikkupikku 6mo ago
  Apollo killed three astronauts. NASA learned some lessons from that and the rest of the program was safer, although still extremely risky.
hluska 6mo ago
I wouldn’t say humans are oblivious to safety. The Apollo program was very successful as long as you’re not related to Gus Grissom, Ed White or Roger Chaffee. But those three (preventable) deaths aside, Apollo was quite successful and figured out some huge problems. If you’re interested in a heck of a good read, the Columbia Accident Investigation Report is a good place to start: https://ehss.energy.gov/deprep/archive/documents/0308_caib_report_volume1.pdf https://ehss.energy.gov/deprep/archive/documents/0308_caib_r... It looks at the safety culture in NASA and at how that safety culture ran into budget issues, time pressure and a culture that ‘it’s always been okay’. But people were aware of the problems. There’s a really frustrating example from Columbia where engineers on the ground badly wanted to inspect the shuttle’s left wing from the ground using ground based telescopes or even observations from telescopes or any other assets. There’s footage available was an email circulated where an engineer all but begged anyone to take a look with anything. That request was not approved - they never looked. Realistically there’s a point to be made that NASA wasn’t capable of saving those astronauts at that point. But they had a shuttle almost ready to to, they could have jettisoned its science load and possibly had a rescue of some sort available. They never looked though but alarm bells were ringing. It’s more accurate to say people are highly aware of safety but when you get a bunch of us together, add in cognitive biases and promotion bands we can get stuck in unsafe ruts.
- sfn42 6mo ago
  I'd say it's more accurate to say the people who are actually smart work as engineers. Leadership is generally engineers who were better at office politics than engineering, or just business majors etc. So you have a group of really talented people using their talents to do awesome things, and then you have some useless idiots who are good at kissing the right asses, running the show and taking most of the credit. And that's how you end up killing astronauts, because the useless assholes in charge aren't even competent enough to recognize when they should listen to the brains of their operation. All they care about is looking good to their superiors and hitting some arbitrary deadline they've decided to set for no damn reason etc.
CWuestefeld 6mo ago
humans are so oblivious to safety It seems that in modern times, humans focus on safety almost to the exclusion of everything else. As much as the more traditional salutations "godspeed" or "have a nice day", we're even more likely to hear "drive safe" or "have a safe trip" or "be safe". We're very nearly paralyzed by insisting that everything must be maximally safe. Surely you've heard the mantra "...if it saves just one life...". The optimal amount of tragedy is not zero. It's correct that we should accept some risk. We just need to be up-front and recognize what the safety margins really are.
- MeetingsBrowser 6mo ago
  > We're very nearly paralyzed by insisting that everything must be maximally safe. Are we? People saying "have a safe trip" is pretty weak evidence. The counter evidence is just about everything else going on, at least in the US. Relaxed worker safety standards, weakened environmental protections, and generally moving as fast as possible.
  - adamsb6 6mo ago
    My kids are going to be legally mandated to be in car seats until they’re about 12 years old.
    - MeetingsBrowser 6mo ago
      Your implied frustration at a relatively easy change backed by experts and mountains of data is another point in favor of > humans are so oblivious to safety
      - enoch_r 6mo ago
        We have 4 kids. Before we had our 3rd, we needed to buy a new vehicle solely because we couldn't fit 3 car seats into the back of our old car. And when traveling with kids, carrying 4 gigantic car seats plus your other luggage is not exactly as easy as you might think! It essentially rules out solo parent travel with all 4 kids. Transferring car seats between two cars, or installing car seats in a taxi, is a serious pain. Furthermore, the evidence that car seats actually benefit safety is significantly less robust than you might think. The "mountains of evidence" that do exist for things like 70% reductions in fatalities, bizarrely enough, generally compare the rate of fatalities for car seats vs completely unrestrained kids. When you compare the rate of fatalities in car seats to kids wearing adult seat belts, the bulk of the evidence suggests essentially no difference. Fatalities happen when the forces involved are catastrophic and sadly a car seat doesn't help much for kids over 2. Even a back of the envelope comparison makes this extremely plausible: car crash fatalities for kids 9-12 have declined by 72% from 1978-2017. If car seats and car seat laws save significant numbers of lives, you'd expect that the fatality rate for kids 0-8, who are generally in car seats, to have decreased much more. But it hasn't, it declined by 73% over the same period. Now, car seats and boosters do seem to moderately reduce non-fatal injuries - huge spread of estimates here, most clustering around 10-25%. It's reasonable for most people to use car seats or boosters most of the time based on this alone, IMO, especially for young kids. But do they justify a mandate? IMO: no. Absolutely not. Worth mentioning that mandates probably do succeed in one thing: they reduce the number of children born at all by at least 57x more than they prevent child fatalities. Roughly 8,000 kids per year, 145,000 kids since 1980. That's with the (unlikely, as discussed above) assumption that car seats do in fact save significant numbers of lives. But it's also entirely possible that they've prevented hundreds of thousands of kids from being born, somewhat reduced the nonfatal injury rate, and saved essentially no lives. Citations below: Fatality reduction with car seats or boosters: - https://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/seatbelts.pdf https://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/seatbelts.pdf (found that seat belts as effective as car seats for children 2-6) - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jae.2449 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jae.2449 (independent replication of above with different data set) - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19959729/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19959729/ (no statistically significant difference between booster seats and seat belt alone for fatalities) - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16754824/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16754824/ (the main counter-estimate to the above, with the 28% fatality reduction) Non-fatal injury reductions: - https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/ecinqu/v48y2010i3p521-536.html https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/ecinqu/v48y2010i3p521-536.html (no difference in serious injuries, ~25% reduction in least serious injury category) - https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/811338 https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/... (14% reduction in likelihood of injury for boosters) - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19841126/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19841126/ (45% estimate) - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12783914/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12783914/ (59% estimate) Reduction in birth rate from car seat mandates: - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3665046 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3665046 (car seat mandates "led to a permanent reduction of approximately 8,000 births in the same year, and 145,000 fewer births since 1980, with 90% of this decline being since 2000") Note that both the 45% and 59% estimate for injury reduction and the 28% estimate for fatality reduction all come from one research group using a proprietary data set. Everything that's independently reproducible points towards small or zero effect on fatalities and modest effects on injuries.
irchans 6mo ago
Us humans do have difficulty with safety. Sometimes we are able to overcome that problem to an extent. Here are some the few examples where humans have done well with safety: FAA commercial airlines, Soyuz, ISS, Shinkansen trains, US Nuclear power post 3 mile island, Vaccines, and the Falcon 9.
nritchie 6mo ago
Maybe not so much "oblivious to safety" as "oblivious to probable risk." We worry to much about low risk events (like airline flights) and don't worry enough about higher risk events (like trips-and-falls, driving a car, poor diet...)

It is bound to happen again and again considering humans are so oblivious to safety.

by actimod 6mo ago

It is bound to happen again and again considering humans are so oblivious to safety.

Then explain the Apollo program, and the actual printed literature that came out of the program that summarized how they were successful.

mathgeek 6mo ago
If you're looking for programs where mistakes were not made, Apollo is not the program to choose. I highly recommend visiting Kennedy Space Center some time where they go in-depth on how close it came to never happening after Apollo I. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1 That being said, I'm a big proponent of "you can't make ICBM's carrying humans 100% safe", but you sure can try your best.
mikkupikku 6mo ago
Apollo killed three astronauts. NASA learned some lessons from that and the rest of the program was safer, although still extremely risky.

hluska 6mo ago

I wouldn’t say humans are oblivious to safety. The Apollo program was very successful as long as you’re not related to Gus Grissom, Ed White or Roger Chaffee. But those three (preventable) deaths aside, Apollo was quite successful and figured out some huge problems. If you’re interested in a heck of a good read, the Columbia Accident Investigation Report is a good place to start: https://ehss.energy.gov/deprep/archive/documents/0308_caib_report_volume1.pdf https://ehss.energy.gov/deprep/archive/documents/0308_caib_r... It looks at the safety culture in NASA and at how that safety culture ran into budget issues, time pressure and a culture that ‘it’s always been okay’. But people were aware of the problems. There’s a really frustrating example from Columbia where engineers on the ground badly wanted to inspect the shuttle’s left wing from the ground using ground based telescopes or even observations from telescopes or any other assets. There’s footage available was an email circulated where an engineer all but begged anyone to take a look with anything. That request was not approved - they never looked. Realistically there’s a point to be made that NASA wasn’t capable of saving those astronauts at that point. But they had a shuttle almost ready to to, they could have jettisoned its science load and possibly had a rescue of some sort available. They never looked though but alarm bells were ringing. It’s more accurate to say people are highly aware of safety but when you get a bunch of us together, add in cognitive biases and promotion bands we can get stuck in unsafe ruts.

sfn42 6mo ago
I'd say it's more accurate to say the people who are actually smart work as engineers. Leadership is generally engineers who were better at office politics than engineering, or just business majors etc. So you have a group of really talented people using their talents to do awesome things, and then you have some useless idiots who are good at kissing the right asses, running the show and taking most of the credit. And that's how you end up killing astronauts, because the useless assholes in charge aren't even competent enough to recognize when they should listen to the brains of their operation. All they care about is looking good to their superiors and hitting some arbitrary deadline they've decided to set for no damn reason etc.

CWuestefeld 6mo ago

humans are so oblivious to safety It seems that in modern times, humans focus on safety almost to the exclusion of everything else. As much as the more traditional salutations "godspeed" or "have a nice day", we're even more likely to hear "drive safe" or "have a safe trip" or "be safe". We're very nearly paralyzed by insisting that everything must be maximally safe. Surely you've heard the mantra "...if it saves just one life...". The optimal amount of tragedy is not zero. It's correct that we should accept some risk. We just need to be up-front and recognize what the safety margins really are.

MeetingsBrowser 6mo ago
> We're very nearly paralyzed by insisting that everything must be maximally safe. Are we? People saying "have a safe trip" is pretty weak evidence. The counter evidence is just about everything else going on, at least in the US. Relaxed worker safety standards, weakened environmental protections, and generally moving as fast as possible.
- adamsb6 6mo ago
  My kids are going to be legally mandated to be in car seats until they’re about 12 years old.
  - MeetingsBrowser 6mo ago
    Your implied frustration at a relatively easy change backed by experts and mountains of data is another point in favor of > humans are so oblivious to safety
    - enoch_r 6mo ago
      We have 4 kids. Before we had our 3rd, we needed to buy a new vehicle solely because we couldn't fit 3 car seats into the back of our old car. And when traveling with kids, carrying 4 gigantic car seats plus your other luggage is not exactly as easy as you might think! It essentially rules out solo parent travel with all 4 kids. Transferring car seats between two cars, or installing car seats in a taxi, is a serious pain. Furthermore, the evidence that car seats actually benefit safety is significantly less robust than you might think. The "mountains of evidence" that do exist for things like 70% reductions in fatalities, bizarrely enough, generally compare the rate of fatalities for car seats vs completely unrestrained kids. When you compare the rate of fatalities in car seats to kids wearing adult seat belts, the bulk of the evidence suggests essentially no difference. Fatalities happen when the forces involved are catastrophic and sadly a car seat doesn't help much for kids over 2. Even a back of the envelope comparison makes this extremely plausible: car crash fatalities for kids 9-12 have declined by 72% from 1978-2017. If car seats and car seat laws save significant numbers of lives, you'd expect that the fatality rate for kids 0-8, who are generally in car seats, to have decreased much more. But it hasn't, it declined by 73% over the same period. Now, car seats and boosters do seem to moderately reduce non-fatal injuries - huge spread of estimates here, most clustering around 10-25%. It's reasonable for most people to use car seats or boosters most of the time based on this alone, IMO, especially for young kids. But do they justify a mandate? IMO: no. Absolutely not. Worth mentioning that mandates probably do succeed in one thing: they reduce the number of children born at all by at least 57x more than they prevent child fatalities. Roughly 8,000 kids per year, 145,000 kids since 1980. That's with the (unlikely, as discussed above) assumption that car seats do in fact save significant numbers of lives. But it's also entirely possible that they've prevented hundreds of thousands of kids from being born, somewhat reduced the nonfatal injury rate, and saved essentially no lives. Citations below: Fatality reduction with car seats or boosters: - https://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/seatbelts.pdf https://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/seatbelts.pdf (found that seat belts as effective as car seats for children 2-6) - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jae.2449 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jae.2449 (independent replication of above with different data set) - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19959729/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19959729/ (no statistically significant difference between booster seats and seat belt alone for fatalities) - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16754824/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16754824/ (the main counter-estimate to the above, with the 28% fatality reduction) Non-fatal injury reductions: - https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/ecinqu/v48y2010i3p521-536.html https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/ecinqu/v48y2010i3p521-536.html (no difference in serious injuries, ~25% reduction in least serious injury category) - https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/811338 https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/... (14% reduction in likelihood of injury for boosters) - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19841126/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19841126/ (45% estimate) - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12783914/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12783914/ (59% estimate) Reduction in birth rate from car seat mandates: - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3665046 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3665046 (car seat mandates "led to a permanent reduction of approximately 8,000 births in the same year, and 145,000 fewer births since 1980, with 90% of this decline being since 2000") Note that both the 45% and 59% estimate for injury reduction and the 28% estimate for fatality reduction all come from one research group using a proprietary data set. Everything that's independently reproducible points towards small or zero effect on fatalities and modest effects on injuries.

irchans 6mo ago

Us humans do have difficulty with safety. Sometimes we are able to overcome that problem to an extent. Here are some the few examples where humans have done well with safety: FAA commercial airlines, Soyuz, ISS, Shinkansen trains, US Nuclear power post 3 mile island, Vaccines, and the Falcon 9.

nritchie 6mo ago

Maybe not so much "oblivious to safety" as "oblivious to probable risk." We worry to much about low risk events (like airline flights) and don't worry enough about higher risk events (like trips-and-falls, driving a car, poor diet...)