Comment by CWuestefeld
6 days ago
humans are so oblivious to safety
It seems that in modern times, humans focus on safety almost to the exclusion of everything else. As much as the more traditional salutations "godspeed" or "have a nice day", we're even more likely to hear "drive safe" or "have a safe trip" or "be safe".
We're very nearly paralyzed by insisting that everything must be maximally safe. Surely you've heard the mantra "...if it saves just one life...".
The optimal amount of tragedy is not zero. It's correct that we should accept some risk. We just need to be up-front and recognize what the safety margins really are.
> We're very nearly paralyzed by insisting that everything must be maximally safe.
Are we? People saying "have a safe trip" is pretty weak evidence.
The counter evidence is just about everything else going on, at least in the US. Relaxed worker safety standards, weakened environmental protections, and generally moving as fast as possible.
My kids are going to be legally mandated to be in car seats until they’re about 12 years old.
Your implied frustration at a relatively easy change backed by experts and mountains of data is another point in favor of
> humans are so oblivious to safety
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Oh wow what a tragedy. You think maybe there's reasons for that mandate? Like maybe it saves children's lives?
But sure everything would be better if any moron was allowed to decide how to keep their own kids safe.
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Considering cars are one of the top causes of death for kids (the top?), this just feels obvious.
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>Relaxed worker safety standards, weakened environmental protections, and generally moving as fast as possible.
These sorts of collective values (or lack thereof) make it more important that individuals focus on their own safety in day-to-day life, no?
Yes, why don't individuals who live near industrial facilities simply find their own clean air to breathe.
And workers should refuse to do unsafe work, and simply take one of the many safe jobs instead.
We don't need a childhood vaccine schedule. We just need parents to keep their kids from getting sick.
Kind of silly that we as a society even bothered with all of the dangerous safety standards to start with.
Considering that driving (at least in the US) is a relatively unsafe means of travel compared to the alternatives, I can understand imploring someone to drive safe.
Not just the US.
Rather strangely when choosing transportation options, people generally don't say "I'll take the subway it's safer", when it very much is.
On the other hand people accept things like "I have a fear of flying" much more easily than "I have a fear of cars".
Our internal emotional thinking doesn't work very well with probabilities so it is a very common fallacy trying to reduce a probability to zero when it is completely irrational.
I feel like all the responses to your comment sort of prove its point.
As I was reading the post I was wondering along the same lines, if this is different from before. Going to space is an inherently risky activity. It's always going to be easy to write the "this is not safe" think piece, where you can either say "I told you so" or "Whew, thankfully we made it this time!" afterwards. Things like this only happen when you accept some risk and people say "yes" press forward.
All that said, not all risk is equal, and I'm trying to understand if NASA is uniquely dysfunctional now and taking needless, incidental risks.
America has been craving safety since 9/11, and it has made cowards of everybody, so in some sense I would agree.
But taking a risk regarding an unknown or to expand knowledge or actually accomplish something is one thing. Ignoring known and mitigable risks just to save money, save face, meet a deadline or please a bureaucrat is another.
Anyway these clowns even fail your criterion, because by covering up the results of the first launch/experiment, they are not being up front about a risk.
In my opinion this is a top-down, human hierarchy thing. CEOs and agency administrators create and set an organization's culture and expectations.
The irony is that a faulty heat shield is an engineering challenge that real engineers would love to tackle; all you have to do is turn them loose on the problem, let them fix it. They live for that. I find it actually aesthetically offensive that the organization and its culture has instead taught them venal, circumspect careerism, which is cowardice of a different kind.