3 ms·

This man understands. It’s the .001% chance that kills people

• inglor_cz 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • cafard 6y ago
    I think I read this in a column of Jared Diamond's.
• gwd 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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