80 Transcontinental Railroad
80 Suez Canal
50 Brooklyn Bridge
17.46 World Trade Center
6.4 Sydney Harbor Bridge
4.47 Hoover Dam
3.37 San Francisco Bay Bridge
3.33 Eiffel Tower
2.67 Titanic
2.5 Sears Tower
1.47 Empire State Building
1.17 Trans-Alaska Pipeline System
0.75 City Center Las Vegas
0 Chrysler Building
[1] https://www.forconstructionpros.com/blogs/construction-toolb...
Looks like I zoomed in (cmd-+) a few times to make the numbers more readable, and went past what the page's CSS could handle.
In the mid 90s the bridge name was changed. It is now generally referred to as the “Ironworkers memorial bridge”. Anyone crossing that bridge since is constantly reminded of that engineering error.
“Better safe than sorry” is rising belief.
Once this truism became generally accepted, as it generally is, it has precedent over other considerations. Since “safe” means more than physical safety, practically any human action is subject to exponentially increasing levels of scrutiny. It takes time to come to an agreement that everything is safe. In big projects it takes a lot of time. On bigger projects it might never come.
I think this is a cowardly and inaccurate belief and agree it is what it driving changes across all areas.
It is the institutional flaw of democracies and free markets. People (demand) are capable of acting irrationally and emotionally leading to a reduction of individual and public good.
Throughout history you find the people who believe this are not the ones who's safety is sacrificed in pursuit of some grand project...
I’m assuming your OP thinks “better safe than sorry” is stupid because it doesn’t actually help you make decisions.
I would much rather drive on a bridge of someone whose motto is “do it right.”
This isn’t the Apollo program. We know how to make safe bridges. It’s not a matter of being cautious and talking to every stakeholder. It’s a matter of hiring actual engineers,* letting them work, believing them, and then giving them the resources to monitor construction properly.
It means sometimes rejecting a lot of bad material and holding the project up for 8 months.
It does not mean “lean safe” and cross your fingers.
* meaning licensed engineers. The word engineer has I guess been made meaningless by thousands of people writing code and calling it “engineering”. It used to mean someone had completed training as an engineer.
Better safe than sorry MEANS do it right. It means that human life is more valuable than material wealth.
If you are hiring amateurs to build your bridge, or you are “crossing your fingers”, then you are not being “better safe than sorry” — in the sense that what you are doing can not be an implentation of “better safe than sorry” that can be reconciled with the broader cultural context in which people use the phrase and discuss it.
This is not accurate on both accounts.
First, material wealth can be converted into quality of life in multiple different ways. Consuming additional millions to push death rates down by a few percentage points is taking away from other places, ostensibly hurting others.
Second, better safe than sorry does not mean do it right. Mistakes will happen, and acting like nothing will ever go wrong is a fools errand. Planning for failure is a significant portion of project management and engineering in general. The goal is 0 mistakes, but severe negative overreactions in response to failure can have a net negative impact.
A friend of mine was just hired as a project engineer at a construction company. He was confused since he has no engineering experience. Turns out, at this company, it means you are training to be a project manager.
Another way to look at this is to ask why the United States seems incapable of even maintaining existing projects. For example, look at the current state of the New York City subway.
I suspect slowness in building new infrastructure, and poor maintenance of existing infrastructure, have the same root cause: lack of political will.
American voters don't expect their governments to be good at this kind of thing. European voters would vote politicians out of office if their transit systems got as bad as the NY subway has become. It would be seen as a failure to execute one of the basic duties of government.
Americans often vote those people out of office and their replacements are equally useless or worse.
We have created a system where results often don't matter as long as there is the correct capital letter next to your name on the ballot.
Compounding this further is that politicians know that they can count on your vote but they rely on the money of industry and lobbyists to campaign. Thus the very industry that is supposed to be fixing the problem under contract is able to overcharge and take longer than agreed becuase our politicians rely on them for funding.
Nowadays, big projects in the West are far more complex since have to meet more demands and more stakeholders are involved. In authoritarian countries, this is not so much a problem, the new airport in Istanbul is built very fast, but concerns from citizens are not respected etc.
Pure utilitarianism leads to outcomes that are clearly out of step with almost everyone's moral codes. For example you could kill someone and take their organs to save the lives of 4-5 people. Is it rational that we're not allowed to do that? Why do some people get to keep 2 kidneys when there are others with none?
This is solved at least somewhat by using 'rule utilitarianism' instead of 'act utilitarianism'. Society is better off as a whole if we adhere to rules such as protection of the human body or safety regulations when constructing buildings.
There was a pretty good short story, "Dibs" by Brian Plante, about that published in the April 2004 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact.
Everyone was required to be registered in the transplant matching system. Occasionally you'd receive a letter telling you that someone was going to die soon unless they got one of your organs. That person now had dibs on that organ, and if anything happened to you before they died they got it.
Usually you would get another letter a couple weeks or so later telling you that the person no longer had dibs, which generally meant that they had died.
Sometimes, though, you'd get a second dibs letter while you already had one organ under dibs.
And sometimes you'd get a dibs letter when you already had two organs under dibs...meaning if you died now it would save three lives. At that point you were required to report in and your organs were taken to save those three other lives.
The story concerned someone who worked for the transplant matching agency who got a second dibs letter and was quite worried. He illegally used his insider access to find out who the people were who had dibs on him, and started digging around to try to convince himself they were terrible people who didn't deserve to survive to justify illegally interfering, if I recall correctly (I only read the story once, when it was in the current issue).
I don't remember what happened after that. I just remember thinking that it was an interesting story and explored some interesting issues.
Consider if by sacrificing someone on an altar you could magically cause several months of construction work to happen overnight. That would still be murder.
The current traffic system as an insane "death and mayhem lottery" that we force ourselves to play, with out respect of youth, age or anything.
The current interest and action towards bike-friendly cities is a symptom, I think, of a healing of societies' psyches. We have been pretty brutal to each other since the Younger Dryas, and it's only recently that we've started to calm down and think about what we really want our civilization to be like.
The real thing I would advocate (if this weren't a beautiful Sunday afternoon, calling me from my keyboard) is a design for traffic that began from the premise of three (or four) interconnected but separate networks, one each for pedestrians, bikes, and rail, and maybe one network of specialized freeways for trucks and buses. Personal cars would be a luxury (unless you live in the country) that few would need (rather than a cornerstone of our economy) with rentals taking up the slack for vacations and such.
But if you're interested in this sort of thing, don't bother with my blathering, go read Christopher Alexander.
My other answer is really just an invitation to a kind of thought experiment: what if we really did restrict ourselves to just walking, biking, and trains? How would civilization look in that alternate reality?
If decreasing your speed from 100km/h to 50km/h gives you a 1% lower chance of dying in a road traffic accident, but you spend an additional 2% of your life stuck in traffic, is that a win?
They may be more like classic cars than regular vehicles at some point, though.
You could have picked a better example. I see tons of young people smoke and wonder what the hell is wrong with them, whether or not they haven't been paying attention for the last 40 years and then I realize they didn't because they weren't there to begin with. So the tobacco industry can work their nasty charms on them with abandon because there are new potential suckers born every day.
Or alternatively, maybe as strange as a motorcycle or vintage MG.
I think people underestimate the cultural impact that self-driving vehicles will have - imagine a whole generation or two after self-driving vehicles are generally available - how many people will bother learning to drive? I think it might become more of a job-specific skill than a general 'adult life' skill as it is now in most places.
At some point, human driven cars become novelties, just like that. There is no reason to ban them, but as you suggest, maybe there will be some HOV-like lanes where they don't really have access. Or even some time constraints (not during rush hour on some key roads, not in lower manhattan, etc).
Killing someone to take their organs to save 5 lives is utilitarianism to only first order effects. We live in a world that does not terminate after one time step, so we have to consider Nth order effects to calculate utility.
For example, the second order effect is other humans' moral judgements. "How horrible, he murdered that man" is a valid moral reaction to have, and this is disutility that must be accounted for in a "pure utilitarian" world view. Third order effects may be the social disorder that results from allowing such ad hoc killings as means to an end, and so on.
The only thing preventing pure utilitarianism from being viable is a lack of compute power, and "rule utilitarianism" is a poor heuristic based approach for philosophers without patience ;)
No, but that should be the ideal which you should strive to move towards, when practicable. But you can't ever actually get there, and shouldn't try infinitely hard either.
The question, as always, is: "Where do we draw the line?".
Reliably the people absorbing the risks capture almost none of the added value.
Yes, it's a great idea. Killing one person will allow us to double speed. How exactly I wonder, but this seems like the kind of project where asking questions is strictly forbidden.
We built the first interstate highways pretty quickly too, and part of why is we just plotted a line and set the bulldozers to work. Nobody worried about habitat destruction, erosion, endangered species, etc.
# 10 are confirmed dead on the HK portion, the death toll on the Chinese portion is unknown.
There's little question that lax worker safety and weak labor laws can contribute to faster economic growth, but I'm not sure that's something we should be trying to replicate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong%E2%80%93Zhuhai%E2%80...
http://www.ejinsight.com/20170413-how-many-more-people-have-...
At least one reason is that we have substantially different safety regulations since we're not accepting of deaths on a project like that. 5 people died on that project. 11 died to build the Golden Gate. Original Bay Bridge? 24.
They actually had a rule of thumb at the time: 1 death for every $1M spent on a project[1]. Any metric like that would be absolutely unacceptable today.
[1] - https://www.npr.org/2012/05/27/153778083/75-years-later-buil...