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The Titan Submersible Disaster. The Inside Story Is More Disturbing
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- sho_hn 2y agohttp://web.archive.org/web/20240611124534/https://www.wired.com/story/titan-submersible-disaster-inside-story-oceangate-files/ http://web.archive.org/web/20240611124534/https://www.wired....
- mellosouls 2y agoDeep-sea experts criticized OceanGate’s choices, from Titan’s carbon-fiber construction to Rush’s [CEO] public disdain for industry regulations, which he believed stifled innovation Seems a remarkably similar sentiment to the e/acc types currently loudly influencing tech and business discourse on various media. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_accelerationism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_accelerationism
- EgregiousCube 2y agoOne shouldn’t conclude that regulations lead to positive outcomes from this. In addition to having a disdain for regulation, OceanGate was doing bad engineering. Projects that follow regulation strictly can fail due to bad engineering too.
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- specialist 2y agoRegulations is a scary word for rules. Can you imagine a world without rules? Awful.
- qarl 2y agoSome people had extremely bad relationships with their parents. It's difficult for them to accept rules of any kind.
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- Tepix 2y agoArguably we're seeing bad engineering by OpenAI leading to their superalignment team quitting and raise the alarm.
- rapsey 2y agoPhilosophy majors judging bad engineering and making grand stands.
- zer00eyz 2y agoNo. Re-wind the clock: - A google engineer says "google has AGI"... this leaks and is dismissed. - MS writes a paper that says GPT has hints of AGI. - OpenAI signs deal with MS saying they can have everything OpenAI does till they hit AGI. That last one. Thats not a bet you make if you think AGI is a decade away. Its a bet you make if you think your close. OpenAI thought that they were close. They fell for the classic AI trap of "if only we had a bigger model". They got high on their own supply and thought that some sort of tipping point would come with size or scale. That a bigger model with MORE data and MORE information would have AGI, sapience or sentience emerge. It was a bad bet. Q* isnt going to get there, the LLM line is dead. Why do you need to worry about safety or super alignment if you arent going to get to AGI. They left because there is no THERE, there..
- rapsey 2y ago> They left because there is no THERE, there.. They left because they lost the power struggle.
- zer00eyz 2y agoThat makes zero sense. If your safety oriented, and your company is close to AGI you stay regardless. Your boss isnt going to push you out because you leave and scream "it will kill us all"... All the safety people have been doing that for years, now they are quite. If you aren't close, or realize "we're never getting there" leaving, vesting makes sense. There's NO existential risk. Talk of AGI is hubris, vanity and snake oil.
- lolinder 2y ago> Projects that follow regulation strictly can fail due to bad engineering too. Which in the world of regulated engineering disciplines usually translates to new regulations to prevent the newly discovered failure modes. The point of regulation isn't to eliminate 100% of bad engineering, it's to rigorously define and enforce the current standard of good engineering so that the vast majority of cases don't fail.
- jvanderbot 2y agoRules and regulations are not designed to ensure good products. They are there to prevent disastrous ones.
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- Symmetry 2y agoWouldn't the e/acc analysis here be that if people, or our entire species, has to die in the name of progress then that's a cost we should be willing to bear?
- itishappy 2y agoI'm not super familiar with the space, but I don't think technology that nobody can use captures the "effective" part. End the human race by transferring all our consciousnesses to the immortal AI mainframe? A-OK! End the human race for a fancy new sub design? Not effective. :(
- rvnx 2y agoHe already got punished by life, no need to blame him posthumous. He is like one of the inventors of the parachute (Franz Karl Reichelt), still wanted to try because he believed in it. Unfortunately believing is not enough when it comes to reliability. Effort was good though, as apparently it worked at some point. > This submersible design, later renamed Titan, eventually made it down to the Titanic in 2021. It even returned to the site for expeditions the next two years. But nearly one year ago, on June 18, 2023, Titan dove to the infamous wreck and imploded, instantly killing all five people onboard, including Rush himself which could explain why they sell tickets. I'm sure SpaceX already knows the rockets won't make it back intact, but they still launch anyway (despite the losses).
- et-al 2y agoThe only comparison we should make of Stockton Rush is Icarus.
- vundercind 2y agoNotably, he was also warned not to fly too low over the ocean. “Beneath the waves” was right out.
- edf13 2y agoPretty sure the inventory of the parachute didn't take paying guests on his tests...
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- mellosouls 2y agoThe inventor of the parachute probably didn't take several people with him on false premises.
- gonzo41 2y agoRespect the ocean, Space is somewhat mild in comparison.
- SomeoneFromCA 2y agoYes, tictacs may as well be from the ocean....
- rob74 2y agoI don't think space is milder, but to get up there, you first have to build a working rocket, which will make sure that you generally know what you are doing. The ocean doesn't have such a barrier, you can theoretically lower anything into the water and try to get to the Titanic...
- coldtea 2y agoThe ocean, even the deep, is orders of magnitude easier and less dangerous than space...
- sgarland 2y agoAs a former submariner (but not an astronaut, tbf), I think they’re on-par. They both actively want to kill you at all times.
- coldtea 2y agoIn total failure mode, yes. But with one of the two though there are other humans not far away to send help, and land/open sea to rise up if you see a problem emerging. In space it can be nightmare to get any help or get back if something goes wrong.
- sgarland 2y agoYou can’t always get human contact underwater. If you can’t come up to periscope depth, comms are extremely limited. Even when you can, the response is likely to be “fix it yourself.” It was a strange and isolating feeling the first time something broke underway, and I realized there wasn’t someone to ask how to fix it. It’s also a great builder of grit and determination, or of hopelessness. People tend to go one way or the other. Being awakened with a flooding alarm when drills were not scheduled, for example – I realized afterwards (as did everyone else, I assume) that if faced with an actual emergency, I could keep my cool and work the problem. [0] It’s a good feeling, especially when you know you can trust the other 100+ people around you to do the same. Incidentally, it was not technically flooding (unplanned water ingestion at a rate greater than the capacity of dewatering systems), but sure as hell looked scary when they demonstrated the flow rate seen later. [0]: I personally think this is why Navy Nukes (especially submariners) make great SREs. The fact that a Nuke helped build Google’s SRE program probably helps.
- nathan_compton 2y ago[flagged]
- dale_glass 2y ago> This is such an amazingly delicious piece of schadenfreude. It doesn't work out that way for me due to the deaths of passengers that had no responsibility for anything here, and whose only mistake was trusting Rush too much.
- nathan_compton 2y agoSchadenfreude precludes not true horror or sadness. But if I felt true horror or sadness at every event which warranted it I would have killed myself a long time ago, assuming I could keep up with the astronomical accounting entailed in keeping track of them all. The world is a grotesque suffering engine, you may have noticed. Let us savor schadenfreude where we can, I say.
- Pxtl 2y agoI feel genuinely awful for the 19-year-old boy who was in that suicide-tube just to please his father. His whole life, which would've been a happy one of wealth and freedom, snuffed out because of these utterly stupid risks. But for Rush himself? He deserves all the posthumous mockery and jeering he gets and more. He was quite literally too stupid to live. Everybody else in that boat is on a spectrum of "you had more means than anybody else in the world to know this was extremely unsafe and you're part of a political class that by-and-large celebrates libertarianism so there's some irony and culpability here but still it's sad that you trusted a guy and he murdered you with utter incompetence".
- psychoslave 2y agoI didn’t know the term schadenfreude, but looking for the definition, it immediately remembered me De rerum natura[1], there is a passage about how good it feels that you are not aboard the boat that you see sink in the horizon or something like that. [1] Of the Nature of Things, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Of_the_Nature_of_Things_(Leonard) https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Of_the_Nature_of_Things_(Leon...
- Pxtl 2y agoReminds me of Vonnegut's line from Jailbird (without the stuttering of the character who uttered it), on the principal cause of a massacre: "American amateurism in matters of life and death" I'm a Canadian. As a Millenial of the "just watch a Youtube video and figure it out" generation, and somebody who has watched some things (like housing) get strangled by regulation, I can see the appeal of American libertarianism on a lot of subjects. But as Vonnegut said: matters of life and death.
- jessriedel 2y ago“Seriousness of outcomes” is a bad way to approximate the appropriate degree of regulation. We have many examples of very serious industries (e.g. pharmaceuticals, autonomous vehicles) where overly cautious regulation results in many more deaths on net. Better rules of thumb are “whether externalities are internalized”, “asymmetry in upside vs downside”, “ability to measure outcomes”.
- voisin 2y ago> overly cautious regulation results in many more deaths on net How do you know this?
- jessriedel 2y agoThere's no comprehensive answer that's going to fit in this textbox but: For self-driving cars, it arises from (a) there are 30k American deaths per year from normal cars, (b) the number of deaths from self-driving cars is negligible (a few per year if you include Teslas, and zero per year if you focus on the best technology from Waymo and Cruise), and (c) everything we know about R&D points to significant acceleration possible by testing and iterating more at larger scale. For pharmaceuticals, it's a longer answer but it still starts by comparing the deaths caused by the marginal approved drug (relatively few) to the long-term benefits of trying out more drugs (high). The root cause, ultimately, is that the regulatory agency gets blamed for every death caused by something they allow but do not get blamed for deaths from the absence of things that were not allowed.
- ubermonkey 2y agoIs it "more disturbing," though, really? I mean, privileged rich dude who thinks he knows better than experts wins Darwin award, and some people dumb enough to trust him got to go along for the (one way) ride. I'm not any more disturbed by it now than I was a year ago, and a year ago it barely moved the needle. And then it was only about the 19 year old son of one of the passengers -- even at that age, a child ought to be able to trust his father to keep him safe, and Shahzada Dawood utterly failed on that count.
- dudisubekti 2y agoStockton Rush is not eligible for Darwin award because he had two children. The 19-year old son is eligible, though he won’t win the award because he was peer-pressured by his dad.
- echoangle 2y agoI wanted to ask if the Darwin Award is also possible if you manage to get yourself and your child killed but the father had another daughter which is still alive
- dudisubekti 2y agoI was mistaken, I just rechecked the rules and apparently having an offspring no longer disqualifies a candidate since the offspring only inherits 50% of the nominee’s genes. So everyone in the sub are eligible now.
- ubermonkey 2y agoWell, fair.
- psychoslave 2y agoI didn’t delve this story, I just remember I saw a five minutes info at some tv channel in France, which was interviewing a guy who refused to for the ride just before the launch as he estimated the safety level he was expecting was not there. I don’t know if other riders were aware of that fact, which should have been communicated to them as a big red alert. Sad story, really. These people at least died while actively pursuing a dream, though it finished in a dramatic way. This is unlike so many people in Gaza or Ukraine just to mention what pop out of my mind. :’(
- ashleyn 2y ago"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman, commenting on the Challenger disaster
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- datadrivenangel 2y agoTale as old as time: lack of safety culture due to reality denying executives causes people to die.
- CyberDildonics 2y agoI don't think the executive going down in their own creation and using a video game controller before imploding is a tale as old time.
- seanicus 2y agoHow about a nepo baby trying to achieve low orbit using wax wings?
- marcosdumay 2y agoIt is too. But it's a very different tale from the one where the executive just orders other people to take the bullet.
- antisthenes 2y agoLikely happened all the time during the feudal ages, when incompetent military commanders ordered their feudal subjects to engage in combat with disadvantage. This event is just thinly veiled with a little bit more civility and tech progress.
- ImHereToVote 2y agoIt's a good thing that the development of general goal to action mappers is in the hands of more prudent and wise executives.
- mrweasel 2y agoThe whole idea was/is weird. I can understand undertaking a certain level of risk to get an amazing view of the Titanic, or some other wreck or reef, but that wasn't even what was offered. Regardless of who offered this dive and how it was managed, there would always have been some risk. That risk had to be stupid low for what was offered, a tiny window, offering a really poor viewing experience. It not even like the was a massive glass dome and you could pan around the wreck for hours just looking at it from a multitude of angels. Notice how all the videos and photos are always taken from the outside of the submersible. The cost and risk, as compared to what was on offer never matched up.
- Someone 2y agoThey didn’t offer just that, but also bragging rights for people for whom a few $100k is peanuts. Basically the same reason people climb Everest and not peaks ‘nobody’ knows about that are a lot less crowded.
- poincaredisk 2y agoI imagine the real offer was a certain thrill and uniqueness. People do base jumping, motocykle street racing, free solo climbing on skycrappers, and various other incredibly risky things for a reason. Maybe adrenaline hiy, maybe experience, but certainly not a well thought of risk/benefit balance sheet.
- voisin 2y ago> amazing view of the Titanic This is the sort of experience where I doubt the view was anywhere as good as what an unmanned vehicle that prioritized lighting and filming could capture. I suspect this was far more about being able to say “I spent $[huge amount of money] and got to see it with my own eyes” even though the view was probably pretty shit with everyone crowded around a small dome.
- JKCalhoun 2y agoIf you look at the passengers they seem to generally be people wholly obsessed with the Titanic. So I don't think these dives were ever going to be attractive to you and I — the more casually curious.
- azalemeth 2y agoDavid Lochridge, who oversaw marine operations at the company and who needed to sign off on the transfer, became convinced that Titan was unsafe. In January 2018, Lochridge sent Rush a quality-control inspection report detailing 27 issues with the vehicle, from questionable O-ring seals on the domes and missing bolts to flammable materials and more concerns about its carbon-fiber hull. Rush fired him the next day. (Although Lochridge later made a whistleblower report to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration about Titan, Rush sued him for breach of contract. The settlement of that lawsuit resulted in Lochridge dropping his complaint, paying OceanGate nearly $10,000, and signing an NDA. Lochridge did not respond to WIRED.) How is that legal in the US? It is insane that someone who clearly was acting in the interest of the public (albeit the rich, fee-paying public...) should be found at fault for doing something that is clearly morally correct. I don't normally read Wired, bu this article is both morbidly fascinating and a great tale of human hubris.
- kelsey98765431 2y agoThe word "found" implies judicial discovery of truth through due process. This was a settlement. Nobody was found to be at fault, the information was highly dangerous and therefore valuable, if you want to eliminate the market of buying silence reform due process protections so they cannot be subverted by so called plea "deals" and so called settlement "agreements".
- axus 2y agoIf I read that right, Lochridge was not compensated for silence at all, he paid them $10,000 ?
- marcosdumay 2y agoThat's not right. "Settlement" does really say a judge oversaw the entire thing while a corporation bullied somebody working for the public interest into silence.
- twh270 2y agoThe lawsuit was settled out of court (https://www.wsbradio.com/news/national/documents-detail/VUTBOO52RVPGP53MXHXAZS2VDA/ https://www.wsbradio.com/news/national/documents-detail/VUTB...). Reading between the lines, I'm guessing OceanGate (a company with substantial financial resources) would have buried Lochbridge (an individual with substantially fewer financial resources) in lawsuits if he had not settled. (Not to mention the stress, hardship, and real-or-perceived threat of jail time for Lochbridge, should the court find him to be guilty.) If you're implying that the judge was somehow complicit in helping OceanGate ('oversaw', meaning presided over and made decisions concerning), then please provide evidence of that?
- southernplaces7 2y agoThe Wired article clearly paints Rush as someone who was irresponsible and cavalier about even the basics of good engineering before testing a complex thing with real human lives that trusted him too much. In the essence of that argument at least, they're right. His using a prototype he knew to be a failure to then explore the ocean with customers aboard, under the same conditions as those that caused its test failure, is criminally negligent. However, pointing to all sorts of mistakes and gambles small or large as narratives towards a full blown condemnation of extremely dangerous efforts is mistaken I think: In the world of exploring extremely harsh environments, some heavy risk is inevitable even if you do everything you know of right. In such contexts, something could go catastrophically wrong just as easily as it could all end successfully and a narrative will be constructed for why either was the case even if either outcome was interchangeably plausible.. Pushing immediate blame on someone for something going wrong in an inherently risky activity is to fall into this above narrative trap. It also implies the idea that people who do dangerous but potentially worthy things are wrong for doing so because they didn't have perfect foresight.
- throwup238 2y ago> In the world of exploring extremely harsh environments, some heavy risk is inevitable even if you do everything you know of right. In such contexts, something could go catastrophically wrong just as easily as it could all end successfully and a narrative will be constructed for why either was the case even if either outcome was interchangeably plausible.. That implies that what they were doing was somehow pioneering. It wasn’t. Deepsea explorers and the oil and gas industry have used submersibles at those depths for decades and their safety profile is very well understood. There are facilities to test them and procedures to make sure they’re safe before anyone risks their life. All Rush did was make a poorly designed, poorly tested submersible with the wrong materials where he cut corners left and right. TFA is just a laundry list of criminal negligence. The Titan passengers make up the bulk of the fatalities from civilian submersibles this century. Save for military submarines and the occasional industrial accident, they’ve been extremely safe.
- sgarland 2y ago
- jmyeet 2y agoOne interesting thing about this saga is we learned just how much of a badass James Cameron is. James Cameron put together the team that designed the DeepSea Challenger, which he took to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, far deeper than Titanic. One interesting tidbid (IIRC) is that they spent 3 years just designing the pressure vessel in software before they ever built anything, so precise the engineering had to be. And even then they did have some system failures on that dive but nothing catastrophic. OceanGate was an exercise in hubris from people who didn't know better and didn't want to know better. It was pure ego from the uninformed. I personally found the general reaction to be fascinating too: it's like a whole bunch of people discovered class awareness and solidarity.
- lacksconfidence 2y agoSurprisingly the DeepSea Challenger was only $10M as well. Thats certainly a ton of money, but it's in the same ballpark as what ocean gate spent.
- em-bee 2y agoi guess the difference was that ocean gate needed to recoup the expense and make a profit as fast as possible whereas the deepsea challenger didn't. so they could take their time and do it right without pressure.
- upon_drumhead 2y agoIf you get the chance to watch Deepsea Challenge[1], it's worth the time. They were under a lot of pressure, which James Cameron was very proud of and the source of. They had more problems then you think, but was able to make it work. [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2332883/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2332883/
- em-bee 2y agoof course. i meant they weren't under pressure to cut corners and ignore problems in order to make a profit. it was a different kind of pressure, to make sure they didn't miss any problems and to eliminate any risks, and possibly they risked the project being aborted if they could not solve all the problems.
- double0jimb0 2y agoAs an product designer / inventor, I know that feeling well... that point when so many prototypes have failed, but you feel you are so close. You feel you've run out of time and that it will be too expensive to test another one, so you convince yourself to go into production with what *should* work, it has to right?!?... (well it almost never does, and it's 100% not worth the stress). But to put your own life and others at risk making that move... whoooooooweeeeee, that's fully into batshit crazy land.
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- another2another 2y agoThe 'Inside' Story Is More Disturbing Is this a tasteless pun ?
- coldtea 2y agoGiven that this as a pun would be applicable to anything with an interior and exterior, I'd say no, it's not meant as such.
- coldtea 2y ago"Move fast and crush people"