7 ms·

There's something I don't get about that method, as clever as it sounds. The method is if there are brown M&Ms, then check the entire production for safety. Wha

There's something I don't get about that method, as clever as it sounds. The method is if there are brown M&Ms, then check the entire production for safety. What about the else? Don't check everything? So if the person in charge of the green room happens to be on top of things and picks out a few M&Ms, they don't line-check the entire production even though there could be something "literally life-threatening"? It's easy to say that the brown M&Ms acted as a signal, but I can't think of any way to depend on that signal that isn't reckless. Just check the actual production, since that seems to be an option.

hallway_monitor 5y ago
If we were designing a critical system around this, I suppose I would create several unrelated triggers that, if found, would invoke an extra-detailed review of all work in the show.
hashkb 5y ago
The baseline assumption is that they read your contract and do everything. It's their job to get it right. If they're attentive to the stupidest thing in your contract, they probably did an OK job on everything else. Sure, it's still possible to be electrocuted during the show even if the M&M's were right. But, rock stars are not going to arrive early every night just to stay alive. The buck has to stop somewhere, and EVH decided it was in the bowl of M&M's.
- jjeaff 5y ago
  I don't buy that this trick would be effective, though I like the sentiment. I would guess that the detail of m&m color could very often be overlooked due to its insignificance and create a false signal. For one, the same people in charge of safety like riggings and electrical are not going to be the same people that are supplying the refreshments. I can also imagine a high number of people like myself reading that part and think it's a joke or purposely ignoring it because there are much more important issues to deal with and because I'm not much into indulging the ridiculous whims of self important people.
  - YuriNiyazov 5y ago
    > I can also imagine a high number of people like myself reading that part and think it's a joke or purposely ignoring it because there are much more important issues to deal with and because I'm not much into indulging the ridiculous whims of self important people. It doesn't say "no brown M&Ms;" - it says "no brown M&Ms, otherwise we cancel the show and you still pay us the entire amount". If I saw something like that in a contract, maybe I wouldn't go looking for brown M&Ms, I'd at least ask my boss (who hopefully has a direct line to our lawyers) "is this for real?", and if my boss and our lawyers are any good they'd tell me that's as real as it gets.
  - Melkman 5y ago
    There is no need to indulge them: you just tell them you are not going to sort the M&M's. If you do that in advance: great. If you ignore other points and tell them in advance also great. If you ignore requests and don't communicate that fact you are in trouble. Like the 15 amp sockets which can deliver 19amps in a comment above. That's a fire hazard. If you don't start a discussion that it is a fire hazard and you will only deliver 15amps or you will use a different higher rated socket you failed the test and your work is suspect.
  - hashkb 5y ago
    > I'm not much into indulging the ridiculous whims of self important people. Then you probably wouldn't be working at a concert venue / on a showbusiness production team anyway. Edit: have you seen a Van Halen (or, really, any stadium-headlining) show? The entire performance is "the ridiculous whims of self important people". That's kind of why we like it.
pqdbr 5y ago
The else is undetermined. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denying_the_antecedent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denying_the_antecedent So, the logic of this signal is like this: - If a brown M&M HAS been found, you know for a fact they didn't follow the specs well enough; - IF a brown M&M HAS NOT been found (denying the antecedent), you can't state anything about they following the specs or not.
- travisjungroth 5y ago
  I was talking about behavior following a decision tree. You're talking about arguments. The "else" can't exactly be undetermined here. In checking out the M&Ms, he's making a choice to check the production in that moment or not. (Of course, he can check it later, too).
sa46 5y ago
It’s a common heuristic for inspections. It’s not efficient or possible to check everything, so you inspect a few pieces in minute detail. For the pieces that fail, you do a complete inspection. In my experience it’s a pretty good heuristic. It fails badly if the organization knows what pieces will be inspected (queue Goodhart). It can also be fantastically inefficient if there’s a ton of checks or the checks are ambiguous. Being a stickler at inspections sets a useful precedent that organizations will do a better job for you in the future. Napoleon took advantage of this during his first inspection of a combined arms unit (Napoleon was an artillery officer). He inspected the shit out the artillery unit first. Then he could be reasonably confident the light infantry and Calvary units would take the inspection seriously.
- tialaramex 5y ago
  An even cleverer trick if you have lots of things you could inspect, but finite resources and you should like to encourage people to have practices that routinely pass inspection anyway: The Paris MOU randomly inspects vessels entering European ports with the rate of inspections based on their flag. So if you're a UK registered ship, you might expected to go several years without inspection, while if you're Albanian registered, Albania is blacklisted, you're getting inspected twice a year or more, and if you fail several inspections you're getting banned from all European ports. How did Albania get blacklisted? The Paris MOU tracks the results of inspections. Each time a ship flying some flag is inspected, the result of the inspection changes the calculation of how much apparent risk there is of ships with that flag failing inspection. Risk too high? Greylist. Risk higher still? Blacklist. Why flags? Because before Port State Control existed, the Flag States (Country where the ship is registered) were responsible for periodically inspecting ships. And they still are, it's international law, the Europeans just got sick of all these ships with a "flag of convenience" from some distant island that are clearly non-compliant and have never been inspected in their nice well-regulated ports. So they invented the Paris MOU and Port State Control. And it worked, I mentioned the UK flag is whitelisted, but the Bahamas are a famous Flag of Convenience, and they're whitelisted too, because they took the job seriously. A Bahamas registration is a little cheaper†, but your ship will be properly inspected on their behalf, and so sure enough when it gets randomly inspected again in say, Antwerp, it'll likely pass. Meanwhile St Vincent, another Flag of Convenience, is on the Greylist and a few tiny islands that dipped their toes in the "Flag of Convenience" business are blacklisted. The promise of inspectors poking around inside your ships every five minutes is a bad deal even if Tuvalu shipping registration is half price. † The other thing we don't like about Flags of Convenience is they make it easier to hide who owns things, which can serve to also avoid taxation. The Paris MOU doesn't fix that, that superyacht registered in the Bahamas might be safe but the owner likely didn't pay tax...
_jal 5y ago
As in most things, it is an economic tradeoff. A big-name traveling band is kind of like a carnival without the ferris wheels. They have a lot less support staff than you probably think, and most of them are busy most of the time you're not driving. If you have more than one person playing management/problem solver/coordinator/process lubricant, you've got it easy. Much more typical is everyone heads-down on their part of the event and one person trying to hold it all together. That person has no free bandwidth, and depends heavily on proxy measures of the state of things. I've played roadie before, not for a super big act and not for long. And I've ended up running point for a lot of conferences, more or less because I know how to run that sort of thing. Conferences are so, so much easier - they have resources, can assume workers aren't wasted, can assume the location at least vaguely cares about things like fire suppression, can assume the venue doing a revenue split actually has a license to sell alcohol...
- travisjungroth 5y ago
  > As in most things, it is an economic tradeoff. I think that's what gets me. I'm pretty "Old Man Yells At Cloud" right now, criticizing an 80s metal band for not meeting the safety standard that I've imagined. It's just that people pull out this idea as being something neat and I think it's a completely inappropriate technique when other options are available and safety is on the line. If either of these things aren't true, then sure, try it. You can't see how people follow orders in war without sending them to war. So you tell them "no food in the barracks" and when you catch them with a bagel you make them do a hundred pushups. And it's easy to toss out resumes with typos since they've indicated they don't actually have attention to detail. Those make sense because they're the best you can do. But if someone dies at your concert, you'll probably think it would have been worth it to have more than one person playing safety checker. The contracts and M&Ms aren't actually going to make you feel better. (Or necessarily keep the lawyers away). At its deepest, I think I'm reacting to a change that happened to me over time. I used to work at a ropes course. Think team building, high wires and zip lines. We'd give a list of instructions to our group contact to pass along to the group, including that people need to wear long pants and closed-toe shoes. Well, about 20% of groups would hop out of their cars with a bunch of people in shorts and sandals. "Oh, no one told us." And we'd announce to ourselves that the group contact had failed to communicate and we should "watch out" for the rest of the day. Looking back, I think we were the dumb ones. If 20% of groups are showing up unprepared to my ropes course, then that's my problem. I need to make different choices that lead to better outcomes. If I have evidence I shouldn't trust group contracts to make things happen (I definitely do) then I need to stop counting on them.
dane-pgp 5y ago
Perhaps in practice, if they passed the M&Ms check, you would say "Great, okay, now talk me through all the other things you set up." whereas if they failed that test, you would say "I'm not willing to take your word on anything, so I'm going to call in an external auditor to check everything, and I'll recover the costs of that from you, for breach of contract."
Sebb767 5y ago
The other commenters have a point, but the Snopes article actually points this out: > So just as a little test, in the technical aspect of the rider, it would say “Article 148: There will be fifteen amperage voltage sockets at twenty-foot spaces, evenly, providing nineteen amperes …” This kind of thing. And article number 126, in the middle of nowhere, was: “There will be no brown M&M’s in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.” So they had other simple-to-check signs; the brown M&M one is just the only one commonly cited as it's the funniest/most interesting.
- travisjungroth 5y ago
  Is a fifteen amp socket providing nineteen amps a thing?
  - tetha 5y ago
    It's at least 15 sockets, each providing at least 19 amps. Probably following some plug/socket standard.
    - tonyarkles 5y ago
      I think you’re incorrect. There is a standard 15A socket. There is no standard 19A socket (but there are 20A sockets that are compatible with 15A plugs)
  - nightpool 5y ago
    No, I think it's supposed to be a contradiction that an on-the-ball venue will catch before signing the contract.
  - TFortunato 5y ago
    They are stating that they would put 19A of load on a 15A rated socket. E.g. creating an obvious safety hazard that should be caught and addressed.
    - 5y ago
kmeisthax 5y ago
It's a heuristic. Furthermore, the brown M&Ms clause was buried deep in a list of technical riders. The person in charge of the green room isn't reading the technical part of the contract at all. Why would they? It's not their job. They're reading the other part of the contract that plainly says "please put a bowl of M&Ms in the green room". So the only two cases in which a venue is going to pick out the M&Ms is... 1. The technical director saw the requirement and told the green room guy to start picking out M&Ms or the show is cancelled 2. The green room guy somehow knows about the brown M&Ms thing and decides to falsely signal compliance Presumably, the whole brown M&Ms thing was obscure enough that no venue actually decided to just check for odd requirements. Furthermore, if they did decide to just do that and only that, specifically knowing that they were interfering with such a heuristic, they'd almost certainly be liable for something. So I doubt anyone would deliberately interfere with this, and it's hard to accidentally comply with just the no brown M&Ms thing. "Just line-check the production all the time" might not always be an option.
- bch 5y ago
  If the brown m&m clause wasn’t in the green-room section, then it’s still a valid test of the setup - in the sense: “can you guys simply communicate?”
mabbo 5y ago
It's a bit like mutation testing. Add real bugs to the code (through automation) and see what gets caught by your unit test. Do this a few hundred times and you can get some idea how many bugs your unit tests might have missed.

hallway_monitor 5y ago

If we were designing a critical system around this, I suppose I would create several unrelated triggers that, if found, would invoke an extra-detailed review of all work in the show.

hashkb 5y ago

The baseline assumption is that they read your contract and do everything. It's their job to get it right. If they're attentive to the stupidest thing in your contract, they probably did an OK job on everything else. Sure, it's still possible to be electrocuted during the show even if the M&M's were right. But, rock stars are not going to arrive early every night just to stay alive. The buck has to stop somewhere, and EVH decided it was in the bowl of M&M's.

jjeaff 5y ago
I don't buy that this trick would be effective, though I like the sentiment. I would guess that the detail of m&m color could very often be overlooked due to its insignificance and create a false signal. For one, the same people in charge of safety like riggings and electrical are not going to be the same people that are supplying the refreshments. I can also imagine a high number of people like myself reading that part and think it's a joke or purposely ignoring it because there are much more important issues to deal with and because I'm not much into indulging the ridiculous whims of self important people.
- YuriNiyazov 5y ago
  > I can also imagine a high number of people like myself reading that part and think it's a joke or purposely ignoring it because there are much more important issues to deal with and because I'm not much into indulging the ridiculous whims of self important people. It doesn't say "no brown M&Ms;" - it says "no brown M&Ms, otherwise we cancel the show and you still pay us the entire amount". If I saw something like that in a contract, maybe I wouldn't go looking for brown M&Ms, I'd at least ask my boss (who hopefully has a direct line to our lawyers) "is this for real?", and if my boss and our lawyers are any good they'd tell me that's as real as it gets.
- Melkman 5y ago
  There is no need to indulge them: you just tell them you are not going to sort the M&M's. If you do that in advance: great. If you ignore other points and tell them in advance also great. If you ignore requests and don't communicate that fact you are in trouble. Like the 15 amp sockets which can deliver 19amps in a comment above. That's a fire hazard. If you don't start a discussion that it is a fire hazard and you will only deliver 15amps or you will use a different higher rated socket you failed the test and your work is suspect.
- hashkb 5y ago
  > I'm not much into indulging the ridiculous whims of self important people. Then you probably wouldn't be working at a concert venue / on a showbusiness production team anyway. Edit: have you seen a Van Halen (or, really, any stadium-headlining) show? The entire performance is "the ridiculous whims of self important people". That's kind of why we like it.

pqdbr 5y ago

The else is undetermined. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denying_the_antecedent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denying_the_antecedent So, the logic of this signal is like this: - If a brown M&M HAS been found, you know for a fact they didn't follow the specs well enough; - IF a brown M&M HAS NOT been found (denying the antecedent), you can't state anything about they following the specs or not.

travisjungroth 5y ago
I was talking about behavior following a decision tree. You're talking about arguments. The "else" can't exactly be undetermined here. In checking out the M&Ms, he's making a choice to check the production in that moment or not. (Of course, he can check it later, too).

sa46 5y ago

It’s a common heuristic for inspections. It’s not efficient or possible to check everything, so you inspect a few pieces in minute detail. For the pieces that fail, you do a complete inspection. In my experience it’s a pretty good heuristic. It fails badly if the organization knows what pieces will be inspected (queue Goodhart). It can also be fantastically inefficient if there’s a ton of checks or the checks are ambiguous. Being a stickler at inspections sets a useful precedent that organizations will do a better job for you in the future. Napoleon took advantage of this during his first inspection of a combined arms unit (Napoleon was an artillery officer). He inspected the shit out the artillery unit first. Then he could be reasonably confident the light infantry and Calvary units would take the inspection seriously.

tialaramex 5y ago
An even cleverer trick if you have lots of things you could inspect, but finite resources and you should like to encourage people to have practices that routinely pass inspection anyway: The Paris MOU randomly inspects vessels entering European ports with the rate of inspections based on their flag. So if you're a UK registered ship, you might expected to go several years without inspection, while if you're Albanian registered, Albania is blacklisted, you're getting inspected twice a year or more, and if you fail several inspections you're getting banned from all European ports. How did Albania get blacklisted? The Paris MOU tracks the results of inspections. Each time a ship flying some flag is inspected, the result of the inspection changes the calculation of how much apparent risk there is of ships with that flag failing inspection. Risk too high? Greylist. Risk higher still? Blacklist. Why flags? Because before Port State Control existed, the Flag States (Country where the ship is registered) were responsible for periodically inspecting ships. And they still are, it's international law, the Europeans just got sick of all these ships with a "flag of convenience" from some distant island that are clearly non-compliant and have never been inspected in their nice well-regulated ports. So they invented the Paris MOU and Port State Control. And it worked, I mentioned the UK flag is whitelisted, but the Bahamas are a famous Flag of Convenience, and they're whitelisted too, because they took the job seriously. A Bahamas registration is a little cheaper†, but your ship will be properly inspected on their behalf, and so sure enough when it gets randomly inspected again in say, Antwerp, it'll likely pass. Meanwhile St Vincent, another Flag of Convenience, is on the Greylist and a few tiny islands that dipped their toes in the "Flag of Convenience" business are blacklisted. The promise of inspectors poking around inside your ships every five minutes is a bad deal even if Tuvalu shipping registration is half price. † The other thing we don't like about Flags of Convenience is they make it easier to hide who owns things, which can serve to also avoid taxation. The Paris MOU doesn't fix that, that superyacht registered in the Bahamas might be safe but the owner likely didn't pay tax...

_jal 5y ago

As in most things, it is an economic tradeoff. A big-name traveling band is kind of like a carnival without the ferris wheels. They have a lot less support staff than you probably think, and most of them are busy most of the time you're not driving. If you have more than one person playing management/problem solver/coordinator/process lubricant, you've got it easy. Much more typical is everyone heads-down on their part of the event and one person trying to hold it all together. That person has no free bandwidth, and depends heavily on proxy measures of the state of things. I've played roadie before, not for a super big act and not for long. And I've ended up running point for a lot of conferences, more or less because I know how to run that sort of thing. Conferences are so, so much easier - they have resources, can assume workers aren't wasted, can assume the location at least vaguely cares about things like fire suppression, can assume the venue doing a revenue split actually has a license to sell alcohol...

travisjungroth 5y ago
> As in most things, it is an economic tradeoff. I think that's what gets me. I'm pretty "Old Man Yells At Cloud" right now, criticizing an 80s metal band for not meeting the safety standard that I've imagined. It's just that people pull out this idea as being something neat and I think it's a completely inappropriate technique when other options are available and safety is on the line. If either of these things aren't true, then sure, try it. You can't see how people follow orders in war without sending them to war. So you tell them "no food in the barracks" and when you catch them with a bagel you make them do a hundred pushups. And it's easy to toss out resumes with typos since they've indicated they don't actually have attention to detail. Those make sense because they're the best you can do. But if someone dies at your concert, you'll probably think it would have been worth it to have more than one person playing safety checker. The contracts and M&Ms aren't actually going to make you feel better. (Or necessarily keep the lawyers away). At its deepest, I think I'm reacting to a change that happened to me over time. I used to work at a ropes course. Think team building, high wires and zip lines. We'd give a list of instructions to our group contact to pass along to the group, including that people need to wear long pants and closed-toe shoes. Well, about 20% of groups would hop out of their cars with a bunch of people in shorts and sandals. "Oh, no one told us." And we'd announce to ourselves that the group contact had failed to communicate and we should "watch out" for the rest of the day. Looking back, I think we were the dumb ones. If 20% of groups are showing up unprepared to my ropes course, then that's my problem. I need to make different choices that lead to better outcomes. If I have evidence I shouldn't trust group contracts to make things happen (I definitely do) then I need to stop counting on them.

dane-pgp 5y ago

Perhaps in practice, if they passed the M&Ms check, you would say "Great, okay, now talk me through all the other things you set up." whereas if they failed that test, you would say "I'm not willing to take your word on anything, so I'm going to call in an external auditor to check everything, and I'll recover the costs of that from you, for breach of contract."

Sebb767 5y ago

The other commenters have a point, but the Snopes article actually points this out: > So just as a little test, in the technical aspect of the rider, it would say “Article 148: There will be fifteen amperage voltage sockets at twenty-foot spaces, evenly, providing nineteen amperes …” This kind of thing. And article number 126, in the middle of nowhere, was: “There will be no brown M&M’s in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.” So they had other simple-to-check signs; the brown M&M one is just the only one commonly cited as it's the funniest/most interesting.

travisjungroth 5y ago
Is a fifteen amp socket providing nineteen amps a thing?
- tetha 5y ago
  It's at least 15 sockets, each providing at least 19 amps. Probably following some plug/socket standard.
  - tonyarkles 5y ago
    I think you’re incorrect. There is a standard 15A socket. There is no standard 19A socket (but there are 20A sockets that are compatible with 15A plugs)
- nightpool 5y ago
  No, I think it's supposed to be a contradiction that an on-the-ball venue will catch before signing the contract.
- TFortunato 5y ago
  They are stating that they would put 19A of load on a 15A rated socket. E.g. creating an obvious safety hazard that should be caught and addressed.
  - 5y ago

kmeisthax 5y ago

It's a heuristic. Furthermore, the brown M&Ms clause was buried deep in a list of technical riders. The person in charge of the green room isn't reading the technical part of the contract at all. Why would they? It's not their job. They're reading the other part of the contract that plainly says "please put a bowl of M&Ms in the green room". So the only two cases in which a venue is going to pick out the M&Ms is... 1. The technical director saw the requirement and told the green room guy to start picking out M&Ms or the show is cancelled 2. The green room guy somehow knows about the brown M&Ms thing and decides to falsely signal compliance Presumably, the whole brown M&Ms thing was obscure enough that no venue actually decided to just check for odd requirements. Furthermore, if they did decide to just do that and only that, specifically knowing that they were interfering with such a heuristic, they'd almost certainly be liable for something. So I doubt anyone would deliberately interfere with this, and it's hard to accidentally comply with just the no brown M&Ms thing. "Just line-check the production all the time" might not always be an option.

bch 5y ago
If the brown m&m clause wasn’t in the green-room section, then it’s still a valid test of the setup - in the sense: “can you guys simply communicate?”

mabbo 5y ago

It's a bit like mutation testing. Add real bugs to the code (through automation) and see what gets caught by your unit test. Do this a few hundred times and you can get some idea how many bugs your unit tests might have missed.