5 ms·

This is worth emphasizing: > "The bug was identified quickly in part because some flight crews noticed the weights didn’t seem right and asked for manual valid

This is worth emphasizing: > "The bug was identified quickly in part because some flight crews noticed the weights didn’t seem right and asked for manual validation of the figures....The Alaska captain said that, as for many things in aviation, pilots routinely use an acronym when they do the pre-takeoff “sanity check”: TLAR, which means “That Looks About Right.”" Keeping well-trained humans in the loop in all partially or highly automated systems is important for this reason - and although corporate bean-counters in the overly finacialized US economy, whose prime motivation is to maximize shareholder profits by cutting labor costs, may not like to hear this, that mentality is the central reason behind the Boeing MAX debacle.

jmeister 4y ago
[flagged]
- kahrl 4y ago
  "the market" doesn't exist in this situation. You have powerless, disenfranchised individuals with no choice.
- Swenrekcah 4y ago
  And that answer is demonstrably wrong.
- nervousvarun 4y ago
  And yeah...we know how that works in America. The land of the free, the home of the public losses/privatized profits.
- pixl97 4y ago
  Right, lets get rid of the NTSB, the companies will investigate themselves.... And find themselves guilty of no wrongdoing.
- aflukasz 4y ago
  "The market" is and always will be underinformed, including the knowledge about any potential ongoing "economic punishment".
- RockyMcNuts 4y ago
  It's not a standard economics answer, even economists (normal ones anyway) aren't going to fly on planes entirely unregulated in a purely free market. Gradient descent and reinforcement learning work eventually, but they take a lot of iteration and spectacular failures. Different exploration/exploitation tradeoffs are needed in different environments, the market signal isn't really strong enough to differentiate and the incentives don't actually line up perfectly. The standard economics answer is more like, the market (i.e. regs) evolved to address coordination problems and align the market incentives better with the true long-term welfare function.
  - toiletfuneral 4y ago
    [dead]
- mr_00ff00 4y ago
  maybe in one of those simple textbook economics where everyone has perfect information and the economy only produces one good from two different companies.
- piva00 4y ago
  Just like a spherical cow in a non-friction world. The standard economics model is too simplified to account for all the human reality, this is such a case.
- HEmanZ 4y ago
  Even libertarian economists don’t make this argument, pretty much everyone wants dangerous spaces where the public can’t be expected to technically understand the risks and trade offs involved, standard economics says regulate. How much should you pay the well-trained human in the loop, that’s believed best to go unregulated.
- Forgeties79 4y ago
  Theory =/= Practice. We've seen time and time again that simply isn't how things play out consistently. It's largely why we have regulations/oversight. The reason the "well-trained humans" are in the loop is often due to legally required oversight and safety nets. Plenty of companies do not (or would not if they could get away with it) operate with safeties they should otherwise have in place because the money lost does not outweigh the money gained and no one is forcing their hand. They can putter along and kill or hurt people for an indeterminate amount of time, so long as the consequences stay below a certain threshold to not invite public or governmental scrutiny. See: The Ford Pinto.
  - ycombin23918 4y ago
    > See: The Ford Pinto. Actually a bad example, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Retrospective_safety_analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Retrospective_safet...
    - Forgeties79 4y ago
      TIL! I was clearly going off a commonly parroted example/story that I needed to do more research on. Appreciate it.
- zhte415 4y ago
  Every time someone says 'economics says' 1000 economists thrash and writhe in unison. It's the only thing they agree on.
  - sclarisse 4y ago
    Well, that and the general impact of rent control.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- twobitshifter 4y ago
  The consequence of any failure is much larger than the value of forgoing regulation.
- phh 4y ago
  My ECO101 lectures (I don't know if that's "standard economics") included government regulations to handle externalities (which can usually be summed up as "deaths")
- rsynnott 4y ago
  "The market fixes everything" is absolutely not _standard_ economics; it's a particularly fringe maximalist libertarian view which even most libertarians would not entirely subscribe to.
  - sclarisse 4y ago
    Moreover, it’s generally accepted as a standard part of economics that the market only ever begins to fix things (be efficient) when property rights are enforced, barriers to entry are few, and transaction costs are low. It’s not clear that “aviation” manages more than about one of those items.
- cptskippy 4y ago
  The key word in your statement being: > should The trouble with this answer, and the people who accept, it is that they assume the market is fair or at least pretend so they can ignore the inherent problems. At this point it should be apparent to anyone that markets are rigged, and anyone sticking to the idea of self regulating markets should not be trusted. The trouble with this answer is that it makes two incorrect assumptions: Companies regularly attempt to interfere with or harm any means of regulation, governmental or otherwise. Companies stifle competition that might regulate their behavior both legally and illegally without fear of consequence. * Even if your answer held true, which is absolutely does not, the inherit problem with it is that there's an acceptable rate of failure before correction takes hold and that the losses are acceptable. There is irreparable harm that occurs in many industries and the morally acceptable limit of zero is well below the market's acceptable limit.
- namaria 4y ago
  Yeah yeah eventually physics takes care of everything. Doesn't mean we have to suffer through it. That's the whole point of civilization isn't it?
agloe_dreams 4y ago
Oh God. Pilots use LGTM too.
- dclowd9901 4y ago
  Honestly, I’m glad they do that much. God forbid they just blindly accept the data.
  - agloe_dreams 4y ago
    That has, historically been my issue with LGTM. It is ultimately a meaningless rubber stamp. Many people get a large PR and give it a quick scroll, type LGTM and move on. If I had it my way, every PR with over 100 LOC diff should require two PR code comments for a reviewer to approve it.
    - dclowd9901 4y ago
      I see it more as “this result is commensurate with my experience,” the problem with it, of course, being reliant on the pilot’s experience. But otherwise we’re just talking about a “sniff test” on a number. LGTM sucks in software because software inherently is a lot more complex than a number.
  - tialaramex 4y ago
    Indeed. Designing software so that it helps humans to eyeball stuff where humans eyeballing stuff might help is really good. For example in that incident in Ireland where crew erroneously told their jet plane it was very, very cold, and then (cold air is dense, less power needed) they barely had enough thrust to take off before they ran entirely out of runway - that was partly caused (Swiss cheese model) by the pilots being issued with software that didn't make it easy for them to cross check the facts they can eyeball. Is it certain they'd have realised if their software did show this information - like the software issued to similar crews with other outfits? No, but that's one more opportunity for everybody to not die, and the whole point of the Swiss cheese model is that lots of things have to go wrong or else you're fine. One of the other potential mitigations for that incident illustrates where human eyeballs don't help. In principle a human pilot could realise they aren't accelerating enough. In practice humans are lousy at estimating acceleration to the tolerance needed so this isn't effective unless you use the same strip so often that your brain learns exactly how things ought to look. However thanks to GPS a machine can measure acceleration very well, and it can know how long your chosen runway is and what its take off speed is - so it can estimate if you're accelerating enough and the latest models can announce "Caution: Acceleration" early in the take off roll, before V1, which means the crew can abort and check why they didn't have the intended acceleration - regardless of the cause.
908B64B197 4y ago
Unsurprisingly, it's a 737. Same plane where 9$/h coders were hired in India for it's software. [0] [1] [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/boeing-outsourced-737-max-report-2019-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/boeing-outsourced-737-max-re... [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-28/boeing-s-737-max-software-outsourced-to-9-an-hour-engineers https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-28/boeing-s-...
- cratermoon 4y ago
  This has nothing to do with the 737, it's ground software for calculating weight distribution. It happens that Alaska's fleet is mostly 737s
- jaywalk 4y ago
  This has literally nothing to do with the plane.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- dang 4y ago
  "Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

jmeister 4y ago

[flagged]

kahrl 4y ago
"the market" doesn't exist in this situation. You have powerless, disenfranchised individuals with no choice.
Swenrekcah 4y ago
And that answer is demonstrably wrong.
nervousvarun 4y ago
And yeah...we know how that works in America. The land of the free, the home of the public losses/privatized profits.
pixl97 4y ago
Right, lets get rid of the NTSB, the companies will investigate themselves.... And find themselves guilty of no wrongdoing.
aflukasz 4y ago
"The market" is and always will be underinformed, including the knowledge about any potential ongoing "economic punishment".
RockyMcNuts 4y ago
It's not a standard economics answer, even economists (normal ones anyway) aren't going to fly on planes entirely unregulated in a purely free market. Gradient descent and reinforcement learning work eventually, but they take a lot of iteration and spectacular failures. Different exploration/exploitation tradeoffs are needed in different environments, the market signal isn't really strong enough to differentiate and the incentives don't actually line up perfectly. The standard economics answer is more like, the market (i.e. regs) evolved to address coordination problems and align the market incentives better with the true long-term welfare function.
- toiletfuneral 4y ago
  [dead]
mr_00ff00 4y ago
maybe in one of those simple textbook economics where everyone has perfect information and the economy only produces one good from two different companies.
piva00 4y ago
Just like a spherical cow in a non-friction world. The standard economics model is too simplified to account for all the human reality, this is such a case.
HEmanZ 4y ago
Even libertarian economists don’t make this argument, pretty much everyone wants dangerous spaces where the public can’t be expected to technically understand the risks and trade offs involved, standard economics says regulate. How much should you pay the well-trained human in the loop, that’s believed best to go unregulated.
Forgeties79 4y ago
Theory =/= Practice. We've seen time and time again that simply isn't how things play out consistently. It's largely why we have regulations/oversight. The reason the "well-trained humans" are in the loop is often due to legally required oversight and safety nets. Plenty of companies do not (or would not if they could get away with it) operate with safeties they should otherwise have in place because the money lost does not outweigh the money gained and no one is forcing their hand. They can putter along and kill or hurt people for an indeterminate amount of time, so long as the consequences stay below a certain threshold to not invite public or governmental scrutiny. See: The Ford Pinto.
- ycombin23918 4y ago
  > See: The Ford Pinto. Actually a bad example, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Retrospective_safety_analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Retrospective_safet...
  - Forgeties79 4y ago
    TIL! I was clearly going off a commonly parroted example/story that I needed to do more research on. Appreciate it.
zhte415 4y ago
Every time someone says 'economics says' 1000 economists thrash and writhe in unison. It's the only thing they agree on.
- sclarisse 4y ago
  Well, that and the general impact of rent control.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
twobitshifter 4y ago
The consequence of any failure is much larger than the value of forgoing regulation.
phh 4y ago
My ECO101 lectures (I don't know if that's "standard economics") included government regulations to handle externalities (which can usually be summed up as "deaths")
rsynnott 4y ago
"The market fixes everything" is absolutely not _standard_ economics; it's a particularly fringe maximalist libertarian view which even most libertarians would not entirely subscribe to.
- sclarisse 4y ago
  Moreover, it’s generally accepted as a standard part of economics that the market only ever begins to fix things (be efficient) when property rights are enforced, barriers to entry are few, and transaction costs are low. It’s not clear that “aviation” manages more than about one of those items.
cptskippy 4y ago
The key word in your statement being: > should The trouble with this answer, and the people who accept, it is that they assume the market is fair or at least pretend so they can ignore the inherent problems. At this point it should be apparent to anyone that markets are rigged, and anyone sticking to the idea of self regulating markets should not be trusted. The trouble with this answer is that it makes two incorrect assumptions: Companies regularly attempt to interfere with or harm any means of regulation, governmental or otherwise. Companies stifle competition that might regulate their behavior both legally and illegally without fear of consequence. * Even if your answer held true, which is absolutely does not, the inherit problem with it is that there's an acceptable rate of failure before correction takes hold and that the losses are acceptable. There is irreparable harm that occurs in many industries and the morally acceptable limit of zero is well below the market's acceptable limit.
namaria 4y ago
Yeah yeah eventually physics takes care of everything. Doesn't mean we have to suffer through it. That's the whole point of civilization isn't it?

agloe_dreams 4y ago

Oh God. Pilots use LGTM too.

dclowd9901 4y ago
Honestly, I’m glad they do that much. God forbid they just blindly accept the data.
- agloe_dreams 4y ago
  That has, historically been my issue with LGTM. It is ultimately a meaningless rubber stamp. Many people get a large PR and give it a quick scroll, type LGTM and move on. If I had it my way, every PR with over 100 LOC diff should require two PR code comments for a reviewer to approve it.
  - dclowd9901 4y ago
    I see it more as “this result is commensurate with my experience,” the problem with it, of course, being reliant on the pilot’s experience. But otherwise we’re just talking about a “sniff test” on a number. LGTM sucks in software because software inherently is a lot more complex than a number.
- tialaramex 4y ago
  Indeed. Designing software so that it helps humans to eyeball stuff where humans eyeballing stuff might help is really good. For example in that incident in Ireland where crew erroneously told their jet plane it was very, very cold, and then (cold air is dense, less power needed) they barely had enough thrust to take off before they ran entirely out of runway - that was partly caused (Swiss cheese model) by the pilots being issued with software that didn't make it easy for them to cross check the facts they can eyeball. Is it certain they'd have realised if their software did show this information - like the software issued to similar crews with other outfits? No, but that's one more opportunity for everybody to not die, and the whole point of the Swiss cheese model is that lots of things have to go wrong or else you're fine. One of the other potential mitigations for that incident illustrates where human eyeballs don't help. In principle a human pilot could realise they aren't accelerating enough. In practice humans are lousy at estimating acceleration to the tolerance needed so this isn't effective unless you use the same strip so often that your brain learns exactly how things ought to look. However thanks to GPS a machine can measure acceleration very well, and it can know how long your chosen runway is and what its take off speed is - so it can estimate if you're accelerating enough and the latest models can announce "Caution: Acceleration" early in the take off roll, before V1, which means the crew can abort and check why they didn't have the intended acceleration - regardless of the cause.

908B64B197 4y ago

Unsurprisingly, it's a 737. Same plane where 9$/h coders were hired in India for it's software. [0] [1] [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/boeing-outsourced-737-max-report-2019-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/boeing-outsourced-737-max-re... [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-28/boeing-s-737-max-software-outsourced-to-9-an-hour-engineers https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-28/boeing-s-...

cratermoon 4y ago
This has nothing to do with the 737, it's ground software for calculating weight distribution. It happens that Alaska's fleet is mostly 737s
jaywalk 4y ago
This has literally nothing to do with the plane.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dang 4y ago
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html