4 ms·

Adams Complexity Threshold

28 points by alexandros 16y ago

stcredzero 16y ago
The Adams Complexity Threshold is the point at which something is so complicated it no longer works. The Gulf oil spill is probably a case of complexity reaching the threshold. It was literally impossible for anyone to know if the oil rig was safe or not. The engineering was too complex. I'm sure management thought it was safe, or hoped it was safe, or hallucinated that it was safe. It wasn't possible to know for sure. Disagree. If the oil companies had put together a consortium to research such "worst case" scenarios and develop equipment and procedures to deal with them quickly, then this would have been preventable. (How about an even worse scenario: oil rig blows up, sinks, smashes the blowout preventer. Even Michael Bay can think of that one.) The oil companies could've done this, but chose instead to gamble on what they thought was a "good enough" lower level of safety. No one can be 100% sure all of the machinery and safety mechanisms and procedures will work, but it is possible to make the likelihood reasonably small and then add an additional fallback position that you are pretty certain will work. The oil companies didn't have a fallback beyond the blowout preventer that they knew would work in a short timeframe. An unreasonable expectation? Perhaps. Technology companies do this with their data all the time. Of course, protecting data is 1) much cheaper and 2) is protecting an asset and not preventing an unfortunate externality.
- pigbucket 16y ago
  > No one can be a 100% sure The problem is complexity plus scale. Do something potentially disastrous a 100k times, then you need to be impossibly close to being a 100% sure you've made it safe for every case. 99.9% doesn't cut it. BP's fallback position is: if it blows, and we can't stop it, we'll drill a relief well. That's the kind of decision that looks ethically bankrupt, probably is ethically bankrupt, and is nonetheless going to be made every time unless all the other oil companies also agree, or are forced to have, the fallback already in place.
chaosmachine 16y ago
Pre-drill a relief well. It's not that complex. Actually, some countries already require it.
- ovi256 16y ago
  Drill a relief well. It's not that big of a deal.
pchristensen 16y ago
The Checklist Manifesto (http://www.amazon.com/Checklist-Manifesto-How-Things-Right/dp/0805091742/ http://www.amazon.com/Checklist-Manifesto-How-Things-Right/d... ) is exactly about managing excessive complexity.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
jcl 16y ago
Complexity is often a natural outgrowth of success. Man-made complexity is simply a combination of things that we figured out how to do right, one layered on top of the other, until failure is achieved. A great line... Reminds me of: "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it." -- Brian W. Kernighan
macrael 16y ago
Not sure I buy his point about how engineers and other professionals are the only ones who manage complexity. I have never taken a poly-sci class before, but my guess is that the whole point is to work to reduce the enormous complexity of differing political systems into something you can understand. And, as a single data point, my English major/aspiring author friend is one of the deepest thinkers I know. He regularly surprises me by being able to distil complex situations into something manageable. Engineers definitely don't have a monopoly on that.
arohner 16y ago
Things like http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=10763042 http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=10763042 make me not convinced the BP was just an accident that could have happened to any of the oil companies.
bh42 16y ago
Adams is a smart and funny guy, but his great talent to simply often leads him to embarrassing oversimplification. His bold assumption that no one could be sure if the BP rig was safe is complete BS. Watch the 60 Minutes report, listen to the interview, LOTS of people knew exactly how unsafe it was. The same goes for Enron, both Bethany McLean and James Chanos pointed out the king is naked, long before Enron imploded. Just because Scott Adams can't comprehend something, it does not mean that it is incomprehensible. It is true that our modern lives are very complicated. But primitive people posses staggering amounts of knowledge, which just happen to be essential for their survival. We all had knowledge like that a long time ago. I have no idea exactly who knows more, but I bet we are all in the same ballpark, because we are all humans.
- Gormo 16y ago
  As they say, hindsight is 20/20. It might be relatively easy post-hoc to trace a problem that has already occurred back to a relatively small set of causes, and then ask why these were overlooked - after all, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. But when the system itself is so complex that any of a thousand other factors might have gone wrong instead, you're really comparing a thousand ounces of prevention to a pound of cure. You can get really caught up in all of the plausible contingencies, which grow disproportionately with complexity. If you were to audit that oil rig inch-by-inch, you might have found dozens of things which could have led to a problem of near the same impact as the current leak. And you might have even focused on fixing all of them. But you can't presume that some other factor that you didn't notice (or couldn't have noticed given the finite nature of your knowledge) wouldn't have triggered a slightly different failure, and you can spend an enormous amount of time fixing things that would not have caused a failure. Adams makes a good point - the best way to ensure the reliability of a system is to understand the functioning of the system as a whole, and beyond a certain scale of complexity, this is extremely difficult and often impossible.

28 points by alexandros 16y ago

The Adams Complexity Threshold is the point at which something is so complicated it no longer works. The Gulf oil spill is probably a case of complexity reaching the threshold. It was literally impossible for anyone to know if the oil rig was safe or not. The engineering was too complex. I'm sure management thought it was safe, or hoped it was safe, or hallucinated that it was safe. It wasn't possible to know for sure. Disagree. If the oil companies had put together a consortium to research such "worst case" scenarios and develop equipment and procedures to deal with them quickly, then this would have been preventable. (How about an even worse scenario: oil rig blows up, sinks, smashes the blowout preventer. Even Michael Bay can think of that one.) The oil companies could've done this, but chose instead to gamble on what they thought was a "good enough" lower level of safety. No one can be 100% sure all of the machinery and safety mechanisms and procedures will work, but it is possible to make the likelihood reasonably small and then add an additional fallback position that you are pretty certain will work. The oil companies didn't have a fallback beyond the blowout preventer that they knew would work in a short timeframe. An unreasonable expectation? Perhaps. Technology companies do this with their data all the time. Of course, protecting data is 1) much cheaper and 2) is protecting an asset and not preventing an unfortunate externality.

pigbucket 16y ago
> No one can be a 100% sure The problem is complexity plus scale. Do something potentially disastrous a 100k times, then you need to be impossibly close to being a 100% sure you've made it safe for every case. 99.9% doesn't cut it. BP's fallback position is: if it blows, and we can't stop it, we'll drill a relief well. That's the kind of decision that looks ethically bankrupt, probably is ethically bankrupt, and is nonetheless going to be made every time unless all the other oil companies also agree, or are forced to have, the fallback already in place.

chaosmachine 16y ago

Pre-drill a relief well. It's not that complex. Actually, some countries already require it.

ovi256 16y ago
Drill a relief well. It's not that big of a deal.

pchristensen 16y ago

The Checklist Manifesto (http://www.amazon.com/Checklist-Manifesto-How-Things-Right/dp/0805091742/ http://www.amazon.com/Checklist-Manifesto-How-Things-Right/d... ) is exactly about managing excessive complexity.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

jcl 16y ago

Complexity is often a natural outgrowth of success. Man-made complexity is simply a combination of things that we figured out how to do right, one layered on top of the other, until failure is achieved. A great line... Reminds me of: "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it." -- Brian W. Kernighan

macrael 16y ago

Not sure I buy his point about how engineers and other professionals are the only ones who manage complexity. I have never taken a poly-sci class before, but my guess is that the whole point is to work to reduce the enormous complexity of differing political systems into something you can understand. And, as a single data point, my English major/aspiring author friend is one of the deepest thinkers I know. He regularly surprises me by being able to distil complex situations into something manageable. Engineers definitely don't have a monopoly on that.

arohner 16y ago

Things like http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=10763042 http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=10763042 make me not convinced the BP was just an accident that could have happened to any of the oil companies.

bh42 16y ago

Adams is a smart and funny guy, but his great talent to simply often leads him to embarrassing oversimplification. His bold assumption that no one could be sure if the BP rig was safe is complete BS. Watch the 60 Minutes report, listen to the interview, LOTS of people knew exactly how unsafe it was. The same goes for Enron, both Bethany McLean and James Chanos pointed out the king is naked, long before Enron imploded. Just because Scott Adams can't comprehend something, it does not mean that it is incomprehensible. It is true that our modern lives are very complicated. But primitive people posses staggering amounts of knowledge, which just happen to be essential for their survival. We all had knowledge like that a long time ago. I have no idea exactly who knows more, but I bet we are all in the same ballpark, because we are all humans.

Gormo 16y ago
As they say, hindsight is 20/20. It might be relatively easy post-hoc to trace a problem that has already occurred back to a relatively small set of causes, and then ask why these were overlooked - after all, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. But when the system itself is so complex that any of a thousand other factors might have gone wrong instead, you're really comparing a thousand ounces of prevention to a pound of cure. You can get really caught up in all of the plausible contingencies, which grow disproportionately with complexity. If you were to audit that oil rig inch-by-inch, you might have found dozens of things which could have led to a problem of near the same impact as the current leak. And you might have even focused on fixing all of them. But you can't presume that some other factor that you didn't notice (or couldn't have noticed given the finite nature of your knowledge) wouldn't have triggered a slightly different failure, and you can spend an enormous amount of time fixing things that would not have caused a failure. Adams makes a good point - the best way to ensure the reliability of a system is to understand the functioning of the system as a whole, and beyond a certain scale of complexity, this is extremely difficult and often impossible.