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I think you are conflating causes here. A faulty aircraft where design issues led to a rare incident is something completely different than the quite common tra

I think you are conflating causes here. A faulty aircraft where design issues led to a rare incident is something completely different than the quite common traffic deaths mostly originating from asverse conditions an reckless driving of a traffic participant. Traffic accidents are not mainly caused by a certain car model being sold with faulty breaks, and airplane crashes are incredibly rare occurances.

JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
I don't think it's a conflation because it's a moral question and a judgment of how we view death. I know multiple people that have died in car accidents. I know nobody who's died in a plane crash. Even if the FAA made the wrong call here, why do we give outsized influence and attention to events that cause relatively few deaths? In other words: what is the greater moral tragedy, losing 40,000 of your fellow citizens at the hands of aggressive or uneducated or unskilled drivers, or 400 deaths largely due to corporate cost cutting? My mental framework suggests we should optimize for addressing maximal number of deaths, but we rarely make that choice.
- croes 6y ago
  400 because they grounded the 737 Max. Imagine a car sometimes driving to left if you steer right. Would you blame the driver or the manufacturer. BTW count the hours people drive and compare them to the hours people fly and than look at the death rate.
  - notahacker 6y ago
    > Imagine a car sometimes driving to left if you steer right. Would you blame the driver or the manufacturer. We don't need to imagine this. There's a car called a Tesla which sometimes unexpectedly and fatally decides to steer in a different direction, and its management invariably blame the driver. Weirdly, HNers not only generally don't want Tesla's entire management and design team to be fired, they actually tend towards defending their approach... Edit: would love it if the people who apparently disagree could make some arguments why Tesla's fatality-inducing electronic driver support system deserves a different response to Boeing's
  - ReptileMan 6y ago
    We had the BMW SUV that hardened the wheel to prevent roll over and that meant lower chances of avoiding heads on collision.
  - nyolfen 6y ago
    for an analogous situation, it would be a car manufacturer that removed some previously-included safety feature, and made the car autopilot against your command when it malfunctioned
- oblio 6y ago
  > My mental framework suggests we should optimize for addressing maximal number of deaths, but we rarely make that choice. Who says we aren't? Modern cars have much, much better passive safety systems and active safety systems are light years of what was available before, and improving rapidly. One random example: I have a Volvo V40 and I can barely see around the A pillar. And I see this in all modern cars. I don't remember feeling the same way about cars from 20-30 years ago. I'm quite confident that if the V40 would roll over, even at somewhat high speed, my chances of getting out relatively unscathed would be better than even those in a sports car from, say, 30 years ago.
- cm2187 6y ago
  And if you look at deaths by drowning it dwarfs those numbers. Though people get worked up with terrorism, plane crashes and rare diseases.
  - ogogmad 6y ago
    Deaths from rare diseases are "fat tailed". Meaning that if you found out there were millions of excess deaths in a given year, then a new disease is a lot more likely to be the reason than car crashes. Are deaths from terrorism fat tailed? Terrorists can get access to biological weapons, the electricity grid, the water supply, a skyscraper with thousands of people in it, the parliament building of a country... I think it is fat tailed.
    - cm2187 6y ago
      If a disease causes millions of deaths it is not a rare disease. There has been a grand total of about 200-ish cases of the mad cow disease cumulatively. Though it terrorized people for years.
      - ogogmad 6y ago
        Maybe you're right, but I heard similar claims about Covid and Ebolavirus when they were still rare. People were saying early last year that you're more likely to die from a car accident than from Covid. So your earlier comment reminded me of that. Perhaps I misunderstood you.
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  Are they actually safer? "In cars, one person died per 5.5 million passenger hours traveled, versus one death per 6 million passenger hours in commercial airline flights-a slim difference at best!" Also , I can't cross london by plane, so what do I do with that information? This whole argument smells of whataboutism of sorts 'well if cars kill so many people we shouldn't give boeing such hard time for killing a few" https://observer.com/1998/03/driving-versus-flying-the-debate-is-settled https://observer.com/1998/03/driving-versus-flying-the-debat...
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    Do we generally use cars and planes to pass time (if so, measure deaths per hour) or to transport people to a different location (if so, measuring deaths per mile seems a lot more sensible)?
    - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
      I am approaching it from the scientific standpoint - which of the two measurements is an actual independant variable, and which is an artifact of the measurement? If the planes go twice slower, would their deaths per kilometer stay the same, or would deaths per hour? I am willing to bet it's the latter. In that case planes have the same chance of failing (mechanically or through human error) as cars do. It is very difficult to increase that safety factor, maybe impossible. The conclusion to draw from that, is that you can't point at car manufacturers and blame them for producing unreliable / bad quality machines. On the other hand, measurement per kilometer implies that as a traveller you should use a plane where possible, but obviously they can't replace car in a daily commute.
      - sokoloff 6y ago
        Airliners rarely crash in cruise, so doubling the hours in cruise is likely to almost halve the crash rate per hour with no significant change in crashes per flight (and therefore per kilometer). Maybe it makes the crew a little more fatigued on descent and approach to landing, likely partially offset by it making air travel less appealing to pax, resulting in fewer people per fatal accident. [0] https://www.theglobalist.com/when-do-planes-crash/ https://www.theglobalist.com/when-do-planes-crash/
- sumedh 6y ago
  > I know multiple people that have died in car accidents. Did they die because the car had issues or was it some other reason?
  - JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
    Does it matter how they died if the outcome is the same, is the question I wish I would've posed earlier. One was due to drunk driving. The other two, I'm not privy to the full details. It could have been, but statistically I would suppose not; most are human error, I'd presume. I'd further suppose that simply put, it's easier to stop 400 deaths due to a failure to regulate than it is to change the driving habits of citizens, and that's why --even if one is 100x worse-- it doesn't draw the attention, and it makes me feel like my loss doesn't matter, even though others are far more likely to experience the loss I did, rather than the main post subject, and I will admit that shaped my view entering the discussion.
    - sumedh 6y ago
      > Does it matter how they died if the outcome is the same, That is like saying oranges and apples are the same because they are fruits. It matters how they died because the car victims died due human error not because the car was defective, the plane victims died because of the plane itself was defective. If the planes were not ground many more people who have died and people on ground if the plane fell on them. Would you drive in a car which is known to crash into walls?
- ljf 6y ago
  The deaths stopped because 'we' demanded that they stop flying. Who would make that choice in your model?

JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago

I don't think it's a conflation because it's a moral question and a judgment of how we view death. I know multiple people that have died in car accidents. I know nobody who's died in a plane crash. Even if the FAA made the wrong call here, why do we give outsized influence and attention to events that cause relatively few deaths? In other words: what is the greater moral tragedy, losing 40,000 of your fellow citizens at the hands of aggressive or uneducated or unskilled drivers, or 400 deaths largely due to corporate cost cutting? My mental framework suggests we should optimize for addressing maximal number of deaths, but we rarely make that choice.

croes 6y ago
400 because they grounded the 737 Max. Imagine a car sometimes driving to left if you steer right. Would you blame the driver or the manufacturer. BTW count the hours people drive and compare them to the hours people fly and than look at the death rate.
- notahacker 6y ago
  > Imagine a car sometimes driving to left if you steer right. Would you blame the driver or the manufacturer. We don't need to imagine this. There's a car called a Tesla which sometimes unexpectedly and fatally decides to steer in a different direction, and its management invariably blame the driver. Weirdly, HNers not only generally don't want Tesla's entire management and design team to be fired, they actually tend towards defending their approach... Edit: would love it if the people who apparently disagree could make some arguments why Tesla's fatality-inducing electronic driver support system deserves a different response to Boeing's
- ReptileMan 6y ago
  We had the BMW SUV that hardened the wheel to prevent roll over and that meant lower chances of avoiding heads on collision.
- nyolfen 6y ago
  for an analogous situation, it would be a car manufacturer that removed some previously-included safety feature, and made the car autopilot against your command when it malfunctioned
oblio 6y ago
> My mental framework suggests we should optimize for addressing maximal number of deaths, but we rarely make that choice. Who says we aren't? Modern cars have much, much better passive safety systems and active safety systems are light years of what was available before, and improving rapidly. One random example: I have a Volvo V40 and I can barely see around the A pillar. And I see this in all modern cars. I don't remember feeling the same way about cars from 20-30 years ago. I'm quite confident that if the V40 would roll over, even at somewhat high speed, my chances of getting out relatively unscathed would be better than even those in a sports car from, say, 30 years ago.
cm2187 6y ago
And if you look at deaths by drowning it dwarfs those numbers. Though people get worked up with terrorism, plane crashes and rare diseases.
- ogogmad 6y ago
  Deaths from rare diseases are "fat tailed". Meaning that if you found out there were millions of excess deaths in a given year, then a new disease is a lot more likely to be the reason than car crashes. Are deaths from terrorism fat tailed? Terrorists can get access to biological weapons, the electricity grid, the water supply, a skyscraper with thousands of people in it, the parliament building of a country... I think it is fat tailed.
  - cm2187 6y ago
    If a disease causes millions of deaths it is not a rare disease. There has been a grand total of about 200-ish cases of the mad cow disease cumulatively. Though it terrorized people for years.
    - ogogmad 6y ago
      Maybe you're right, but I heard similar claims about Covid and Ebolavirus when they were still rare. People were saying early last year that you're more likely to die from a car accident than from Covid. So your earlier comment reminded me of that. Perhaps I misunderstood you.
ClumsyPilot 6y ago
Are they actually safer? "In cars, one person died per 5.5 million passenger hours traveled, versus one death per 6 million passenger hours in commercial airline flights-a slim difference at best!" Also , I can't cross london by plane, so what do I do with that information? This whole argument smells of whataboutism of sorts 'well if cars kill so many people we shouldn't give boeing such hard time for killing a few" https://observer.com/1998/03/driving-versus-flying-the-debate-is-settled https://observer.com/1998/03/driving-versus-flying-the-debat...
- sokoloff 6y ago
  Do we generally use cars and planes to pass time (if so, measure deaths per hour) or to transport people to a different location (if so, measuring deaths per mile seems a lot more sensible)?
  - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    I am approaching it from the scientific standpoint - which of the two measurements is an actual independant variable, and which is an artifact of the measurement? If the planes go twice slower, would their deaths per kilometer stay the same, or would deaths per hour? I am willing to bet it's the latter. In that case planes have the same chance of failing (mechanically or through human error) as cars do. It is very difficult to increase that safety factor, maybe impossible. The conclusion to draw from that, is that you can't point at car manufacturers and blame them for producing unreliable / bad quality machines. On the other hand, measurement per kilometer implies that as a traveller you should use a plane where possible, but obviously they can't replace car in a daily commute.
    - sokoloff 6y ago
      Airliners rarely crash in cruise, so doubling the hours in cruise is likely to almost halve the crash rate per hour with no significant change in crashes per flight (and therefore per kilometer). Maybe it makes the crew a little more fatigued on descent and approach to landing, likely partially offset by it making air travel less appealing to pax, resulting in fewer people per fatal accident. [0] https://www.theglobalist.com/when-do-planes-crash/ https://www.theglobalist.com/when-do-planes-crash/
sumedh 6y ago
> I know multiple people that have died in car accidents. Did they die because the car had issues or was it some other reason?
- JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
  Does it matter how they died if the outcome is the same, is the question I wish I would've posed earlier. One was due to drunk driving. The other two, I'm not privy to the full details. It could have been, but statistically I would suppose not; most are human error, I'd presume. I'd further suppose that simply put, it's easier to stop 400 deaths due to a failure to regulate than it is to change the driving habits of citizens, and that's why --even if one is 100x worse-- it doesn't draw the attention, and it makes me feel like my loss doesn't matter, even though others are far more likely to experience the loss I did, rather than the main post subject, and I will admit that shaped my view entering the discussion.
  - sumedh 6y ago
    > Does it matter how they died if the outcome is the same, That is like saying oranges and apples are the same because they are fruits. It matters how they died because the car victims died due human error not because the car was defective, the plane victims died because of the plane itself was defective. If the planes were not ground many more people who have died and people on ground if the plane fell on them. Would you drive in a car which is known to crash into walls?
ljf 6y ago
The deaths stopped because 'we' demanded that they stop flying. Who would make that choice in your model?