(Lesson learned the hard way)
It's probably the goal, but complex endeavors mean you need to iterate to get there
This is reckless and it is stupid and excusemaking for it has no moral grounds.
Excuse me, there are several companies operating submarines that visit the Titanic with tourists?
Submersibles visited the Challenger Deep in the 1960s. We know how to build them, we know how to build them effectively, and we know many of the ways not to build them. "But we added tourists!" is not a meaningful factor here unless what you meant-but-wouldn't-say is "but we value engineered it!" in which case: yes, exactly, that's what safety rules are designed to put guardrails around.
It’s a tragedy, but high risk activities are by definition going to have a few.
And if you tried to take paid passengers on a homebuilt uncertified aircraft today you would go to jail. This isn't the early days. The challenger deep was reached over 60 years ago. We've been building submarines longer than airplanes. We know how to do this stuff safely. This was negligence.
Or then you take things slow and you end up like NASA who has not launched any new rocket in years. Is that better?
Science, discovery, boldly going where no one has gone before? Absolutely safety is going to be somewhat compromised. Taking rich people to the gawk at the Titanic? I, personally, think you're a bit of dick for MacGyvering a vessel together and calling it good enough.
It says something like "this experimental craft has not been certified by any regulatory body". They probably have to be in international waters to put it in water.
If you want to carry paying passengers then things are different, but that's why they were officially crew.
(Crew members who are paying to be there has a very long history. One of the last lines operating sailing ships, in the 1920s and 30s, made money from merchant marine cadets whose countries still required them to have a certain amount of experience as crew of a sailing vessel to get their ticket.)
Looking at the accounts reported to date, the OceanGate engineering culture was basically non-existent. Their test program was extremely lightweight to say the least, and the results that came back from what little hull testing they did do were ignored, resulting in the dismissal of an internal whistleblower [1]. We also learned that there were flammable materials within the pressure vessel, no practical contingency plan to speak of, no emergency beacon fitted, the list goes on. The whole thing was just cobbled together, not fully thought out or vetted, and yet the intent was to journey to one of the most unforgiving environments imaginable.
But getting back to the account of the reversed motor above -- it is one of the purest examples I can now think of where life imitates art. Piloting a stolen (but seaworthy) deep-sea submersible to the wreckage of the Titanic -- that was only able to make right-hand turns due to a "sub club" anti-theft device -- was a major plot point in the pilot episode of the TV series "Pinky and the Brain". Narf.
[1] https://newrepublic.com/post/173802/missing-titanic-sub-face...
Stockton Rush, CEO of OceanGate: "so the pressure vessel is not MacGyver at all because that's where we work with Boeing and NASA and the University of Washington. Everything else can fail: your thrusters can go, your lights can go, you're still going to be safe"
"Mr. Kohnen said that Mr. Rush called him after reading the letter and told him that industry standards were stifling innovation."
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/20/us/oceangate-titanic-miss...
As I get older, I see this sentiment as very naive. The tacit assumption seems to be that there is an agency, a government, an organization, that would review and approve such endeavors. But that's just not how the world works. You can't stop people from going to sea, or sending contraptions to the bottom. It's a very big world, filled with mostly ocean, and plenty of thrill-seekers who will attempt anything half-way reasonable. Even 10% reasonable. You can't stop that, and personally, I don't think its a good idea. To get it you'd need a nanny state that snoops on everyone and steps in to stop you "for your own safety". It's easy to imagine scenarios where this gets out of hand.
If it’s uncle bob in his garage I’d be fine with lack of regulation, but when he starts commercially selling his trips he’d need to pass safety standards.
So literally, it is like, "the four of you's job is to look out this window, make sure it doesn't fog up, my job is to do everything else, alright let's dive"
It doesn't sound like that was the case here.
In a truly free world, people are allowed to make dumb, risky decisions.
It is a necessary component of a complex society.
The main distinction between a self-determined vs authoritarian govt is the independence or lack thereof of all of the govt and society's institutions, including he legislative, executive, & judicial branches of govt, and in general society the press, industry, academy, religious orgs, social orgs, sports, etc. In self-determined societies, these are all quite independent and have a balance of power. In an authoritarian society, the branches of govt and institutions of society are coerced to serve the executive(s) (dictator or oligarchs).
A little bit of regulation does not make a government authoritarian.
Also, desiring to give up power to an authority is authoritarianism (at least according to Oxford): “ the enforcement or advocacy of strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom.”
We struggle to regulate giant industries, there is no chance we can regulate every crazy idea that someone wants to try out.
It’s not that hard, and in any case complexity does not imply authoritarianism.
To my knowledge DNV certification is part of insurance processes. The crew could have asked for such a certification if they wanted to reduce risk (they definitely had the cash).
It is all there, and just because you don't know about it and I cannot recite it all off the top of my head does not mean that it doesn't exist and that it could not be implemented. Regulators know how to find the right people to evaluate the risks and set suitable requirements. (That said, in some industries, regulatory capture and corruption is a real problem, but it does not seem to be the case here.)
As someone who has dealt with certification bodies for designs critical to their operators lives I am well aware of the processes involved. In my experience regulators are often the least qualified to determine risks, since the most qualified people make more money on the other side of the fence. So regulators depend on following a rulebook rather than expert judgement. There are definitely rulebooks for submarines, but they are generally for naval applications with billions of resources, not to minisub expeditions.
The company was open that their design was cheap and cheerful and followed no certification or standard. The riders knew this and could have chosen more expensive, safer alternatives. But did they truly ‘know’ how much extra risk they were taking? I don’t think there’s any good way to judge that.
> “It seems that its main features are the non-acceptance of conflict and plurality as normal elements of politics, the will to preserve the status quo and prevent change by keeping all political dynamics under close control by a strong central power, and lastly, the erosion of the rule of law, the division of powers, and democratic voting procedures.”
Western democracies are not examples of authoritarianism, no matter how much they might interfere with the desire of rich people to prove they’re special.
And that goal cannot be achieved as long as there is 1) rule of law and 2) broadly independent branches of govt and societal institutions. A wannabe autocrat cannot successfully infringe on personal freedoms if (s)he cannot get the legislature, judiciary, press, etc. to go along with it.
And I totally get adventurism, having been an internal-level alpine ski racer, rock climbing instructor, champion sportscar racer, etc.
The key here is how much these "adventurers" are putting the rest of society at risk. Because, right this minute, you (if you are a US or Canadian resident) and I are paying $$millions for the rescue/recovery of the asshat CEO and his four sucker customers.
I think a better regulatory solution may be to require putting up a bond covering the cost of rescue and/or cleanup if something goes awry, or sign-off that there would be no rescue attempt whatsoever (and a bond to cover cleanup of a historic site). But it is not authoritarian to say that "No, we won't allow such adventures without meeting sound safety and systems standards."
These clowns didn't even want to pay to qualify the window in the sub past 1/3 of the planned operating depth, they had not even an emergency signal buoy, or some way of making/emitting a unique sound so they could be quickly located (Canadian sonobuoys detected some clanging sounds yesterday, but they are still not found).
If society really wants any dolt to fabricate any contraption and expect the rest of society to pay to rescue them, that is a societal decision. But it is also totally ok to say NO to that, or put on some basic requirements.
These are neither slippery slopes nor authoritarianism, and it is wrong to cry "authoritarianism" at any rule you might not like; it can be legitimately discussed without catastrophizing.
Regulations do make our life smooth, even if there is a tendency to go overboard.
For subs, it is a tiny number of people and risks are nearly impossible to assess.
We have subs that have been touring the oceans for several decades, so we have a pretty good idea of what is unsafe and what works.
this is total fabrication, we have submarines for 200 years. WW1 german u-boats were safer than this piece of crap
If people want to take huge risks, then so be it. Whether they build the sub themselves or pay and give that responsibility to a proxy, it is still up to them to make their own risk assessment.
I dont see how this is any different. Perhaps you personally have a "so be it" libertarian view but thats not the view the government takes.
If a ship or submarine does not register to any country, I think most coast guards will assume it to be pirates or drug smugglers. And they will probably surrender and arrest anyone on board or sink you if it comes to that.
LMAO.
Remember the proposition: you’re going to dive 2.4 miles underwater, in the middle of the Atlantic.
On a nuclear sub with the best collision avoidance and mapping data available, with highly regimented procedure, this is still a riskier proposition than most people appreciate.
But you’re going to do it in a carbon fiber hull. This is at the very minimum an adventure, with a very high risk of turning into a disaster. You sign the liability waiver and have the balls to get on board the boat, and have the further commitment to board the submersible day-of.
I’m not saying this to blame them or extol their courage. It just is what it is, and sometimes - oftentimes - with adventure sports and tourism, we don’t need to search for bad guys and villains. It’s risky living and this is what it looks like sometimes.
> There is definitely a difference, but it doesn’t really matter philosophically speaking.
I'm unconvinced. The phrase "philosophically speaking" is very vague. Which philosoph(y/ies)?
> If people want to take huge risks, then so be it.
You didn't say who is affected by said risks. Only the person taking the huge risk? What about externalities? "Huge" risks would include an existential threat to an individual and thus anyone who knows or depends on them.
> Whether they build the sub themselves or pay and give that responsibility to a proxy, it is still up to them to make their own risk assessment.
Sounds like we're in the domains of legal and/or moral philosophy. The phrase "up to them" suggests a responsibility, a kind of normative claim. Perhaps a responsibility to make wise decisions? Perhaps a responsibility that cannot be transferred or delegated?
Using the phrase "philosophically speaking" invites these kinds of questions, particularly when the underlying philosophy is unsaid and its reasoning unclear.
Fundamentally every risky decision is up to the individual. Even trusting the regulator is a decision (I don’t trust some regulators in my country because they have a bad record for competence, so I avoid/minimise using things that they regulate). Therefore the final ‘responsibility’ for your safety is always personal, unless you were forced on board, or lied to about the construction.
Legally it’s anyone’s guess who is responsible, that depends on the polity involved and the political philosophy it uses (libertarianism or authoritarianism being the 2 extremes).
I think we should protect those who truly cannot judge (children and mentally handicapped) but in this case it was grown men taking a risk for the chance of a reward. I hope they are found alive and well but I think they had every right to go aboard.
It seems you are trying to say something along the lines of:
A. In cases where an individual has the freedom to make decisions (i.e. not coerced or manipulated)
B. The individual bears moral responsibility for the consequences of those decisions
To what degree did I convey what you were hoping to convey?
This is an flawed argument for at least two reasons:
1. The consequences flow from many people's actions. Figuring out credit and blame is a hard project in philosophy, even theoretically. In practice, it can often be impossible.
2. Humans have imperfect abilities to predict consequences
Point A does not always hold -- not even most of the time. Individual conscious awareness and volitional control is limited. We are largely driven by subconscious and non-volitional parts of our brains. Not to mention by environmental constraints.
I'm not sure I understand your criticism. In this case, who else but the individuals decided to go on the expedition? Where is the lack of freedom? And what is the relevance of 2? Are you saying people are not responsible for their actions because they don't have perfect prediction power? Doesn't it follow that no-one is responsible for anything?
To what degree is it reasonable to hold people to prescriptive standards when their:
- conscious awareness is imperfect
- volitional ability is imperfect
- rationality is constrained
You seem to be suggesting that once coercion and some other caveats are ruled out, the only/main decision under moral consideration is the “very last one” where the person climbs into the underwater craft? (This kind of claim would be very common.)
This is not positive (objective) claim. In order to make such a claim, you have to make a value judgment.
I don’t think it’s particularly useful to point at the last obviously that went sideways and put all the blame on it. That doesn’t allow for a good post mortem. A large set of actions have bearing here, and they tend to be connected.
Many people here on HN know how to reason under uncertainty wrt debugging or attack trees. That same level of rigor needs to be used when analyzing human behavior and ethics. Judgmentalism often gets in the way.
I didn’t mean to frame them as a binary, I interpreted your premises as binary and just wanted to better understand them.
You say it’s a matter of degree, but I fail to see to what degree you think the individual is ‘responsible.’ You are happy to lock up a criminal because ‘their brain and bodies’ make a predictably bad behaviour, so it seems like you do think the individual is ‘responsible.’ In the same way I think we should allow people’s ‘brain and body’ to put themselves in harms way if it doesn’t predictably harm anyone else, thus we essentially hold them ‘responsible.’ I don’t think this is ‘judgementalism’ but rather just the best way to approach a complex situation (as you have shown). I cannot see any good alternatives.
At some point all this complexity needs to be discarded and we need to make a decision either way. We could write tomes about how complex this all is, but it doesn’t change the simplicity of how those intangible arguments become a tangible policy.
Fundamentally everything is a binary when it comes to behaviour, you either take a risk or you don’t. The complexity is fun to unpack but doesn’t fundamentally matter to what our behaviour is. In this case I think our behaviour should be to allow people to make risky personal decisions and accept the consequences for those decisions. It is unworkable to think society can or should hold everyone’s hand all the time.
> You are happy to lock up a criminal because ‘their brain and bodies’ make a predictably bad behaviour, so it seems like you do think the individual is ‘responsible.’
I suppose we need to unpack various meaning(s) of “responsible” then.
To clarify, I don’t hold a person ‘responsible’ in the way most people do; e.g. many people will suggest someone deserves a punishment because they had the freedom to do otherwise. I reject the idea that people have conscious free will. The universe just unfolds; individual decisions flow from the laws of the universe.
To clarify my argument: incarceration is just when the other options don’t work; i.e. the consequences are undesirable.
So, for example, if it were possible to take a dangerous person and guarantee that they would not be in an environment or situation where they would be a danger again, I don’t see the point of judging or punishing them based solely on some (mistaken) notion that they could’ve done anything differently.
That said, punishment may be just to the extent that it dissuades future lawbreaking.
Yes, there are consequences to one’s actions, especially in a society that strives for mutual respect and the rule of law. I think this is what you mean by ‘responsibility’?
I don’t care for how many people use ‘responsibility’.
(1) Too often such a meaning is so skewed towards individualism that it almost by definition rules out exploring collective action or systematic failures.
(2) It is easy to find the last proximate thing that “went wrong” and hold the person who did it “responsible”. But what about the more significant factors?
In so many cases, I think people expect people to be ‘responsible’ in ways that defy statistics. If you look at the number of times that drunk people get behind the wheel, it is clear that we can’t rely on individual responsibility to get the job done. Hence social movements for designated drivers, rules for people who serve alcohol, and more.
Judgmentalism is tricky to pin down. I try to distinguish an assessment from a judgment; an assessment is about facts whereas a judgment is about values. So when I talk about judgmentalism, I’m talking about this tendency of people to look at other people’s mistakes, and say/think “they should have known better and acted differently”.
I think I understand your perspective. Just to check: what is your stance on seatbelt laws and why?
I think it is in society’s interest to dissuade people from doing idiotic things. Of course, there is value in individual freedom too.
How often do completely victimless crimes occur?. The person who doesn’t wear their seatbelt ends up going to the hospital. That requires money and resources. Due to insurance and/or public funding, that person is not going to pay the full cost of that visit. Even if they paid the full cost, it still would have an effect on other people wanting to use the service around the same time.
> In this case I think our behaviour should be to allow people to make risky personal decisions and accept the consequences for those decisions.
Except that society likes having people around that are, well, alive, unmaimed, etc. for many reasons — for intrinsic value and also to contribute to society.
I’m not sure I have a comprehensive theory about the morality protecting people from themselves. But e.g. we know that humans are susceptible to alcoholism, so we try some things. I don’t think anyone thinks it is ethical to just let someone drink themselves to death — at least not until all other feasible options have been exhausted. Defining feasibility is not obvious. At some point we might say that the alcoholic’s life is not worth saving given the treatment cost.
> It is unworkable to think society can or should hold everyone’s hand all the time.
Loaded language again.
This is obvious but narrow. I grant that we don’t have unlimited money to do everything that we might want. But that has no bearing on what we should do with the money we have.
So I would ask you specify a principle that guides you.
When it comes to ethics, many thinkers define one or more or the following: principles, objectives, or ideal future states.
Most sensible ethical systems care about human flourishing and reducing human suffering. To those ends, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with getting help from a friend or a government. Whether or not social programs make sense is a calculation not a statement of first principles.
I agree with seatbelt laws since it is simple to regulate, doesn’t change driving very much and saves a huge number of lives and resources. Most people don’t understand how dangerous driving truly is.
There are a lot of differences between that and the minisub situation. One is scale, this doesn’t harm many people; another is relative danger, submarining is an incredibly dangerous activity (even naval vessels have major accidents). I think the main reason I don’t like suggestions to heavily regulate exploration is that it would basically prevent the activity occurring. We could ban all extreme sports and save many lives, but at what cost? I value the joy and excitement these things bring people, even with the massive danger.
Apologies for the loaded language, it probably doesn’t help the discussion. Sometimes I just can’t help myself (but I’m not responsible :P). Thanks for the interesting discussion.
You can apply binary categorization if you want, but that’s not what’s happening with the human body acting in the universe. Human actions have many degrees of freedom.
As one example, consider a cop deciding on how to respond to a vehicle stop. There are conservatively dozens of ways in which his response might vary. Does he call in for backup? How does he characterize the situation? How does approach the vehicle? What does he say to the driver? Does he place a hand on his gun? Does he draw a weapon?
As another example, consider a manager breaking some bad news to her employee. The possibilities for the human interaction are vast.
Why is it important to you to frame human actions or risk-taking as binary? Is it necessary for your argument? I struggle to see how.
But I’m also struggling to make sense of the moral philosophy you are outlining.
And my moral philosophy isn’t comprehensive or consistent, essentially I think there are some useful moral standards (eg golden rule) but when it comes to details I’m a relativist, we can choose what we want, there is no true right or wrong.
We can label these actions in many ways, such as analog or discrete.
To revisit my earlier question: Does it matter to your philosophy how we label them? Why?
In this case the binary action is getting in the sub or not. The outcome is dying or not. There is no analogue aspect of either. You can’t half enter a submarine or half die.
Decomposing things down to a binary is fundamentally how things work. We can analyse things to death and add our own mental/idealistic layers of continuity (like probabilities of outcomes or degrees of truthiness of statements), but the decisions that come from the analysis are always binary.
Which kind of moral relativism? There is quite a big difference between the various flavors...
> Descriptive moral relativism holds only that people do, in fact, disagree fundamentally about what is moral, with no judgment being expressed on the desirability of this.
> Meta-ethical moral relativism holds that in such disagreements, nobody is objectively right or wrong.
> Normative moral relativism holds that because nobody is right or wrong, everyone ought to tolerate the behavior of others even when large disagreements about morality exist.
> Said concepts of the different intellectual movements involve considerable nuance and aren't absolute descriptions.
Quotes from Wikipedia [1], even though I prefer the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [2] for more detailed explanations.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism
[2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-relativism/#ForArg
There are practical differences such as: I prefer not to travel to geographic regions where a sizable number of people think it’s OK to harm me or treat me less than their in-group. I think you would agree. (?)
I’m not simply speaking of general chaos that you might find in a war zone; I’m speaking of cultural and ethical norms that are predictably harmful or constrain my ethical set of freedoms.
For such a preference, we can ask: How we assess this preference we have to avoid particular moral systems? To what degree does the following apply: We are acting rationally to protect ourselves? does our preference also reveal our actual morality here?
What about when such a choice cannot be made in a vacuum? It is one thing say that you’re a (particular kind of) moral relativist, but if you had to make a choice between supporting one moral system and another, what would you do?
Philosophers such a Robert Kane use logic along the lines of ”you have to choose” to argue against the deeper senses of moral relativism.
Thanks for discussing. I think they were probably better forums for us to unpack these ideas. I think we disagreed enough to make it interesting and are clear enough to make discussion possible. LMW if the subject area or another, would be something that you would like to unpack further. I’m prototyping some discussion tooling.
I’m interested in the discussion UI. For a while I’ve been thinking about how to turn discussions like this into knowledge graphs to make it easy for others to follow and contribute. If you’d like we could set up accounts on one of the philosophy forums to discuss this?
There is a difference between somebody selling me poison and somebody selling me “lemonade” that’s actually poison.
You can build your own plane and fly it with relatively few restrictions, but as soon as you a) manufacture a plane for sale to someone else, or b) get paid for transporting someone in it, the regulators become much much stricter.
The question of whether or not organisations, businesses, states, armed forces, educational institutions, self-declared medical providers, and other entities incur some obligation to preserve peoples lives - and if so in which ways and to what extents - are far from settled questions. It helps no one to adopt a hard-libertarian position, omit the framework being employed, and imply the matter is settled.
A fair number of regulatory efforts trace their roots to a groundswell of public distress in the aftermath of preventable deaths; and questions such as "should I, a computer programmer, be undertaking my own untrained risk assessment of the particular type of cladding used in Grenfell tower" are perfectly fair objections to a libertarian free-for-all position.
I’m not a hard line libertarian, I think regulations are good in many cases. But not in the case of high risk adventuring. If you want to climb Everest, visit the titanic or the stratosphere, then that’s up to you: the state need not hold your hand, the risks are obvious to anyone with eyes.
The fact that libertarians have a difficult time just goes to show how close minded and dogmatic universities are. If all flavours of opinions were respected enough for discussion then I think you would end up with less extremists online and in general.
I think the demarcation problem applies just as well to politics as to science. What is good policy? Impossible to know absolutely, so we must rely on heuristics, judgement and intuition. Claims to truly objective knowledge just don’t hold up. Regulators often fail, and in many cases no regulation is preferable. I can’t prove that, but critics can’t prove otherwise, so we discuss and learn and change our opinions as we go.
The Grenfell tower is good example of failure of regulation. And I think the fundamental problem _is_ over regulation. When regulations become bloated beyond the capacity to enforce them, most of them are ignored and the most obvious ones are the only ones enforced. If the regulation was simpler it would be easier to enforce because you would only focus on _critical_ aspects. Instead of simplifying, people campaign for more regulation, forgetting second order effects that make things less safe.
Seems like a worse deal than the war on drugs. At least you don't get many people breaking into houses or neglecting their children to pay for their next trip to the Titanic.
Let them go nuts. Tax it like you would a commoner with a loaf of bread, bill them in full for any rescue efforts, and let nature take its course.
I've worked at some companies that manage huge systems that affects tens of millions of people, which cause extremely severe problems if they break, and they are "cobbled" together with a surprising amount of metaphorical bubble gum and duct tape.
Every time I go somewhere new, I assume they have their shit together and I am surprised every time.
So no, it doesn't surprise me that an operation like this was cobbled together in the same fashion.
But when you use that approach on a new, one-off device with life-threatening consequences for failure, sooner or later you're going to find out that "testing in production" may not always be appropriate.
Look at e.g. Kubernetes. You can cobble something together on kubernetes and once you get it limping, the system will be running surprisingly well for being cobbled together, compared to e.g. a system cobbled together from one off bash scripts.
The point is just that any system that's being used successfully in production at scale has already been tested, has already broken in myriad ways both in testing and in production, and those issues have been addressed somehow - quite possibly by more cobbling together.
This doesn't somehow make the system "not actually cobbled together" - as I said, the implementation may still seem horrible to engineers. It just means that the points of failure that have actually arisen, whether in testing or production, have been addressed somehow, so that the system is able to function at scale.
A key point in all this is that factors like survivor bias are at play: you're not looking at an org that failed because of their cobbled-together system, you're looking at one that succeeded. Large orgs are also more likely to have more testing to help catch the issues with their cobbled-together systems.
This all means that if you try to use this approach on your experimental submarine that you're selling tickets for, you're trading off the almost certain loss of life of some of your passengers against the short-term time and cost savings achieved by poor engineering practices.
To quote Lord Farquaad, "Some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I am willing to make."
Nowadays I expect something clumsy and mediocre, regardless of the organization, with very apparent problems and _maybe_ some bright spots somewhere in the system architecture.
Yes, my impression is that this feels naive, especially if reflects a more general viewpoint of surprise when organizations do negligent things. The law of large numbers combined with human nature seems to statistically all-but guarantee such failures over a few decades.
> ... The tacit assumption seems to be that there is an agency, a government, an organization, that would review and approve such endeavors.
No. You made that tacit assumption, not the commenter before you. This assumption makes it easy to setup a straw man.
> But that's just not how the world works. You can't stop people from going to sea, or sending contraptions to the bottom. It's a very big world, filled with mostly ocean, and plenty of thrill-seekers who will attempt anything half-way reasonable. Even 10% reasonable. You can't stop that...
This is a false dichotomy. A more apropos question is how to reduce undesirable outcomes.
> ... To get it you'd need a nanny state ...
"Nanny state" is loaded language, "... rhetoric used to influence an audience by using words and phrases with strong connotations. This type of language is very often made vague to more effectively invoke an emotional response and/or exploit stereotypes." - Wikipedia
> ... that snoops on everyone ...
More loaded language.
> and steps in to stop you "for your own safety".
More loaded language.
> It's easy to imagine scenarios where this gets out of hand.
Are you using the slippery slope fallacy? I'm not quite sure.
Regardless, wise public policy is not exclusively based on such an approach of imagining things getting out of hand. There are better ways. To name just one, scenario planning is a powerful way of combining probabilistic decision-making across potential scenarios.
You aren't explicitly stating your political philosophy, but I'd bet it underlines your thinking here. I just hope that it is conscious, curious hypothesis-testing and not calcified dogma.
## Useful Responses
There is a wide menu of public responses and/or policy instruments available to reduce undesirable outcomes and promote desirable ones.
It is an interesting question, I think, not one that should be quickly dismissed. Legally, jurisdiction seems to be a good place to start. Culturally and economically, what motivates such negligent underwater attempts? Maybe it isn't the top problem in the world to solve, but I think too many tech people have a huge blind spots and pretend to know more than they actually do. This example is newsworthy, fun, tragic, and not particularly politically charged, best I can tell. So why not use some good reasoning here and discuss it?
We have laborious and very expensive approval processes for airplanes, ask the 737 MAX inspector from the FAA how well that guarded against bad engineering.
If even the bad engineering is at fault here (unknown as of writing this).
Those approval processes don't work when the government regulators allow the company being regulated to "self-regulate". There was no real FAA approval process for the 737MAX: FAA just let Boeing do it themselves. Of course that's going to lead to bad engineering when the sales team and executives make engineering decisions, and no one outside the company knows anything about it.
In the meantime such processes add much to the expense such that only larger well-funded and well-connected people can participate. The ones most likely to game it, btw.
It’s a reason planes basically look the same for many decades too; newer stuff is harder to get through. Also part of why Boeing thought it best to revise an existing design once more, besides designing a new one. The process led to bad design decisions quite directly, though of course everyone blames Boeing (rightly) but not the process the FAA imposed.
Not true. The reason planes look the same is because that's simply the optimal shape and layout, aerodynamically, for carrying passengers in the most fuel-efficient manner. Ask any aerospace engineer.
But there's been some big differences if you look more closely. Engine nacelles are a lot larger than they were 50 years ago, since bigger high-bypass turbofans are more efficient. And winglets are basically standard now. Under the skin there's huge differences: fly-by-wire, composite wings, etc.
>Also part of why Boeing thought it best to revise an existing design once more
Wrong. It's because some customers (cough Southwest cough) would only fly 737s, and because the FAA's broken rules allowed anything called a "737" with a 737 airframe to be flown by any pilot rated for that aircraft, even if they've only flown one from 1969, even though there's big differences between the generations, and because the FAA didn't mandate a more thorough process for this loophole.
>The process led to bad design decisions quite directly, though of course everyone blames Boeing (rightly) but not the process the FAA imposed.
This is correct. The FAA is the root of the problem here. But the problem isn't that "processes can be gamed around", the problem is that this particular regulatory agency was corrupt and failed in its primary duty. Of course regulations can be gamed around; that's why the regulators are supposed to stay on top of that, and continually revise regulations to deal with this. It's a cat-and-mouse game, but here the cat just gave up and let the mouse tell it how to do its job as a cat. The answer to this problem isn't to get rid of cats; it's to euthanize this particular cat and get a better cat.
What regulatory agency isn't captured?
If you make a regulatory body, you want to staff it with those who 'know' about the subject. That's going to come from the most well-known groups at the time. These are people, and they had lives and friends before in the groups they came from. So, naturally, a lighter touch will be given to some from the same groups, but not to others who are unknown; and that's best case.
Also, I have seen no evidence that any regulatory body has done much to help safety, and they will definitely discourage risk-taking. Planes for instance, were getting better and safer before the FAA arrived. Concern for the environment grew before the EPA, workplace safety increased before OSHA, and so on. All these agencies (because they are staffed again by people, who want to keep their jobs - ask a doctor, he'll say you need a doctor, etc.) will point to the improvements after their inception, and say, "look at the good job we do!". It does not hold though, that these improvements would not have occurred without the agency, and it could very well be the case that improvements come sooner.
For instance, the current basic airframe might be best, but few try other designs, like a lift body, or a flying wing, which might be more efficient. I know the B-2 bomber was based on a flying wing design and does need sophisticated computer control of the control surfaces though, to work without a tail, and that's costly enough to get right. Add the FAA rules on top, and, as has happened, that idea dies early on the vine. You might say that's a good thing, and maybe in this case it was, but it also clearly wasn't tried for very long either, and the attempts would draw greater scrutiny from the FAA.
And that's a shame.
Stockton Rush, is that you? Aren't you dead? Or are you a big fan of his?
>Concern for the environment grew before the EPA
That sounds like "thoughts and prayers". "Concern" doesn't protect the environment; laws and enforcement does. The EPA was made for a good reason.
>workplace safety increased before OSHA
Some, but not in other places, just like the EPA. OSHA made rules and enforced them, so everyone got workplace safety, not just some places where management cared enough.
>ask a doctor, he'll say you need a doctor
Yes, because everyone eventually gets some illness that requires the services of a doctor. Many illnesses are only detectable with tests.
>For instance, the current basic airframe might be best, but few try other designs, like a lift body, or a flying wing, which might be more efficient.
You can read stuff all over the internet explaining why flying works don't work for passengers; it's not because of "regulation", it's because it's just a bad design for that. It's only used for bombers because it gives them stealth (combined with other design choices), and bombers don't need pressurization. Pressurizing a flying wing adds lots of weight, and to get equivalent internal volume, the design requires a huge wingspan that airports can't handle. It has nothing to do with FAA rules, and everything to do with physics.
I think the former is totally fine and there's no need for governments to get involved, while the latter is pretty bad and very possible to regulate.
A lot of ocean activity is thoroughly regulated. For example: https://www.imo.org/en/About/Conventions/Pages/International...
Moreover, It's not like they're getting paid in sand dollars or doubloons from the bottom of the sea. The passengers are signing contracts and paying large fees in landlubber currencies. There's a company involved here, a legal entity. The company is based in Washington State.
If this was really not covered by any law in any country with a plausible claim on it, you can bet that people will soon be clamoring for one. Remember that air travel was once entirely unregulated. Now it's one of the most highly controlled activities. A lot of regulation like that happens in response to notable disasters; the regulations are, as they say, "written in blood."
I also suspect that people with broad authority may investigate this and consider/recommend prosecutions if appropriate. E.g., the Washington State Attorney General, the US Coast Guard, and the Canadian Coast Guard.
It's not hard to certify vehicles before use. We do it with cars on a daily basis.
Measuring the necessity for regulation "in blood" is unbelievably cruel.
Good regulation balances the need for innovation vs the need for public health and safety. We can argue about the right balancing point all day, and people certainly will. But there's no simple solution on either side.
How is this a deniable point?
We are conscious enough as humans to not require death to change beliefs.
People who pay for that kind of trip know the dangers and have money enough to do their own due diligence.
Personally, I think it ought to be illegal to misrepresent your service’s safety. I seriously doubt the passengers onboard were aware of OceanGate’s whistleblower lawsuit or the claim that the viewport is not rated for the depth it is used at. When interviewed by the BBC, the company represented their submersible as very safe, certainly not as something likely to kill its passengers.
How is it a “nanny state” or “snooping” to require businesses to be honest about their service? This isn’t even necessarily an action a government would have to perform - it could be carried out by classification societies [0]. Do whatever you like with your own experimental sub, but don’t misrepresent it as a safe sightseeing trip for tourists.
To me, it is more naive to assume that nothing can be done about businesses misrepresenting or outright lying about stuff. We have remedies for those - they are called laws and regulations.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_classification_society
I believe that the GP’s point is that there’s no omniscient agency that can preemptively stop people from doing stupid things. There’s not enough resources to watch everything that everybody is doing all the time.
Have you ever heard of the name "Edward Snowden"?
What everybody is doing is already literally being watched all the time and it has been that way or at least decades and has gotten worse with technological evolution.
So, to evaluate action at t=0, we compare some metric at the real t=1 against the counterfactual at t=1.
It is logically invalid to evaluate the efficacy of an action by only comparing the metric at t=0 and t=1. That kind of reasoning error is incredibly common.
I didn’t suggest that this is necessary. It seems like there should be enough resources to look into the construction standards of a tourism company based in the U.S. that has received international press coverage for several years. It is possible to stop a tourism company from operating. This wasn’t a secret deep sea dive that no one could halt - it was the latest in a series of commercial voyages that were covered in the press (a BBC reporter went on one a few years ago, and there is a video tour of the vehicle). This dive was publicly announced.
No one needs to be surveilled 24/7 for regulations to work.
So everything already worked as intended. The tourists didn't bother to check the classification or if they did, were willing to dive anyways.
The 737 MAX shows that government involvement is not enough. Likewise doping shows that a legal framework is not enough to prevent advanced cheating.
>Personally, I think it ought to be illegal to misrepresent your service’s safety. I seriously doubt the passengers onboard were aware of OceanGate’s whistleblower lawsuit
Wouldn't it be better to establish a verification culture? There are always businesses that lie. The law only works retroactively while the tourists would be alive if they had checked.
My comment was suggesting that the U.S. government require that a business has a certification from an approved classification society in order to conduct a submersible tourism business. This does not seem to be the law currently since OceanGate is allowed to operate without any.
> The 737 MAX shows that government involvement is not enough.
No regulations will prevent all accidents, but I would say the rarity of fatal air accidents in the U.S. in recent decades is partly a testament to high standards enforced by the FAA.
> Wouldn't it be better to establish a verification culture?
That sounds good too. That doesn’t contradict that regulations should also be in place so these conventions are required.
Because the FAA has reporting requirements for any abnormal flight behavior which causes deviation. They literally prevent future accidents by analyzing past behavior.
Of course it is. But I think GP was just saying that there are no agencies to check rare venture like this. At least not before an incident happens.
> But I think GP was just saying that there are no agencies to check rare venture like this.
I think they were making a stronger claim: that there is not only no agency currently doing this, but that it is pointless and impossible to try and regulate this area, which I don’t agree with.
But I agree with GP: there is something off about the calls for regulation here. Fundamentally, people should have the right to risk their lives in crazy expeditions to the bottom of the sea or the top of a mountain, and charging someone else money to be taken along does not change that.
No. That poster was not just making positive claims. They also made normative and prescriptive claims, which I am pushing back on.
IANAL. This isn't just your personal opinion. In Common Law jurisdictions, see also: negligence, false advertising, deception, fraud, and misrepresentation. Civil Law jurisdictions have concepts that are comparable.
This is exactly why we need less government and be slower to call for laws. Human nature cannot be changed despite our belief that it can be.
The same lazy decisions that led to this potential event can also be used to destroy lives.
At the end of the day we are all accountable for our selves.
A nanny state is telling you how to live your life. An example is when NYC banned large soft drinks or when we listed marijuana as a schedule 1 drug. Registration of a mode of transportation is hardly a nanny state activity because vehicles inherently pose a risk to others whether as a passenger or someone sharing proximity with you.
You can certainly build your own car and register it. They're often called salvage titles; this is true for airplane kits too, but you also have to be able to prove the worthiness of the machine. We have lots of process and administration to take care of this, but for whatever reason it didn't work here.
- they didn't do a test dive first with no humans on board
- they didn't do a test dive with just staff, no paying customers
- the first "test" was to the full depth where the craft would be basically unrecoverable
- they didn't seem to even test these things ashore... Because you'd find out if the damn motor was on backwards!
If true, this strikes me as beyond amateurish and outright insane.
Except there's not whole teams of engineers and checklists to prevent that sort of thing. Nor humans aboard.
Shades of the Thresher disaster. No doubt we'll hear a few months down the track that the Navy's sound receivers did actually pick up the implosion noise.
4,000 meters should mean 400 bars of pressure from the water, would the thing need to be inflated at more than 400 bar?
The pressure vessel was a titanium hemisphere bonded to a carbon fiber cylinder. It was destined to fail with such a fundamentally compromised design like that.
I imagine maybe carbon fiber would be better in tension (e.g. airframes) than in compression (this), perhaps. Or do carbon fiber and titanium not get along somehow?
(EDIT: Had tension and compression backwards.)
<in an Obi-Wan Kenobi voice> Now that is a word I have not heard in a long, long time.
Whut
There needs to be a system by which any company can ALWAYS be guaranteed some $X for 0% equity if it is going to be used and documented for life safety improvements and tests. That $X can even come from taxes, I'm okay with that.
Also there seem to be quite a few train derailments as of late.
Oh and what about that apartment building that just...collapsed in Ohio?
Seems like there have been quite a few cases of safety regulatory failure in recent memory.
Edit, oh, it's a pay walled story.
There you go :-)
When things work you can great things in record time.
When things don't work, people die.
No offense, but to put it bluntly, this just means you have no experience with the hardware world, pre Musk, and don't understand the line between "user feature" and "safety critical".
The failure modes for a vehicle are also a lot simpler than a sub. If the interior starts to fill with smoke you can stop and get out. A submarine doesn't have that option.
Haven't they? They've removed radar from their cars and now the AEB system uses image recognition. Does any other manufacturer do that?
"General Motors said Wednesday that automatic emergency braking will be standard on 98% of its new vehicles by Aug. 31, the end of this model year. The four remaining automakers were close to hitting 95% in December."
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-05-31/us-safety-...
https://www.carscoops.com/2022/09/2022-tesla-model-y-perform...
If Tesla decided to make their suspension entirely out of carbon fiber despite knowing carbon fiber handles stress cycles differently and tends to fail catastrophically at the limit then you'd have an apt comparison.
Or you can look at the Boeing 787's carbon fiber body design as an example of how to do something completely differently. They deviated from the norm but that involved years of engineering and testing to identify potential failure points, how operating conditions impact the service life, etc. They designed inspection schedules and procedures for out of spec events like excessive G-forces, hard landings, explosive decompression, over-pressurization due to pack failure, and so on. All of these things are well known with aluminum airplane bodies but not for carbon fiber.
So a 787 operator knows if they have an explosive decompression event exactly what needs to be checked and how many flights to shave off the expected service life.
From what we know right now Titan had a unique hull design yet did absolutely none of the engineering or testing legwork before putting paying passengers inside. That is what makes them reckless and Boeing or Tesla not so much.
Tesla likes to boast about the safety of their cars, and while I don't deny this, I believe that the safety is an accidental side-effect of the inherence properties of building a car with no explosive fuel and a heavy battery pack at the very bottom of the car.
Many other EVs have equivalent safety ratings.
https://www.euroncap.com/en/ratings-rewards/electric-vehicle...
https://www.shift2electric.com/_files/ugd/49f443_f12301e882e...
Using the euroncap ratings you used as an example, the model Y received the highest rating ever tested
It's only when it blows up that it turns from "ingenuity" into "amateur hour".
People who participated in this knew the risks. They fucked up. None of us would have designed a better submarine, and I'd wager we're not all that qualified to tell a crappy design from a good one, except - once again - after the fact.
Once you realize that ingenuity is not going to be enough to survive: Seal everyone in, then fake the whole experience with a screen built in to the porthole.
I dunno. I would never go with wireless over cabled, certainly not as my primary steering method, and it sure as hell wouldn’t be the only method onboard to control the thing.
Maybe it’s better if these things are build by paranoid instead of adventurous people?
Much more concerning are the potential flaws in the carbon fiber hull, as disclosed during the David Lochridge lawsuit (mentioned in another thread), the rumoured lack of surface radios, the limited communication with the surface, the lack of any exits, and even the use of carbon fiber (which is strong in tension, good for high pressure tanks, but weak in compression -- not what I'd want for a submarine under massive compression)
The problems here are just several fold: maybe the door won't help you at depth, but there's a pretty wide envelope of conditions in which a fast escape hatch is the difference between surviving a fire and burning alive.
The CEO of OceanGate said he "learned the lessons of aviation", but this is obviously BS if he's locking himself in a capsule with flammable equipment, piping oxygen in, and just hoping it doesn't burn. That's a recipe for disaster we know how to avoid.
If we’re talking worst mistake I think the lack of any form of communications equipment is it.
Hell, have a 4km long cable. Even if you can’t communicate because the sub is on fire or imploded you can drag them back up.
Of course it’s not nice if your sub implodes, but that’s kind of a requirement for using it in the first place.
Your car is filled with cheap off-the-shelf *car* components. There's far more scrutiny given to car parts, even though they're cheap stuff.
But to get back to the controller, while it's not necessarily the worst problem, it is emblematic. That's why people reduce it to that. It signifies immediately what kind of company they were. Emphasis on were.
So many problems with this scheme, though. No rigorous test (depth, survival, atmosphere), lack of SMEs, carbon fiber hull, failed to learn lessons from aviation (don't lock people in a room that can burn), lack of ventilation, failure to provide emergency breathing, no voice comms, and finally the comms loss during testing that was normalized as operating procedure.
All you'd have to do is not make one of those mistakes, and you'd be doing a better job. These are all issues that are solved on US Navy subs, where we train hundreds of people every year to work on and retire just as many. You don't need to know all these systems, though, just find a retired sub chief and have them walk you through the safety systems.
One thing I've picked up working in software, is that you can enter new domains with relative ease if you just align yourself with experts, and at least listen to their advice. This isn't something that happened on the sub, and I'd be surprised if it ultimately didn't contribute to the total vehicle loss.
All credit to SV Seeker, it is a wildly impressive project, but I don't think they would be mad if I suggest they had the resolver spirit while putting that vessel together.
Consumers (who don't really understand the dangers of the environment they're about to enter) just blindly trust that they're in good hands, and in this case it seems like they were deceived about the trustworthiness of this vessel.
But this trip to see the Titanic is completely different. This was an experimental trip on an experimental vessel (they signed specifically to that affect). Anyone who thinks that journeying down to 13,000 feet to see the titanic was going to be as risk free as crossing the Puget sound or going to disney world is crazy. The sheer reason they are paying for this trip is because it has been relatively impossible up to this point. They are breaking new frontiers by doing so which is by its nature inherently risky. There has to be known risk involved here. It isn't a ride at disneyland. This was serious. I am sure they didn't actually expect to die, but they had to know that there was a realistic possibility of that outcome.
Consumers/the general public are less aware of the risk, and as another reply said more likely to trust a company on it's safety. They aren't marine engineers so they have to. That's why it's a regulated industry.
Researches are making an entirely different risk/benefit calculation and it's useful to society that they can make different risk tradeoffs. Key example, astronauts.
In that is an implication that research is more important to society than a holiday activity.
Did they? Knowing the risks, imo, requires more than just being aware of the failure scenarios - it also means having an understanding of the probabilities involved. Playing Russian roulette with 1 vs 5 rounds have the same worse case outcomes, but the odds are very different.
Not doing destructive testing, hiding info from the guy who was supposed to look at the ship, etc. that's avoiding getting a handle on risk.
> None of us would have designed a better submarine
Probably not, but otoh, it sounds like they probably could have done so and failed to take the necessary steps to make it happen.
https://www.chronline.com/stories/woman-paralyzed-in-toledo-...
This would have been a scrappy solution for a sub in a pool where there was a chance for help. You don't take paying customers on a scrappy sub to the bottom of the ocean.
Peers in the industry though have expressed concerns, such as in this 2018 letter:
> This letter is sent on behalf of our industry members who have collectively expressed unanimous concern regarding the development of TITAN and the planned Titanic Expedition. Our apprehension is that the current experimental approach adopted by Oceangate could result in negative outcomes (from minor to catastrophic) that would have serious consequences for everyone in the industry.
https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/marine-technology-soc...
Or when they fired and sued their director of marine operations who raised safety concerns:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23854184-oceangate-v...
I really hope that the foresight of the MTS is recognized amongst the general public, and the DSV space doesn’t suffer a setback in perception and/or funding. At present, it does seem like the general sentiment is that this specific submersible was built to an incredibly poor standard when compared to, say, the famed Alvin or Deepsea Challenger. I hope that sentiment holds.
I just mean, if the lights are so unreliable, imagine if they all failed, they moving in the dark next to the Titanic. (looks like they also have radar, but that could fail too) And the Pilot in that ep seemed to partly depend on the viewer at the front to say if they got close to something. Looks pretty hard to navigate the sub. I know they trying to give a tour to consumers, but I would want the pilot at the front by the window with the best view and time to react. "Driving" kinda blind with just radar and high ISO camera's is a bit sketch.
Sounds like everything I’ve built in Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom so far.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0fpz9zw
and honestly a lot of it seems quite amateur hour. One of the steering motors was fitted backwards. When they discovered this, at the bottom of the ocean and a few hundred feet from Titanic, the solution they used was to hold the gamepad at right angles to compensate. That time they proceeded with the tour and made it back, but I can see how things could have gone a lot more wrong.