Alert About Missile Bound for Hawaii Was Sent in Error, Officials Say

Re:Alert About Missile Bound for Hawaii Was Sent in Error, O... by cm2187 on Saturday January 13, 2018 @06:49PM (#16142047)

But there are certain jobs where the job is to get it right 100% of the time. This sort of mistake is extremely damaging in the unlikely scenarios that there would be an actual alert. A significant proportion of the population will ignore it next time because of this. You can’t take the “shits happen”, “break often and break fast”, “it doesn’t matter because we learn from our mistakes” attitude with everything. And in general with anything that has to do with nuclear energy & weapons. Or take a swat team to take another recent example of a really bad mistake.

https://www.xkcd.com/1428/

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Re:Alert About Missile Bound for Hawaii Was Sent in Error, O... by marcosdumay on Saturday January 13, 2018 @10:34PM (#16142692)

> But there are certain jobs where the job is to get it right 100% of the time.

No there aren't. There are certain activities that must be always correct, you implement those by making a reliable system out of unreliable jobs, not by making the people 100% reliable.

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Re:Alert About Missile Bound for Hawaii Was Sent in Error, O... by ithkuil on Sunday January 14, 2018 @03:35PM (#16146223)

So, the people who are in charge of designing such a system need to do a good job. What if that too inevitably fails? You can either improve the system/process by learning from mistakes or blindly firing the culprits and replacing them with somebody who might well make the same mistake again

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