5 ms·

This is the issue I have with the media - moreso than any particular bias, media loves to paint a narrative when, in truth, random events are more likely to bla

by cal5k 8y ago

This is the issue I have with the media - moreso than any particular bias, media loves to paint a narrative when, in truth, random events are more likely to blame (though in fairness this is a human flaw borne from the heuristic value of narrative). Accidents happen in complex systems - rather than burning the people involved at the stake, we should recognize the inherent complexity of safety hurtling an aluminum tube full of humans through the air at just below the speed of sound, review the accident in a calm and sober fashion, and make the necessary changes to prevent a similar accident in the future

agumonkey 8y ago
the more I grow, the less I understand why medias.. if twitter and facebook are dopamine abusers, traditional medias are also a kind of drug, mild intensity, but drug still
anigbrowl 8y ago
Oh, let's be calm and sober about this, and passively accept the existence of accidents rather than re-examine organizational, business, or economic premises. So much easier to blame the media. Craven excuse-making and responsibility avoidance at its worst.
- cal5k 8y ago
  ...except for the part where I say we should examine the root cause and make appropriate adjustments? Or should we find every software developer who ever worked on the 737 MAX and throw them in jail? Because brutal punishment of errors is what leads to a culture of quality improvement, right?
  - anigbrowl 8y ago
    No. You chose to start out pointing the finger of blame at the media and adding a vague statement about fixing the issue is mere lip service. You now go to the opposite extreme, employing the fallacy of the excluded middle and emotive language like 'brutal punishment' to invalidate an argument that was never made. Your dishonesty only highlights the weakness of your position.
kayfox 8y ago
The HN discussion of this issue is fairly revealing in that it points towards the people on this site wanting a simple explanation with a short list of people to punish, when it is more likely a long list of small details with many people who might have made relatively minor mistakes or simply not foreseen the issue in question. Working in IT (and also formerly at Boeing, so there's some crossover in experience), I find this unsurprising, as IT systems become more and more complex the answers are not "theres a bug in Vendor X's product" or "system Y was misconfigured" but a long litany of small errors, oversights or unforeseen issues that culminated in some larger issue. It does not help that many of these people are unwilling to adjust their conclusions based on emerging evidence. Fortunately in aviation there is a culture of understanding all the details of accidents, identifying all the possible improvements and implementing them. I suspect that the IT industry is on the verge of a crisis as I don't see this sort of attitude prevalent in it, which is funny because lots of the terminology and some of the techniques are common, just not the culture.
- cal5k 8y ago
  For context, I'm a licensed pilot and my father spent most of his career working at Transport Canada, basically Canada's FAA. So this is one of those topics I probably know more than the average HNer about. What I've noticed more broadly is that there are lots of people on HN with high general intelligence who believe it automatically translates to specific domain knowledge in aviation, medicine, etc., when if quizzed they would likely know far less than they believe they do. So when it comes to quality improvement, for example, they likely haven't spent time at a car factory, or at a Boeing plant, and understand it via bastardized analogies (i.e. Kaizen in software development really isn't the same as in manufacturing) rather than domain expertise. Deep domain expertise is difficult to obtain unless you're really immersed in an industry. The desire to "make someone pay" when errors happen is antithetical to a culture of quality improvement. The accident report for the Lion Air incident actually paints a picture of a complex failure rather than simply being the fault of the software, but that doesn't really get reported on. Hence my issue with the media. Inflammatory headlines and speculation cause people to believe they know more than they actually do about something, and the public pressure drives action that may be totally inappropriate.

by cal5k 8y ago

agumonkey 8y ago

the more I grow, the less I understand why medias.. if twitter and facebook are dopamine abusers, traditional medias are also a kind of drug, mild intensity, but drug still

anigbrowl 8y ago

Oh, let's be calm and sober about this, and passively accept the existence of accidents rather than re-examine organizational, business, or economic premises. So much easier to blame the media. Craven excuse-making and responsibility avoidance at its worst.

cal5k 8y ago
...except for the part where I say we should examine the root cause and make appropriate adjustments? Or should we find every software developer who ever worked on the 737 MAX and throw them in jail? Because brutal punishment of errors is what leads to a culture of quality improvement, right?
- anigbrowl 8y ago
  No. You chose to start out pointing the finger of blame at the media and adding a vague statement about fixing the issue is mere lip service. You now go to the opposite extreme, employing the fallacy of the excluded middle and emotive language like 'brutal punishment' to invalidate an argument that was never made. Your dishonesty only highlights the weakness of your position.

kayfox 8y ago

The HN discussion of this issue is fairly revealing in that it points towards the people on this site wanting a simple explanation with a short list of people to punish, when it is more likely a long list of small details with many people who might have made relatively minor mistakes or simply not foreseen the issue in question. Working in IT (and also formerly at Boeing, so there's some crossover in experience), I find this unsurprising, as IT systems become more and more complex the answers are not "theres a bug in Vendor X's product" or "system Y was misconfigured" but a long litany of small errors, oversights or unforeseen issues that culminated in some larger issue. It does not help that many of these people are unwilling to adjust their conclusions based on emerging evidence. Fortunately in aviation there is a culture of understanding all the details of accidents, identifying all the possible improvements and implementing them. I suspect that the IT industry is on the verge of a crisis as I don't see this sort of attitude prevalent in it, which is funny because lots of the terminology and some of the techniques are common, just not the culture.

cal5k 8y ago
For context, I'm a licensed pilot and my father spent most of his career working at Transport Canada, basically Canada's FAA. So this is one of those topics I probably know more than the average HNer about. What I've noticed more broadly is that there are lots of people on HN with high general intelligence who believe it automatically translates to specific domain knowledge in aviation, medicine, etc., when if quizzed they would likely know far less than they believe they do. So when it comes to quality improvement, for example, they likely haven't spent time at a car factory, or at a Boeing plant, and understand it via bastardized analogies (i.e. Kaizen in software development really isn't the same as in manufacturing) rather than domain expertise. Deep domain expertise is difficult to obtain unless you're really immersed in an industry. The desire to "make someone pay" when errors happen is antithetical to a culture of quality improvement. The accident report for the Lion Air incident actually paints a picture of a complex failure rather than simply being the fault of the software, but that doesn't really get reported on. Hence my issue with the media. Inflammatory headlines and speculation cause people to believe they know more than they actually do about something, and the public pressure drives action that may be totally inappropriate.