5 ms·

Then again — we had that disaster, and we are all still here and doing fine, in general. So overall, the system seems to be quite resilient.

• throwanem 2y ago
  The entire point of the article is to argue we are unwise to consider ourselves more "doing fine" than "between crises at the moment." It doesn't make a very cohesive argument, but the nature of the concern that it treats is such that not much cohesion is needed to reveal some potentially considerable risks; the failure modes here are also not guaranteed to be intuitively cohesive, and there are a few which could require the kind of postmortem it takes an army of historians two or three decades to complete. I've worked with complex systems many times before. Some of them were quite resilient. One of them was so well architected, it could stand up to anything short of EKS falling over entirely. One day EKS fell over entirely. Noah Smith has not favorably impressed me, but as a collator he's acceptable; there is less than usual reason here to discount this work only for the sake of the byline under which it appears. And of all the professions in the world, I would expect ours among the likeliest to produce by random selection someone who understands the difference between "seems resilient" and "resilient".