3 ms·
How common? What's the denominator? It's one thing to say that failure happens often, but what matters is the ratio: the number of failures relative to the numb
by csallen 5y ago
How common? What's the denominator? It's one thing to say that failure happens often, but what matters is the ratio: the number of failures relative to the number of successes.
Denominator blindness leads to people assessing risk solely based on how vividly they can recall failures. Which in turn leads to all sorts of irrational fears and behaviors.
- aledalgrande 5y agoDon't think relative matters much if you have a catastrophic event. One is enough. This hopefully won't have such an impact though. I'd be more worried with nanomachines trained to consume carbon molecules to clean up oil from the ocean which started to eat all organic matter because of a Friday deploy bug.
- akamaka 5y agoThe probability of this particular project failing is unrelated to the fraction of previous failures. Those past failures serve only as a warning. When you jump out of a plane, you don’t just say “99.999% of people survived this before, so I’ll probably be fine”, you carefully triple-check your gear, and you abort if you get a gut feeling something isn’t right.
- pvaldes 5y ago> leads to all sorts of irrational fears and behaviors. Poverty is real, and people fear being poor for good reasons. Losing millions each year because an idiot released a toad, a rabbit, a starling or a snail is a real fear in the real world. People can choose not to see it or to laugh about it, but they will still must to pay, as their grandpas did, and their grandsons will do. Messing with mammals is a thing. Messing with insects, bacteria or virus is a totally new level.