5 ms·

> He made sure that he boarded before the the passenger who had the boarding pass information that he stole; when the other passenger tried to board, the system

by bambax 3y ago

> He made sure that he boarded before the the passenger who had the boarding pass information that he stole; when the other passenger tried to board, the system suggested that this passenger had already boarded, though the gate agent assumed it was a glitch, so allowed that person to board I was wondering exactly this, how is it possible to use a boarding pass twice. The answer is, "the agent assumed it was a glitch". It's interesting that we use machines, and when they flag the type of error they were designed to identify, we simply assume they don't work. Many plane accidents happen for a similar reason, the pilots thinking the systems on board are wrong and they're right. Why don't we trust the machines? Is it because they have bugs and are sometimes actually wrong? Or because we trust our feelings more? If the checking had been on paper, with the agent simply ticking off a list of passengers at the gate, would they have made the same mistake and assumed they got it wrong? What if the list had been ticked off before by somebody else?

CogitoCogito 3y ago
Well the passenger actually _hadn’t_ boarded. Someone else had. Their checks found the extra passenger afterwards. The mistake was letting the original passenger on and that was fixed later.
- fl7305 3y ago
  I don't think their checks caught him though? He only got caught because the plane was full, and he stood out like a sore thumb when he couldn't sit down somewhere.
- bambax 3y ago
  I would disagree with that. The boarding ID had been used once and can't (shouldn't) be used twice. In that case the first use was in error but the system can't know that. So the correct course of action would be to re-check everyone's boarding pass. That may have been impractical / undesirable, but simply ignoring the error as a bug seems careless.
  - gorkish 3y ago
    Maybe if flight attendants were actually getting paid while passengers are boarding they might be more attentive
- drewcoo 3y ago
  If boarded still means "on the vehicle," both people boarded. One person was a passenger and the other was a stowaway.
themoonisachees 3y ago
In this specific case, it's quite possible that the gate agent, being a costumer service worker, didn't want a fuss. If someone comes to a gate agent with a boarding pass, they're most likely not double-spending the pass, and suggesting otherwise to them would be a quick way to a tweet saying "today I bought a plane ticket, and when I tried boarding I was told I already boarded and they refused to reimburse me, do not fly [airline]". Of course it would have been the "correct" course of action here but as someone who has interacted with The Public, the gate agent did their best.
- ethbr1 3y ago
  Beyond that, the UX of this is always subverted by incentives. The system's incentive: (1) make sure no pass is used to board more than once, (2) indicate whether all ticketed passengers have boarded, and if not which are missing The gate agent's incentive: (1) board everyone as pleasantly and quickly as possible So the errant boarder played on the misaligned incentives and time pressure, to bet that the gate agent would ignore any errors. I'm incredibly distrustful of any system that requires: - Someone deal with a rare situation - In realtime - Under pressure - While not being incentivized against an adverse outcome "Well, the person didn't do what they were supposed to in the 1-in-1,000,000 situation" isn't a valid design strategy. (See self-driving-car-interventions and TSA agents)
  - dfxm12 3y ago
    Another interesting question is: What were they supposed to do? Does Delta even have procedures for what to do in this 1-in-1,000,000 situation?
    - hnfong 3y ago
      If the adverse outcome of a 1-in-1000000 situation was somebody possibly sneaking onto a plane and gets a free ride, I'd say just leave it as-is.
  - drewcoo 3y ago
    Incentive implies a choice can be made. No one tips a lawnmower for a really tight trim. The lawnmower manufacturer may have worried about that but the lawnmower itself doesn't even worry. Likewise, the dumb software the agents are using is not making decisions or incentivized. Now if it were AI, we might worry . . .
b112 3y ago
With this comment you've demonstrated why voting machines will never be trusted fully; lack of understanding. You understand paper and pen. It's right there. A child fully understands the dynamic. As soon as the process moves into a machine, you cannot even tell if your checkmark is really counted. This is doubly worked into distrust, by the amount of bugs, weird isses, and strange behaviour software exhibits to end users. People are trained from youth, via personal experience, how incredibly buggy and untrustworthy computers are. They crash, can lose data, be wrong, and the worst of it? The layman cannot even figure out why. Computers are a black box, a mystery, they function by magic. No expert, no claims of audits, or oversight, will ever, ever refute what end users know. Computers make mistakes all the time. Taking these impressions and incorporating them into the votng system is madness for democracy.
- closewith 3y ago
  Not just those impressions, but those realities. The trust model for paper ballots and observed human counting is so superior to any proposed or implemented electronic voting that it's madness to downgrade to electronic.
  - b112 3y ago
    I agree completely, but find that my argument is easier to explain to literally everyone, where as describing trust models is harder to explain to many, and invites debate from others.
  - gus_massa 3y ago
    I prefer "mixed" > "paper" > "electronic", but a few year ago we had elections with only "paper" in our national soccer association: From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_Football_Association https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_Football_Association > With 75 presidents of different Argentine clubs voting, on election day something went wrong when the final count resulted in a draw of 38 to 38 (76 votes in total). The explanation given was that one of the electors put a double vote and that mistake was not reported. As a result, the executive committee decided to postpone the election.
closewith 3y ago
> It's interesting that we use machines, and when they flag the type of error they were designed to identify, we simply assume they don't work. The question is what's the incidence rate of real glitches. If the system errs on 1% of boarding passes, staff will be used to overriding it.
- pixl97 3y ago
  >If the system errs on 1% of boarding passes On a large plane that would be 2-4 people per flight. Honestly an error rate of even .01% would be enough errors per day that your average gate agent would order ride pretty commonly.
Logiar 3y ago
My guess it had happened a few times in the past and had always been "glitches" or passenger doing something silly which also gets blamed as a "glitch".
- mannykannot 3y ago
  ... or the stowaway has found an empty seat (not likely nowadays).
- gus_massa 3y ago
  1) Give the ticket to the first person in the check point, get scaned, talk to the their children that is makin fuzz, give the ticket to the second person in the check point, alarm, nobody remember that they gave the ticket to the first person because everyone was in autopilot. 2) Give the ticket to the first person in the check point, get scaned, notice that the partner went to the bathroom, wait, give the ticket again to the first person in the check point, alarm, nobody remember that they gave the ticket to the first person because everyone was in autopilot.
- adrianmonk 3y ago
  I bet passengers do this often enough. You're traveling as a family. You print boarding passes and distribute them to everybody. Somebody loses theirs. So you print new copies, but you don't necessarily give people the same seat number as the first time. When boarding the plane, one of you reaches into their bag and grabs the one they thought they had lost. So two of your family members are using the same pass, and one is going unused. No harm is caused because the number of passengers on the plane is still as expected, and the family is able to figure out for themselves who takes which seat.
  - zerocrates 3y ago
    I was just recently traveling with someone and they had a copy of both of our boarding passes (I just had mine). I boarded first and heard behind me some issue happening: they'd accidentally given my pass so it popped up as already boarded. They just switched to the right pass and there was no issue. It would have been a little more complicated if we had just happened to board in the opposite order, though. So, I'm sure the general issue of "this pass was used already" happens a lot. How often it gets resolved without the would-be passenger presenting a "good" one, who knows.
deng 3y ago
> Why don't we trust the machines? Is it because they have bugs and are sometimes actually wrong? Or because we trust our feelings more? I can't recommend enough to read the book "Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety" by Eric Schlosser. You will be surprised how often we barely escaped nuclear war because wise people chose to not trust the machines.
- ryandvm 3y ago
  What's amusing is that I don't think anyone trusts complex systems less than software developers.
  - pluc 3y ago
    You'll never find a developer on casino slot machines.
    - raisedbyninjas 3y ago
      Because of knowledge of probability or software quality? Casino software has a lot of review and regulation because the customers have money at stake.
      - pluc 3y ago
        I'd stop it at "because of knowledge"
        albedoa 3y ago
        You should have stopped it earlier. There is such a thing as advantage slots, and many software developers are drawn to advantage play. Because of knowledge.
    - tekla 3y ago
      News to me. Developers are universally considered fish.
3minus1 3y ago
It's true the system may have glitched in the past, but IMO the bigger issue is that the system provides no troubleshooting steps. What if it snapped a photo of every passenger as it scanned their ticket. Then on a duplicate scan it could display the photo of the passenger who already scanned the ticket. That could help the gate agent to actually troubleshoot the warning and figure out what happened.
- drewcoo 3y ago
  Making the system more obviously complicated is no way to convince people it's more trustworthy.
dfxm12 3y ago
This is an individual in a specific situation. I can think of a few reasons off the top of my head why they might have done what they did. Most importantly, there might not even be a standard process to follow here - remember this passenger was properly ticketed. There previously was a glitch. The agent probably didn't want to deal with angry passengers (there was a fight between passengers and a Delta agent in the past couple years).
bdjsiqoocwk 3y ago
> Why don't we trust the machines? We don't trust the machines because some of us aren't outsourcing their critical thinking faculties. If this person assumed it was a computer glitch that probably means that it happened before and they guessed, probably correctly, that glitches happen more often than people trying to reuse boarding passes
SergeAx 3y ago
This is because we don't have a plausible scenario for that case. "Sir, you already boarded the plane, please leave the airport" is not going to work. Calling the police, making a fuss with getting all the people off the plane and then back on is a lot of damage for the company in late flights and missing connections.

by bambax 3y ago

CogitoCogito 3y ago

Well the passenger actually _hadn’t_ boarded. Someone else had. Their checks found the extra passenger afterwards. The mistake was letting the original passenger on and that was fixed later.

fl7305 3y ago
I don't think their checks caught him though? He only got caught because the plane was full, and he stood out like a sore thumb when he couldn't sit down somewhere.
bambax 3y ago
I would disagree with that. The boarding ID had been used once and can't (shouldn't) be used twice. In that case the first use was in error but the system can't know that. So the correct course of action would be to re-check everyone's boarding pass. That may have been impractical / undesirable, but simply ignoring the error as a bug seems careless.
- gorkish 3y ago
  Maybe if flight attendants were actually getting paid while passengers are boarding they might be more attentive
drewcoo 3y ago
If boarded still means "on the vehicle," both people boarded. One person was a passenger and the other was a stowaway.

themoonisachees 3y ago

In this specific case, it's quite possible that the gate agent, being a costumer service worker, didn't want a fuss. If someone comes to a gate agent with a boarding pass, they're most likely not double-spending the pass, and suggesting otherwise to them would be a quick way to a tweet saying "today I bought a plane ticket, and when I tried boarding I was told I already boarded and they refused to reimburse me, do not fly [airline]". Of course it would have been the "correct" course of action here but as someone who has interacted with The Public, the gate agent did their best.

ethbr1 3y ago
Beyond that, the UX of this is always subverted by incentives. The system's incentive: (1) make sure no pass is used to board more than once, (2) indicate whether all ticketed passengers have boarded, and if not which are missing The gate agent's incentive: (1) board everyone as pleasantly and quickly as possible So the errant boarder played on the misaligned incentives and time pressure, to bet that the gate agent would ignore any errors. I'm incredibly distrustful of any system that requires: - Someone deal with a rare situation - In realtime - Under pressure - While not being incentivized against an adverse outcome "Well, the person didn't do what they were supposed to in the 1-in-1,000,000 situation" isn't a valid design strategy. (See self-driving-car-interventions and TSA agents)
- dfxm12 3y ago
  Another interesting question is: What were they supposed to do? Does Delta even have procedures for what to do in this 1-in-1,000,000 situation?
  - hnfong 3y ago
    If the adverse outcome of a 1-in-1000000 situation was somebody possibly sneaking onto a plane and gets a free ride, I'd say just leave it as-is.
- drewcoo 3y ago
  Incentive implies a choice can be made. No one tips a lawnmower for a really tight trim. The lawnmower manufacturer may have worried about that but the lawnmower itself doesn't even worry. Likewise, the dumb software the agents are using is not making decisions or incentivized. Now if it were AI, we might worry . . .

b112 3y ago

With this comment you've demonstrated why voting machines will never be trusted fully; lack of understanding. You understand paper and pen. It's right there. A child fully understands the dynamic. As soon as the process moves into a machine, you cannot even tell if your checkmark is really counted. This is doubly worked into distrust, by the amount of bugs, weird isses, and strange behaviour software exhibits to end users. People are trained from youth, via personal experience, how incredibly buggy and untrustworthy computers are. They crash, can lose data, be wrong, and the worst of it? The layman cannot even figure out why. Computers are a black box, a mystery, they function by magic. No expert, no claims of audits, or oversight, will ever, ever refute what end users know. Computers make mistakes all the time. Taking these impressions and incorporating them into the votng system is madness for democracy.

closewith 3y ago
Not just those impressions, but those realities. The trust model for paper ballots and observed human counting is so superior to any proposed or implemented electronic voting that it's madness to downgrade to electronic.
- b112 3y ago
  I agree completely, but find that my argument is easier to explain to literally everyone, where as describing trust models is harder to explain to many, and invites debate from others.
- gus_massa 3y ago
  I prefer "mixed" > "paper" > "electronic", but a few year ago we had elections with only "paper" in our national soccer association: From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_Football_Association https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_Football_Association > With 75 presidents of different Argentine clubs voting, on election day something went wrong when the final count resulted in a draw of 38 to 38 (76 votes in total). The explanation given was that one of the electors put a double vote and that mistake was not reported. As a result, the executive committee decided to postpone the election.

closewith 3y ago

> It's interesting that we use machines, and when they flag the type of error they were designed to identify, we simply assume they don't work. The question is what's the incidence rate of real glitches. If the system errs on 1% of boarding passes, staff will be used to overriding it.

pixl97 3y ago
>If the system errs on 1% of boarding passes On a large plane that would be 2-4 people per flight. Honestly an error rate of even .01% would be enough errors per day that your average gate agent would order ride pretty commonly.

Logiar 3y ago

My guess it had happened a few times in the past and had always been "glitches" or passenger doing something silly which also gets blamed as a "glitch".

mannykannot 3y ago
... or the stowaway has found an empty seat (not likely nowadays).
gus_massa 3y ago
1) Give the ticket to the first person in the check point, get scaned, talk to the their children that is makin fuzz, give the ticket to the second person in the check point, alarm, nobody remember that they gave the ticket to the first person because everyone was in autopilot. 2) Give the ticket to the first person in the check point, get scaned, notice that the partner went to the bathroom, wait, give the ticket again to the first person in the check point, alarm, nobody remember that they gave the ticket to the first person because everyone was in autopilot.
adrianmonk 3y ago
I bet passengers do this often enough. You're traveling as a family. You print boarding passes and distribute them to everybody. Somebody loses theirs. So you print new copies, but you don't necessarily give people the same seat number as the first time. When boarding the plane, one of you reaches into their bag and grabs the one they thought they had lost. So two of your family members are using the same pass, and one is going unused. No harm is caused because the number of passengers on the plane is still as expected, and the family is able to figure out for themselves who takes which seat.
- zerocrates 3y ago
  I was just recently traveling with someone and they had a copy of both of our boarding passes (I just had mine). I boarded first and heard behind me some issue happening: they'd accidentally given my pass so it popped up as already boarded. They just switched to the right pass and there was no issue. It would have been a little more complicated if we had just happened to board in the opposite order, though. So, I'm sure the general issue of "this pass was used already" happens a lot. How often it gets resolved without the would-be passenger presenting a "good" one, who knows.

deng 3y ago

> Why don't we trust the machines? Is it because they have bugs and are sometimes actually wrong? Or because we trust our feelings more? I can't recommend enough to read the book "Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety" by Eric Schlosser. You will be surprised how often we barely escaped nuclear war because wise people chose to not trust the machines.

ryandvm 3y ago
What's amusing is that I don't think anyone trusts complex systems less than software developers.
- pluc 3y ago
  You'll never find a developer on casino slot machines.
  - raisedbyninjas 3y ago
    Because of knowledge of probability or software quality? Casino software has a lot of review and regulation because the customers have money at stake.
    - pluc 3y ago
      I'd stop it at "because of knowledge"
      - albedoa 3y ago
        You should have stopped it earlier. There is such a thing as advantage slots, and many software developers are drawn to advantage play. Because of knowledge.
  - tekla 3y ago
    News to me. Developers are universally considered fish.

3minus1 3y ago

It's true the system may have glitched in the past, but IMO the bigger issue is that the system provides no troubleshooting steps. What if it snapped a photo of every passenger as it scanned their ticket. Then on a duplicate scan it could display the photo of the passenger who already scanned the ticket. That could help the gate agent to actually troubleshoot the warning and figure out what happened.

drewcoo 3y ago
Making the system more obviously complicated is no way to convince people it's more trustworthy.

dfxm12 3y ago

This is an individual in a specific situation. I can think of a few reasons off the top of my head why they might have done what they did. Most importantly, there might not even be a standard process to follow here - remember this passenger was properly ticketed. There previously was a glitch. The agent probably didn't want to deal with angry passengers (there was a fight between passengers and a Delta agent in the past couple years).

bdjsiqoocwk 3y ago

> Why don't we trust the machines? We don't trust the machines because some of us aren't outsourcing their critical thinking faculties. If this person assumed it was a computer glitch that probably means that it happened before and they guessed, probably correctly, that glitches happen more often than people trying to reuse boarding passes

SergeAx 3y ago

This is because we don't have a plausible scenario for that case. "Sir, you already boarded the plane, please leave the airport" is not going to work. Calling the police, making a fuss with getting all the people off the plane and then back on is a lot of damage for the company in late flights and missing connections.