Yeah but, in your example. this is a bookkeeping issue that, while frustrating and time consuming and costly, is just that. It’s not like a gas line in Manhatta

Yeah but, in your example. this is a bookkeeping issue that, while frustrating and time consuming and costly, is just that. It’s not like a gas line in Manhattan blew up because someone in Toledo hit C-v in Excel. The scientists swapped around excel files and imported stuff without checking, which then was fed into other systems. A clusterfuck but one that is a daily occurrence at, minimally, every major non-tech company. It eventually gets unfucked with human labor or it simply wasn’t important in the first place. Exact same thing happens in research and academia. Point being, unknown unknowns are just that. But most unknowns are known and can be programmed defensively against for most serious use cases. All major fields are like this—like, you can hook up a car battery to light a menthol tank to boil two cups of water… or we can use a kettle. Perhaps for a brief point in time, due to our ignorance or just history, people lit containers of menthol on fire like it was sane, but that doesn’t mean it was, or is.