It's the classic "expertise is universal" fallacy. When we see someone who is an expert in their field, we assume that expertise carries over to totally unrelated fields, when this is emphatically not the case. Being a genius does not prevent someone from being ignorant; the finite nature of time means every genius is almost completely uninformed on almost every topic, and without information what you get is GIGO.

I suspect that many (but not all) of the “crazy” suggestions were a bit tongue-in-cheek.

Which I think is fine? Isn't it fun to imagine how you would unstick a huge boat, even if your idea is totally off the mark due to a bad application of lateral thinking? Be it helium balloons or falcon heavy lifting rockets.

Oh yes, great fun to be had by all. You'll hear no complaints from me.

Or ramming another containership into it.

Or repeatedly exploding nukes behind it to convert it into the first space going Orion container vessel....

Yeah, the part that is missing are the experts who can take those "crazy" suggestions and explain, in accurate detail, all of the reasons why there are better ideas.

Along with detailed explanations of the better ideas.

As it was, we kind of just got stuck on the jokes and random thoughts.

There's a whole industry around ship recovery and they know how to do things like patch things back together with some light underwater welding and then pump the water back out the hole in the bottom with compressed air. Lots of times, this is done while the ship is busy worrying itself to death on a reef.

Ship salvage is a combination of batshit crazy and real-time engineering marvel with a healthy dose of understanding tides waves and currents. There's also a strange maritime law business going on where the captain and or insurance company have to sign a contract. IF the ship is a 'wreck' the salvage company gets what ever they can save or whatever it's agreed on in the contract. If it just needs some help, the contract will be lighter. But many ships have sunk completely while the insurance company and salvage company have argued over whether it was a total loss or just suck in a low tide.

I always find the salvage stories to be super interesting. Seeing people do hard ball business while the ship is breaking up under them is really something else.

Reminded me of the Kathryn Spirit ; "After years of immobility, the federal government awarded an $11-million contract last year to a conglomeration of businesses to dismantle the ship. Ironically, one of the companies picked was the same one that abandoned the wreck in 2011."

Where: "years"=8

"Built in 1967, the Kathryn Spirit has not had an owner since 2015, at which point the federal government took control. The ship, which had been used as a cargo ship in the past, had been towed to Beauharnois in 2011 by the Groupe St-Pierre, which wanted to dismantle it in the St. Lawrence River to then sell the scrap metal."

https://www.westislandblog.com/abandoned-vessel-kathryn-spir...

The smartest ones are maybe not the ones providing suggestions?

Then again, it's fun to speculate, and what are these threads for if not to provoke thought? Maybe it's fine for people to imagine and try to put themselves in the place of the professionals working on the problem. You can interpret the comments here as an indicator of dangerous human hubris if you want, but I think most of the people here understand that they can't do any harm by posting naive speculations on HN.

In my opinion, we should save our outrage for people who make an active attempt to be taken seriously and affect the actions of more qualified people, such as the guy who posted the bizarre (and possibly satirical?) account of his attempt to build a system for guiding doctors' treatment decisions.

I had great fun reading about the number of helicopters and starships needed to lift the ship and probably took something away from it for future endeavours. Really great for thinking about scale.

some of the suggestions seemed borderline condescending

e.g. "why don't they just do X"

as tho' the actual experienced engineers working over there on the problem couldn't come up with better ideas than some guy who happens to spend a lot of their day on the internet.

"Why don't they just do X" has two interpretations:

1. "This is such a simple solution and I think they're dumb for not doing it."

2. "X seems like a great and obvious idea, but they aren't doing it. Therefore, there must be something they know but I don't, and I'm interested in learning it."

I try to take the second interpretation whenever I see someone posing solutions in that manner.

It actually happens quite often and you can get handsomely rewarded for being that some guy ;

https://www.innocentive.com/

Have fun ! :D

"why don't they just do X" can be a great question. Why not just use Riemann integrals for everything? Why not use timestamps as ids? Not knowing the answer is a good enough reason for asking, and I don't feel like I need to police people's feelings and decide if they were feeling curious or condescending when they asked. They'll learn either way, when the question is answered.

I can imagine some people might have asked questions in a disingenuous or insinuating way ("why trust vaccines if the supposed experts can't get a ship unstuck") but I did not personally see any of that.

HN is a lot of amazing experts in a particular subject mostly talking about something else. It's fascinating in this way.

As correct as that is, I don't think anyone was actually thinking those were good ideas. There's something really innocently funny about this episode of history, and honestly it's fun to just think about what-ifs. Could you build surge walls all the way along and use some kind of dam? Combine all the power of every helicopter to lift the whole thing? Big ships are fun, unwieldy objects getting stuck are fun, sometimes it's just fun to mess around.

I wonder if there is a forum of marine engineers somewhere speculating on how Google (or whoever) should fix a service outage...

The way I look at it is, if I’m here, then there’s a strong statistical probability that a bunch of other clueless superficially intelligent people like me found their way here too. I just hope anyone I encounter is smarter than I am.

I enjoy reading all the various ideas people come up to solve a complex issue. I know it's mostly not realistic but always good to see how imagination come forth.

I just re-read that old thread and to be honest, on the whole the advice there is sound. I saw comments discounting the fanciful speculation outnumbering the speculation by at least a multiple of two.

There are silly ideas in every forum. I've been on plenty groups comprised entirely of tech experts and I can confidently say that foolish ideas will be proposed even in the most elite of circles, even in their areas of specialty. It happens, and as long as there are other reasonable voices it's fine.