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I urge everyone to read about Feynman’s participation in the investigation of the challenger disaster: https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3570/1/Feynman.pdf
by baby 4y ago
I urge everyone to read about Feynman’s participation in the investigation of the challenger disaster: https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3570/1/Feynman.pdf https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3570/1/Feynman.pdf
It’s only 17 pages and it has humor and is a page turner. It’s a good or a bad story depending on points of views, nonetheless a great behind the scene story.
- bigDinosaur 4y agoThanks for the read! I believe the general concept people cite here is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance although it's interesting that Feynman hypothesised the 'loss of a common cause' as the fundamental issue - in other words, NASA had lost a unified purpose after successfully going to the moon and in trying to justify its existence had effectively turned the managers into a political class who could lie better to secure funding and political support if they were unaware of engineering problems. The actual engineers in Feynman's story hadn't normalised deviance, they just were essentially blocked from effecting change upwards.