4 ms·

Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis

36 points by blueridge 3y ago

mikewarot 3y ago
This article tries to blame diversity and other efforts for a number of unrelated events. I consider it to be a hit piece. The actual causes of these events are elsewhere. The East Palestine derailment is due to insufficient maintenance and inspection. The PG&E fire was due to a lack of maintenance and inspection, leading to a 90+ year old part failing. The backup in the LA ports was due to a supply shock due to Covid, and rule sets that greatly depleted the availability of transport out of the port into the US. The Colonial pipeline shutdown was the result of a ransomware attack. The Navy incidents are caused by an over-emphasis on administration, and a lack of actual hands on training and practice. We've optimized all resilience out of our supply chains in the name of profit. This backfired during the pandemic. We've failed to maintain our infrastructure. We've allowed corporations to cut corners far beyond prudence or reasonable safety, in the name of short term profits.
- landoftheice 3y ago
  [dead]
MattGaiser 3y ago
> The resulting norms have steadily eroded institutional competency, causing America’s complex systems to fail with increasing regularity. Really? As fewer people than ever are dying in plane crashes. Medical malpractice claims are declining. There are far fewer errors in banking, communications, convictions, far fewer deaths in fires (and fires in general). There are certainly some things getting worse such as homelessness and drug addiction, but most things have dramatically improved over the past generation. It is great to have anecdotes, but you need to demonstrate that reliability is declining in some numerical way, as "increasing regularity" is by definition somehow numerical. > Following three completely avoidable collisions of U.S. Navy warships in 2017 and a fire in 2020 that resulted in the scuttling of USS Bonhomme Richard The US Navy has a pretty lengthy record of hitting things, losing boats to stupid, and killing its sailors for want of training. Is it all that unusual for the US armed forces to lose dozens of people in accidents a year? Admittedly anecdotal from Wikipedia reading, but it doesn't seem to be so. > Recently, the tremendous U.S. record for air safety established since the 1970s has been fraying at the edges. A bunch of people have died due to ATC failures between now and the 1970s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Logan_Airport_runway_incu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Logan_Airport_runway_incu... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Express_Flight_2415 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Express_Flight_2415 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_runway_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_runway_disaster It is obviously not good that these incidents have happened, but they are not exactly new. The "tremendous record for air safety" still has a lot of bodies attached to it. > Shortly after releasing the 737 MAX, 346 people died in two nearly identical 737 MAX crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia. Exactly as many people died when McDonnell Douglas (the real predecessor to Boeing in terms of organizational culture) cut corners on cargo doors. Boeing corporate ethical challenges are not new if you consider MD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_Airlines_Flight_981 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_Airlines_Flight_981 Airline manufacturers killing people due to being sloppy is not new. They are arguably killing the fewest flyers per capita in history. > The modern U.S. is a system of systems interacting together in intricate ways. All these complex systems are simply assumed to work. In February of 2021, cold weather in Texas caused shutdowns at unwinterized natural gas power plants. The failure rippled through the systems with interlocking dependencies. As a result, 246 people died. In straightforward work, declining competency means that things happen more slowly, and products are lower quality or more expensive. That is not lack of competency at all. That is a deliberate choice by Texas to not spend extra money on a resilient system. They deliberately keep their grid disconnected from the rest of the USA so they do not need to comply with Federal standards. Texas is well aware of the issues. They just prefer the free market with cheap power.
- bandrami 3y ago
  > There are certainly some things getting worse such as homelessness and drug addiction You sure about that? The US homelessness rate has been long-term declining for a while now (and it absolutely collapsed during the pandemic, which is the only reason the short-term seems like an uptick), and I've never seen any evidence that the opioid crisis was "bigger" in any quantitative sense than the earlier heroin and cocaine crises; it just hit more politically sympathetic populations.
  - eastbound 3y ago
    I’m sure SF didn’t look like a big homeless camp in the 1980ies. It was supposed to be a dystopian future, where Westfield would close down because it were made illegal to lodge a complain on a member of the population that shoplifts.
    - bandrami 3y ago
      > I’m sure SF didn’t look like a big homeless camp in the 1980ies. Huh? Oh my God yes it did. Cities in the 1980s were dystopian nightmares compared to today.
  - MattGaiser 3y ago
    The HUD data is a bit bulky and hard to share easily [0], but there has been a rise in unsheltered homelessness since 2015 from 173,000 to 234,000. You are right that overall homelessness is down over time (but not since 2015) and this is admittedly not indexed for population growth. The problem is particularly acute in California, which had 171K homeless in 2022 and bottomed out at 114K in 2014. But yes, long term trends are still down. [0] https://www.hudexchange.info/resource/6802/2022-ahar-part-1-pit-estimates-of-homelessness-in-the-us/ https://www.hudexchange.info/resource/6802/2022-ahar-part-1-... And with drugs, I am admittedly not sure of the long term historical trend, but over the past decade or so, things have gotten substantially worse: https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overdose-death-rates https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overd... https://nida.nih.gov/sites/default/files/images/2023-Drug-od-death-rates-1.jpeg https://nida.nih.gov/sites/default/files/images/2023-Drug-od...
bbor 3y ago
Hint: if you’re ever reading an article that pins America’s ills on “the Civil Rights Act of 1964”, you’re reading some bullshit. The idea that America has problems because black people get to have important jobs is such a blatantly fucked up idea that I have no idea how this is on the front page…
- smackeyacky 3y ago
  Yep, all MBA ideas from the ivy league. Not enough diversity is the actual problem with modern america.
glarblblarbl 3y ago
"Harold Robertson is an asset class head and institutional investor at a multi-billion dollar pool of capital."
- MattGaiser 3y ago
  Fascinating that a supposedly numbers fellow has no numbers on reliability, just on race.
  - pydry 3y ago
    These are the people who make the "efficient market hypothesis" come true....
pixel3234 3y ago
I am first one to throw stone at diversity, but I disagree with this article. - Problem is a widespread corruption, not diversity specifically. Soviet union, Iran, Saudis, even Nazi Germany had this common problem. Healthy society would fix inefficiencies, unhealthy society promotes them. Diversity can improve efficiency if done right! - Complex systems will survive, even thrive! Societies like late stage Soviet Union could maintain complex industries, electric grids, space program etc very well. Even 3th world countries are capable of maintaining complex infrastructure while society starves. For example North Korea develops satellites, nukes and rockets... It is connected to ruling class and essential for its power. - End result is that "non essential" will decline. Stuff like life expectancy, fertility, health care... We can already see that.
fatbird 3y ago
The genius of targetting "diversity" is that it's both intuitively easy to understand (whether you believe it), and absolutely unfalsifiable. There's no way to demonstrate that an influx of "diverse" people are the cause of a decrease in competence, but it's an obvious correlation that plays into lingering bigotry. Well done, Harold.
- thephyber 3y ago
  We are smack in the middle of a massive collision of social panics and the common thread is that they are all unfalsifiable. I’m starting to believe The most useful tool in avoiding being suckered by these panics is to actively identify when a claim is unfalsifiable.
- MattGaiser 3y ago
  I am trying to figure out if "escalating rates of failure" is at all true, and of course it will depend on what you measure, but not seeing a lot of evidence. This is not to say that there are not critical societal issues, but a general loss of reliability in cases where that reliability is truly desired? Not seeing very much of that.
- zo1 3y ago
  [flagged]
emodendroket 3y ago
I would perhaps challenge the premise that a system openly rejecting minority job candidates out of hand was anything like "meritocratic."
drewcoo 3y ago
I thought that neoliberalism and the shift to short-term goals for everything, business and beyond, was the cause of our inability to plan anything these days. DEI just seems to give us managers who think and behave like white guys but aren't actually white guys. We applaud them for who they are while what they do remains the same.

36 points by blueridge 3y ago

This article tries to blame diversity and other efforts for a number of unrelated events. I consider it to be a hit piece. The actual causes of these events are elsewhere. The East Palestine derailment is due to insufficient maintenance and inspection. The PG&E fire was due to a lack of maintenance and inspection, leading to a 90+ year old part failing. The backup in the LA ports was due to a supply shock due to Covid, and rule sets that greatly depleted the availability of transport out of the port into the US. The Colonial pipeline shutdown was the result of a ransomware attack. The Navy incidents are caused by an over-emphasis on administration, and a lack of actual hands on training and practice. We've optimized all resilience out of our supply chains in the name of profit. This backfired during the pandemic. We've failed to maintain our infrastructure. We've allowed corporations to cut corners far beyond prudence or reasonable safety, in the name of short term profits.

landoftheice 3y ago
[dead]

MattGaiser 3y ago

> The resulting norms have steadily eroded institutional competency, causing America’s complex systems to fail with increasing regularity. Really? As fewer people than ever are dying in plane crashes. Medical malpractice claims are declining. There are far fewer errors in banking, communications, convictions, far fewer deaths in fires (and fires in general). There are certainly some things getting worse such as homelessness and drug addiction, but most things have dramatically improved over the past generation. It is great to have anecdotes, but you need to demonstrate that reliability is declining in some numerical way, as "increasing regularity" is by definition somehow numerical. > Following three completely avoidable collisions of U.S. Navy warships in 2017 and a fire in 2020 that resulted in the scuttling of USS Bonhomme Richard The US Navy has a pretty lengthy record of hitting things, losing boats to stupid, and killing its sailors for want of training. Is it all that unusual for the US armed forces to lose dozens of people in accidents a year? Admittedly anecdotal from Wikipedia reading, but it doesn't seem to be so. > Recently, the tremendous U.S. record for air safety established since the 1970s has been fraying at the edges. A bunch of people have died due to ATC failures between now and the 1970s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Logan_Airport_runway_incu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Logan_Airport_runway_incu... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Express_Flight_2415 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Express_Flight_2415 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_runway_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_runway_disaster It is obviously not good that these incidents have happened, but they are not exactly new. The "tremendous record for air safety" still has a lot of bodies attached to it. > Shortly after releasing the 737 MAX, 346 people died in two nearly identical 737 MAX crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia. Exactly as many people died when McDonnell Douglas (the real predecessor to Boeing in terms of organizational culture) cut corners on cargo doors. Boeing corporate ethical challenges are not new if you consider MD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_Airlines_Flight_981 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_Airlines_Flight_981 Airline manufacturers killing people due to being sloppy is not new. They are arguably killing the fewest flyers per capita in history. > The modern U.S. is a system of systems interacting together in intricate ways. All these complex systems are simply assumed to work. In February of 2021, cold weather in Texas caused shutdowns at unwinterized natural gas power plants. The failure rippled through the systems with interlocking dependencies. As a result, 246 people died. In straightforward work, declining competency means that things happen more slowly, and products are lower quality or more expensive. That is not lack of competency at all. That is a deliberate choice by Texas to not spend extra money on a resilient system. They deliberately keep their grid disconnected from the rest of the USA so they do not need to comply with Federal standards. Texas is well aware of the issues. They just prefer the free market with cheap power.

bandrami 3y ago
> There are certainly some things getting worse such as homelessness and drug addiction You sure about that? The US homelessness rate has been long-term declining for a while now (and it absolutely collapsed during the pandemic, which is the only reason the short-term seems like an uptick), and I've never seen any evidence that the opioid crisis was "bigger" in any quantitative sense than the earlier heroin and cocaine crises; it just hit more politically sympathetic populations.
- eastbound 3y ago
  I’m sure SF didn’t look like a big homeless camp in the 1980ies. It was supposed to be a dystopian future, where Westfield would close down because it were made illegal to lodge a complain on a member of the population that shoplifts.
  - bandrami 3y ago
    > I’m sure SF didn’t look like a big homeless camp in the 1980ies. Huh? Oh my God yes it did. Cities in the 1980s were dystopian nightmares compared to today.
- MattGaiser 3y ago
  The HUD data is a bit bulky and hard to share easily [0], but there has been a rise in unsheltered homelessness since 2015 from 173,000 to 234,000. You are right that overall homelessness is down over time (but not since 2015) and this is admittedly not indexed for population growth. The problem is particularly acute in California, which had 171K homeless in 2022 and bottomed out at 114K in 2014. But yes, long term trends are still down. [0] https://www.hudexchange.info/resource/6802/2022-ahar-part-1-pit-estimates-of-homelessness-in-the-us/ https://www.hudexchange.info/resource/6802/2022-ahar-part-1-... And with drugs, I am admittedly not sure of the long term historical trend, but over the past decade or so, things have gotten substantially worse: https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overdose-death-rates https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overd... https://nida.nih.gov/sites/default/files/images/2023-Drug-od-death-rates-1.jpeg https://nida.nih.gov/sites/default/files/images/2023-Drug-od...

bbor 3y ago

Hint: if you’re ever reading an article that pins America’s ills on “the Civil Rights Act of 1964”, you’re reading some bullshit. The idea that America has problems because black people get to have important jobs is such a blatantly fucked up idea that I have no idea how this is on the front page…

smackeyacky 3y ago
Yep, all MBA ideas from the ivy league. Not enough diversity is the actual problem with modern america.

glarblblarbl 3y ago

"Harold Robertson is an asset class head and institutional investor at a multi-billion dollar pool of capital."

MattGaiser 3y ago
Fascinating that a supposedly numbers fellow has no numbers on reliability, just on race.
- pydry 3y ago
  These are the people who make the "efficient market hypothesis" come true....

pixel3234 3y ago

I am first one to throw stone at diversity, but I disagree with this article. - Problem is a widespread corruption, not diversity specifically. Soviet union, Iran, Saudis, even Nazi Germany had this common problem. Healthy society would fix inefficiencies, unhealthy society promotes them. Diversity can improve efficiency if done right! - Complex systems will survive, even thrive! Societies like late stage Soviet Union could maintain complex industries, electric grids, space program etc very well. Even 3th world countries are capable of maintaining complex infrastructure while society starves. For example North Korea develops satellites, nukes and rockets... It is connected to ruling class and essential for its power. - End result is that "non essential" will decline. Stuff like life expectancy, fertility, health care... We can already see that.

fatbird 3y ago

The genius of targetting "diversity" is that it's both intuitively easy to understand (whether you believe it), and absolutely unfalsifiable. There's no way to demonstrate that an influx of "diverse" people are the cause of a decrease in competence, but it's an obvious correlation that plays into lingering bigotry. Well done, Harold.

thephyber 3y ago
We are smack in the middle of a massive collision of social panics and the common thread is that they are all unfalsifiable. I’m starting to believe The most useful tool in avoiding being suckered by these panics is to actively identify when a claim is unfalsifiable.
MattGaiser 3y ago
I am trying to figure out if "escalating rates of failure" is at all true, and of course it will depend on what you measure, but not seeing a lot of evidence. This is not to say that there are not critical societal issues, but a general loss of reliability in cases where that reliability is truly desired? Not seeing very much of that.
zo1 3y ago
[flagged]

emodendroket 3y ago

I would perhaps challenge the premise that a system openly rejecting minority job candidates out of hand was anything like "meritocratic."

drewcoo 3y ago

I thought that neoliberalism and the shift to short-term goals for everything, business and beyond, was the cause of our inability to plan anything these days. DEI just seems to give us managers who think and behave like white guys but aren't actually white guys. We applaud them for who they are while what they do remains the same.