4 ms·

Yeah after the MCAS incident showing a kind of malice and the door blowout showing incompetency, I'm perfectly happy to start treating Boeing as guilty until pr

Yeah after the MCAS incident showing a kind of malice and the door blowout showing incompetency, I'm perfectly happy to start treating Boeing as guilty until proven innocent on these incidents. They haven't really been behaving in a way that they're worthy of giving them the benefit of the doubt. Until they start to show that they're changing their behavior (which they clearly didn't do after the MCAS incident) then they really deserve the gut reactions to their own bad headlines. The public doesn't have to try to search for perfect judicial fairness once they've burned our trust, that's a standard that only makes sense to apply to the actual courts.

tptacek 3y ago
I'm fine if you want to distrust or dislike or sanction Boeing. But that's not a good epistemology; it's not bringing you closer to understanding what's happening. It's also deeply incurious (as a rhetorical strategy, not as a belief system).
- ckw 3y ago
  You cannot understand a thing if it kills you first.
- lamontcg 3y ago
  I think the people who are plugged into avherald.com and trying to prove how much they know about aviation are in a worse state, because they're missing the fact that through MCAS and the plug blowout that Boeing's culture really can't be trusted right now. You're very concerned about the fact that you've been studying dendrology and correcting people about the species and nature of the trees when the forest is just on fire. And I can connect this back to problems with our entire management class, which you can't reach when you're just looking at the technical details and frequency of aviation accidents. There's a way to be incurious about the overall sociological and political environment by overly focusing on detailed technical knowledge. And I'm acknowledging that they may be "innocent" in this case (in the sense that these kinds of things are expected across all of commercial aviation). I'm not arguing that I know they're guilty and being completely incurious. But my default hypothesis with Boeing has shifted to guilty until proven innocent, and in the absence of conclusive evidence to assume guilt. That isn't actually incurious, since I'm willing to listen to evidence. But the argument that "things like this happen all the time" isn't actually evidence, that's just a rationalization. And it is okay to stop giving people the benefit of the doubt when they've proved in the past that they don't deserve it. That's just healthy psychological defenses. You move them from the box where they get the benefit of the doubt, over to the box where they don't. To argue nobody should ever do that is to argue that everyone should constantly get manipulated and taken advantage of because this time Lucy isn't going to pull the ball away from Charlie Brown.

tptacek 3y ago

I'm fine if you want to distrust or dislike or sanction Boeing. But that's not a good epistemology; it's not bringing you closer to understanding what's happening. It's also deeply incurious (as a rhetorical strategy, not as a belief system).

ckw 3y ago
You cannot understand a thing if it kills you first.
lamontcg 3y ago
I think the people who are plugged into avherald.com and trying to prove how much they know about aviation are in a worse state, because they're missing the fact that through MCAS and the plug blowout that Boeing's culture really can't be trusted right now. You're very concerned about the fact that you've been studying dendrology and correcting people about the species and nature of the trees when the forest is just on fire. And I can connect this back to problems with our entire management class, which you can't reach when you're just looking at the technical details and frequency of aviation accidents. There's a way to be incurious about the overall sociological and political environment by overly focusing on detailed technical knowledge. And I'm acknowledging that they may be "innocent" in this case (in the sense that these kinds of things are expected across all of commercial aviation). I'm not arguing that I know they're guilty and being completely incurious. But my default hypothesis with Boeing has shifted to guilty until proven innocent, and in the absence of conclusive evidence to assume guilt. That isn't actually incurious, since I'm willing to listen to evidence. But the argument that "things like this happen all the time" isn't actually evidence, that's just a rationalization. And it is okay to stop giving people the benefit of the doubt when they've proved in the past that they don't deserve it. That's just healthy psychological defenses. You move them from the box where they get the benefit of the doubt, over to the box where they don't. To argue nobody should ever do that is to argue that everyone should constantly get manipulated and taken advantage of because this time Lucy isn't going to pull the ball away from Charlie Brown.