5 ms·

From Fight Club: "A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone t

by nolite 6y ago

From Fight Club: "A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one."

ike0790 6y ago
one of many great quotes from Fight Club.
londons_explore 6y ago
People criticize this logic... But it's absolutely correct. If it doesn't come out with results you like, then the inputs are wrong. Specifically, settlement amounts are probably too low. People who claim all safety related issues should get a recall are just wrong. If there is a 1 in a billion chance my car explodes and kills me, then a recall should not be done, because my chances of dying on the way to the dealer to have the repair done are higher.
- hypersoar 6y ago
  We shouldn't expect corporations to be so recklessly amoral. I'm all in favor of higher costs for doing shit like this, but the humans making the decisions bear moral responsibility for them. When they bury critical safety issues, they should be held accountable whether or not this particular financial calculus went their way. Are there serious "people who claim all safety-related issues should get a recall"? That's not the only other available position. Not every safety incident needs to lead to a recall, but that doesn't prevent good-faith judgements on whether or not one is necessary. The fact that we assume this won't happen demonstrates how catastrophically awry we've allowed the artificial construct of a corporation to run.
  - guerrilla 6y ago
    Imagine if we had the "Nutrition Facts" equivalent for failure rates (and supply chain while we're at it.) That'd be an interesting world.
    - gruez 6y ago
      1. people will eventually tune them out, like with prop 65 warnings or the existing nutrition facts/calorie labeling 2. while it's easy to calculate what's the nutritional content in a food, estimating future failure rates isn't trivial and there's a lot of subjectivity involved. Companies will definitely be fudging the reliability numbers to get an edge. See for instance, the failure rates for hard drives. The annual failure rate on the spec sheets are around 0.3%, but empirical data by backblaze puts them anywhere from 0.3% to 12%. Therefore I'd expect these nutritional fact labels to be totally useless at best, and a waste of time/resources at worst.
      - jfim 6y ago
        Prop 65 warnings are pretty useless though, since they have very limited information that does not allow one to evaluate the risk incurred. Case in point, my first internship in California was in a building with a sign that said "This building contains chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm." What's in the building? Who knows. Could be really bad chemicals, or just someone who has a beer on their desk [0]. It would be much better to have some information about the chemicals contained, how bad are the chemicals, and what is the expected effect of the chemicals at the concentration at which they're encountered. [0] https://oehha.ca.gov/chemicals/alcoholic-beverages-0 https://oehha.ca.gov/chemicals/alcoholic-beverages-0
        ficklepickle 6y ago
        Yes, they need some actionable information. I remember seeing my first one as 15 year old Canadian on vacation. My first thought was good thing I'm in Hawaii. My second thought was I can't do anything with this vague information. It was some green slime you put in your bike tires to prevent puncture leaks. I had never seen that before. I bought it and took it home with me, skillfully avoiding California so it didn't become carcinogenic.
- syshum 6y ago
  Modern society has become incapable of proper Risk Analysis COVID has really highlighted this rather well. People do believe there should be zero risk, they will only accept risk when it has already been assimilated into their lives, but as a society we seem incapable of assimilating of new risk. I use to think we would get fully autonomous cars, but now I am pretty sure we will never see this technology on the public roadways, not because it is infeasible, but because it can never ELIMINATE all risk to human life, as such it will be rejected by society. Just like the "2 weeks to flatten the curve" transformed to "everyone self isolate until covid is no more" Automated driving is no longer about being "safer" in an objective way, it has to preventing all death, and if an automated car even causes one death then we must continue with human drivers, at least that is the view of many in society. We can not allow an algorithm to resolve a trolley problem, it is better a human do that. As a society, we have become very very very risk adverse.
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    It's not even a question of risk. Every risk is a trade off against another one. Losing one life to an autonomous vehicle is unacceptable but losing ten to drunk drivers is fine? That's not a risk assessment at all. It's really politics masquerading as risk. As soon as autonomous vehicles are approved you're going to have driverless Amazon delivery trucks ejecting packages in your driveway and emailing you that they've arrived. All the truck drivers and their unions know that, so they do everything they can to inject fear mongering stories into the media every time there is a driverless car accident, because politics. And the media eats it up because it's clickbait. If they provided a reasoned risk assessment then the conclusion wouldn't be "fear for your lives" which wouldn't drive as much traffic.
    - pnutjam 6y ago
      I've seen how software is developed. If we have automated systems doing the same thing, they will all make the same mistake. It will be astounding to see it happen, and disastrous.
      - 6y ago
- aeturnum 6y ago
  I don't think it's correct and I don't think its correctness is objectively decidable. It's one thing when companies have unforeseen flaws that end up causing injury or death. No one is perfect and, while they should pay reasonable restitution in line with the level of their mistake, it seems fine overall. Other the other hand, knowingly producing a product that you are reasonably sure will unexpectedly[1] kill or hurt sometime should have severe penalties. Those penalties should be imposed not through individual lawsuits (which are a poor tool for assuring the rights of whole classes of people - class action lawsuits not withstanding), but through prevailing regulatory action. To be honest I don't think it would be going too far to, as a standard action, nationalize a company in that situation. We really, really do not want a situation where companies are choosing to kill their customers because they think they will come out ahead in the end. Think about it - are we happy that the leadership teams of the tobacco industry, or the oil industry, or the fiberglass industry were kept in place? How much better of a world would we be in if tobacco companies were at existential threat from their behavior? Where they needed to sell cigarettes like the USA sells guns (with the understanding they may kill)? I think we should seriously consider that standard of product safety. [1] Products like guns, which are intended to injure or destroy, are their own thing imo.
- pnutjam 6y ago
  Nice, you built a good argument against a nonsense issue. Now try the actual issue instead of a straw man.
zeroonetwothree 6y ago
Doesn’t take into account costs like bad publicity, effects on employee morale, etc
bonchicbongenre 6y ago
About this: I have a relation who works for a relatively large upstream auto part supplier. I asked him somewhat jokingly about this fight club scene, and he immediately and unabashedly told me he'd been involved in a number of such conversations. In retrospect, I can't understand why I was at all surprised: how else would the conversations go in a corporation (whose sole or primary incentive is by default monetary)? (To be clear, I'm not saying that I find this morally correct — I'm not sure how I feel about that aspect, honestly, except icky at the surface level. I more means that it seems retrospectively to me that, well, of course that's how it would go, given the incentive structure)
- neilparikh 6y ago
  > how else would the conversations go in a corporation (whose sole or primary incentive is by default monetary) This isn't really a corporate issue at all though. Given scarce resources (whether physical or human), we need to be able to allocate resources efficiently. A conversation along these lines happens in public health systems all the time: how much money should be spent on medical interventions? There, the concept of a QALY (Quality-adjusted life year) is used, and typically, a price limit is set per QALY. Then, only interventions below that threshold will be funded. The idea is that since the healthcare system has limited funds, it doesn't make sense to spend exorbitant amounts delivering marginal results for one patient. Now, one could argue this is simply a monetary issue, and if we didn't use money to measure these things, the issue would go away. The thing is, even if money isn't an issue (somehow), scarcity is still something we need to deal with. Developing and administrating medical interventions takes human labour, and spending a disproportionate amount of person hours on small gains is still an issue. This comment is probably a little rambling, but the TL;DR is that given scarce resources (whether that's money in a corporation, or chemists and doctors in a health system), doing calculations on human lives is necessary if we want to make sure we allocate resources effectively.
davidgay 6y ago
In an analogous situation: how do you think a universal healthcare system should make spending and prioritisation decisions?
- iso1210 6y ago
  How does it in the US for those covered by universal healthcare?

by nolite 6y ago

ike0790 6y ago

one of many great quotes from Fight Club.

londons_explore 6y ago

People criticize this logic... But it's absolutely correct. If it doesn't come out with results you like, then the inputs are wrong. Specifically, settlement amounts are probably too low. People who claim all safety related issues should get a recall are just wrong. If there is a 1 in a billion chance my car explodes and kills me, then a recall should not be done, because my chances of dying on the way to the dealer to have the repair done are higher.

hypersoar 6y ago
We shouldn't expect corporations to be so recklessly amoral. I'm all in favor of higher costs for doing shit like this, but the humans making the decisions bear moral responsibility for them. When they bury critical safety issues, they should be held accountable whether or not this particular financial calculus went their way. Are there serious "people who claim all safety-related issues should get a recall"? That's not the only other available position. Not every safety incident needs to lead to a recall, but that doesn't prevent good-faith judgements on whether or not one is necessary. The fact that we assume this won't happen demonstrates how catastrophically awry we've allowed the artificial construct of a corporation to run.
- guerrilla 6y ago
  Imagine if we had the "Nutrition Facts" equivalent for failure rates (and supply chain while we're at it.) That'd be an interesting world.
  - gruez 6y ago
    1. people will eventually tune them out, like with prop 65 warnings or the existing nutrition facts/calorie labeling 2. while it's easy to calculate what's the nutritional content in a food, estimating future failure rates isn't trivial and there's a lot of subjectivity involved. Companies will definitely be fudging the reliability numbers to get an edge. See for instance, the failure rates for hard drives. The annual failure rate on the spec sheets are around 0.3%, but empirical data by backblaze puts them anywhere from 0.3% to 12%. Therefore I'd expect these nutritional fact labels to be totally useless at best, and a waste of time/resources at worst.
    - jfim 6y ago
      Prop 65 warnings are pretty useless though, since they have very limited information that does not allow one to evaluate the risk incurred. Case in point, my first internship in California was in a building with a sign that said "This building contains chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm." What's in the building? Who knows. Could be really bad chemicals, or just someone who has a beer on their desk [0]. It would be much better to have some information about the chemicals contained, how bad are the chemicals, and what is the expected effect of the chemicals at the concentration at which they're encountered. [0] https://oehha.ca.gov/chemicals/alcoholic-beverages-0 https://oehha.ca.gov/chemicals/alcoholic-beverages-0
      - ficklepickle 6y ago
        Yes, they need some actionable information. I remember seeing my first one as 15 year old Canadian on vacation. My first thought was good thing I'm in Hawaii. My second thought was I can't do anything with this vague information. It was some green slime you put in your bike tires to prevent puncture leaks. I had never seen that before. I bought it and took it home with me, skillfully avoiding California so it didn't become carcinogenic.
syshum 6y ago
Modern society has become incapable of proper Risk Analysis COVID has really highlighted this rather well. People do believe there should be zero risk, they will only accept risk when it has already been assimilated into their lives, but as a society we seem incapable of assimilating of new risk. I use to think we would get fully autonomous cars, but now I am pretty sure we will never see this technology on the public roadways, not because it is infeasible, but because it can never ELIMINATE all risk to human life, as such it will be rejected by society. Just like the "2 weeks to flatten the curve" transformed to "everyone self isolate until covid is no more" Automated driving is no longer about being "safer" in an objective way, it has to preventing all death, and if an automated car even causes one death then we must continue with human drivers, at least that is the view of many in society. We can not allow an algorithm to resolve a trolley problem, it is better a human do that. As a society, we have become very very very risk adverse.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  It's not even a question of risk. Every risk is a trade off against another one. Losing one life to an autonomous vehicle is unacceptable but losing ten to drunk drivers is fine? That's not a risk assessment at all. It's really politics masquerading as risk. As soon as autonomous vehicles are approved you're going to have driverless Amazon delivery trucks ejecting packages in your driveway and emailing you that they've arrived. All the truck drivers and their unions know that, so they do everything they can to inject fear mongering stories into the media every time there is a driverless car accident, because politics. And the media eats it up because it's clickbait. If they provided a reasoned risk assessment then the conclusion wouldn't be "fear for your lives" which wouldn't drive as much traffic.
  - pnutjam 6y ago
    I've seen how software is developed. If we have automated systems doing the same thing, they will all make the same mistake. It will be astounding to see it happen, and disastrous.
    - 6y ago
aeturnum 6y ago
I don't think it's correct and I don't think its correctness is objectively decidable. It's one thing when companies have unforeseen flaws that end up causing injury or death. No one is perfect and, while they should pay reasonable restitution in line with the level of their mistake, it seems fine overall. Other the other hand, knowingly producing a product that you are reasonably sure will unexpectedly[1] kill or hurt sometime should have severe penalties. Those penalties should be imposed not through individual lawsuits (which are a poor tool for assuring the rights of whole classes of people - class action lawsuits not withstanding), but through prevailing regulatory action. To be honest I don't think it would be going too far to, as a standard action, nationalize a company in that situation. We really, really do not want a situation where companies are choosing to kill their customers because they think they will come out ahead in the end. Think about it - are we happy that the leadership teams of the tobacco industry, or the oil industry, or the fiberglass industry were kept in place? How much better of a world would we be in if tobacco companies were at existential threat from their behavior? Where they needed to sell cigarettes like the USA sells guns (with the understanding they may kill)? I think we should seriously consider that standard of product safety. [1] Products like guns, which are intended to injure or destroy, are their own thing imo.
pnutjam 6y ago
Nice, you built a good argument against a nonsense issue. Now try the actual issue instead of a straw man.

zeroonetwothree 6y ago

Doesn’t take into account costs like bad publicity, effects on employee morale, etc

bonchicbongenre 6y ago

About this: I have a relation who works for a relatively large upstream auto part supplier. I asked him somewhat jokingly about this fight club scene, and he immediately and unabashedly told me he'd been involved in a number of such conversations. In retrospect, I can't understand why I was at all surprised: how else would the conversations go in a corporation (whose sole or primary incentive is by default monetary)? (To be clear, I'm not saying that I find this morally correct — I'm not sure how I feel about that aspect, honestly, except icky at the surface level. I more means that it seems retrospectively to me that, well, of course that's how it would go, given the incentive structure)

neilparikh 6y ago
> how else would the conversations go in a corporation (whose sole or primary incentive is by default monetary) This isn't really a corporate issue at all though. Given scarce resources (whether physical or human), we need to be able to allocate resources efficiently. A conversation along these lines happens in public health systems all the time: how much money should be spent on medical interventions? There, the concept of a QALY (Quality-adjusted life year) is used, and typically, a price limit is set per QALY. Then, only interventions below that threshold will be funded. The idea is that since the healthcare system has limited funds, it doesn't make sense to spend exorbitant amounts delivering marginal results for one patient. Now, one could argue this is simply a monetary issue, and if we didn't use money to measure these things, the issue would go away. The thing is, even if money isn't an issue (somehow), scarcity is still something we need to deal with. Developing and administrating medical interventions takes human labour, and spending a disproportionate amount of person hours on small gains is still an issue. This comment is probably a little rambling, but the TL;DR is that given scarce resources (whether that's money in a corporation, or chemists and doctors in a health system), doing calculations on human lives is necessary if we want to make sure we allocate resources effectively.

davidgay 6y ago

In an analogous situation: how do you think a universal healthcare system should make spending and prioritisation decisions?

iso1210 6y ago
How does it in the US for those covered by universal healthcare?