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People posting on this forum saying "ah well software's failure case isn't as bad" > This forced controllers to revert to manual processing, leading to more th

• egypturnash 2y ago
  Zero fatalities though. You could do a lot worse for a massive air traffic control failure.
  • hobs 2y ago
    It's true, not saying they did a bad job here, just that even minor problems in your code can exacerbated into giant net effects without you even considering it.
  • lxgr 2y ago
    Unfortunately shutting down air traffic generally does not result in zero excess deaths: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3233376/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3233376/
    • d1sxeyes 2y ago
      Your source says “the fatality rate did not change appreciably”.
      • lxgr 2y ago
        Injuries did increase, though, and I can't think of a plausible mechanism that would somehow cap expected outcomes at "injury but not death".
        • d1sxeyes 2y ago
          So we were talking about excess deaths, which means that supporting your argument with a paper that argues that a previous finding of excessive deaths was flawed is probably not the strongest argument you could make. Increased number of injuries but not deaths could be, for example, (purely making things up off the top of my head here) due to higher levels of distractedness among average drivers due to fear of terrorism, which results in more low-speed, surface-street collisions, while there’s no change in high speed collisions because a short spell of distractedness on the highway is less likely to result in an accident.
          • lmm 2y ago
            > which results in more low-speed, surface-street collisions, while there’s no change in high speed collisions because a short spell of distractedness on the highway is less likely to result in an accident. That's not a remotely plausible model though. There are recorded cases of e.g. 1.6 seconds of distractedness at high speed causing a fatal collision. Anything that increases road injuries is almost certainly also increasing deaths in something close to proportion, but a given study size obviously has a lot more power to detect injuries than deaths.
            • d1sxeyes 2y ago
              Yeah, I was not really trying to argue that that was actually the case, so won’t waste time trying to defend the merits of the model I pulled out of my arse. Alternatively then, perhaps safety developments in cars made them safer to drive around the same time? Or maybe advances in medicine made fatal crashes less likely? Or perhaps there’s some other explanation that doesn’t immediately spring to mind, it’s irrelevant. The only point I’m really making is that the data OP referred to does not show an increase in excess deaths, and in fact specifically fails to find this.
              • lmm 2y ago
                > The only point I’m really making is that the data OP referred to does not show an increase in excess deaths, and in fact specifically fails to find this. That data absolutely does show an increase in deaths, it's right there in the table. It fails to find a statistically significant increase in deaths. The most plausible explanation for that is that the study is underpowered because of the sample size, not that some mystical effect increased injuries without increasing deaths.
• lallysingh 2y ago
  The software needs a way to reject bad plans without falling over.