Checklists are hard (but still a good thing)

Re:Checklists are hard (but still a good thing) by tonyarkles on Wednesday July 23, 2025 @06:52PM (#44664866)

Yeah, I love the book and remember that being brought up. I might have to go revisit that part of the book as a refresher. Aviation, in general and in my current mindset, doesn't seem to benefit from disorder the same way a lot of the other examples he uses in that book.

Aviation is absolutely robust though.

Do you happen to remember how Taleb framed aviation as anti-fragile instead of just robust/not-fragile? As an industry I suppose we're quite good at taking lessons-learned from failures and incorporating those lessons back into making aviation safer as a whole.

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Re:Checklists are hard (but still a good thing) by dvt on Wednesday July 23, 2025 @08:10PM (#44665469)

Antifragile means that whenever something bad happens to the system (i.e. an airplane crash), the system gets stronger by design. A robust system is just a system that is resistant to bad stuff happening (but does not necessarily improve once it happens, or at least it's not built that way).

I'd argue that most Western government institutions (say, governments that have been around for 200+ years) are what you'd call "robust"; likely churches (the Catholic Church, since it's quite centralized), as well.

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Re:Checklists are hard (but still a good thing) by tonyarkles on Wednesday July 23, 2025 @08:11PM (#44665475)

Awesome, thanks for the reminder!

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