Feynmann on Challenger
This is one of the smartest things I've ever read. In 1986, Richard Feynman served on the Rogers commission to investigate the Challenger disaster. Feynman pulished his own comments as an appendix to the offical report. It's so lucid and clear and sensible, yet its wisdom is apparently not obvious. Read it even if you're not interested in the space shuttle. It's about confidence, risk, system design and more:
We have also found that certification criteria used in Flight Readiness Reviews often develop a gradually decreasing strictness. The argument that the same risk was flown before without failure is often accepted as an argument for the safety of accepting it again. Because of this, obvious weaknesses are accepted again and again, sometimes without a sufficiently serious attempt to remedy them, or to delay a flight because of their continued presence.
Think of that line: "The argument that the same risk was flown bere without failure is often accepted as an argument for the safety of accepting it again." Doesn that say a lot about the way people are? "I ran a red light last time and nothing happened. I know someone who smoked every day and lived to be 90. I leave the door to my house unlocked, and nobody's broken in so far." And on and on. People tend to push their luck. We're not good, on a gut level, at estimating dangers.
But that's why we build systems around us, to help us so we don't forget. We do know that we'll get hit or get a ticket eventually if we keep running red lights. A program like the space shuttle is part of a program, so that when (not if) one or two or three parts of it break, there are still other parts of the program there to catch it. But then we rely on the redundancy of those systems too much, and forget that the whole thing only works if best efforts are made to make every part of the system work correctly.
It's interestng to see that these remarks, besides being available on Ralph Leighton's Feynman site, they're on a Nasa site, as well. As the New York Times editorializes today, it appears, sadly, that they weren't taken enough to heart by that organization.
(While you're at Leighton's site, take a look around; there's lots of good reading there. And if you haven't read the collection Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, which includes this appendix, you're missing out on a real treat, and I recommend you remedy that as soon as possible.)
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
10:41:02 PM Permalink
|
|
