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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   33053 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023

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The Titan submersible suddenly became very hot culture war.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Titan_submersible_incident

The wikipedia link is quite thorough.

TLDR as of 2023-06-22 000000z seems to be:

5 people are trapped on a submersible that has lost contact with the outside world.

It was trying to visit the wreck of The Titanic.

Major effort rescue is on under way.

They are running out of air in the next couple of hours.

The name of the vessel is Titan (come on, no one can be that brazen, you are tempting fate)

The people are couple of billionaires, explorer, and the CEO of the company

The vessel can be opened only from outside.

The vessel used some off the shelf parts (like a logitech controller) and somewhat exotic materials.

Now comes the culture war

  1. Somewhat lack of empathy for the people there because of their status in the crazier places of the internet.

  2. The way the vessel was built and operated embodied the SV ethos. There are reports that it was not certified or audited by anyone, that the hull testing procedures were not adequate, that the company moved fast and broke things. So right now said ethos is having torn a new one.

  3. Surfaced a recording of the CEO bragging how they don't want to hire 50 years old white guys because they are not inspiring.

To me actually 2 is the most interesting one out there - 1 is just internet being the internet, 3 - if a small error could lead to death - hire the most safety oriented, pedantic and boring people there are to design your product.

But with silicon valley moving more and more prone to overtaking the meatspace - their physical products kinda suck. From smart thermostats to fridges to whatever we actually have degradation of the experience. So I think we are in a rough ride. And the more products they make smarter or move fast - the more human lives will be at stakes.

Don't think this is culture war as much as "it was inevitable".

company moved fast and broke things

I am glad to see SV get torn a new one. As a MechE turned CompSci person, the difference in ethos between both fields is shocking. It is one thing to have a careless approach when human lives aren't at stake. But to then throw shade towards fields where safety is paramount is classic SV hubris.

their physical products kinda suck

Thanks for saying this out loud. Credit where it is due to Apple. It is the only tech company that knows how to make robust physical products.

It seems like the "move fast and break things" ethos could still have a proper place in physical engineering. I look at SpaceX, for example. They move quickly and break things... until they have a reliable product they can safely put humans on. Falcon 9 is arguably the most reliable rocket in the world, because they were willing to move fast and break things.

What would that look like with a deep submersible? Maybe an autonomous version that gets extensive testing and use before you put people on it? I don't know.

It seems like the "move fast and break things" ethos could still have a proper place in physical engineering.

It does, it's just that we stopped having an existential need to do it, so we have the luxury of judging that "no risk is worth it". After all, there's nobody about to bomb us into the Stone Age if we're wrong about "it wasn't worth the risk".

Of course, 20 years of that and you're getting arrested for letting your children play in the front yard (because don't you know there's a 1e-9 annual risk of them getting snatched?), going outside without a mask (because don't you know that there's a 1e-9 risk of a healthy person under 60 dying of the Apocaflu?), or telling your son he's not a girl (because don't you know... yeah, you get the picture).

I'm not sure I even agree that you can't move fast and break things with people, if those people are fully aware of the risks and willing to accept them. If Columbus had waited until it was totally safe to cross the Atlantic then it never would have happened. There's some risk level that would make space or deep sea exploration not worth it, but I don't think that risk level is zero. Personally I wouldn't be willing to take the risks necessary to be a pioneer, but if other people are willing to do that I don't think we should make regulations to stop them. Now if somebody is hiding the risks or telling people that something is safer than it really is then that is a major problem and should be illegal.

I'd be careful picking SpaceX or anything Elon does as a positive example of 'move fast and break things', the whole thing might very well end up like OceanGate.

Seems pretty unlikely at this point. They already have (arguably) the most reliable rocket in the world.

The rocket is ok, but I'm not sure I try their accounting. There was a leaked email from Elon about how they have to get Starship to orbit if they're to make any money, and I don't see that happening. Generally with Elon, there's a whole lot of hype, and not a whole lot of substance, so if the investor money dries up, his entire empire might come crashing down.

But I hope I'm wrong!

I don't know why you're so skeptical of Starship? They've clearly been making tons of progress on it. Hell, they even launched a failed test.

I can see why you might call Elon a bit of a hype machine, but really, he has delivered on quite a lot of his hype.

Electric cars? Yep

Electric trucks? Yeah

Self driving? Eh, no

Charging network? Yeah

Tons of battery manufacturing? Yeah

Orbital Rocket? Yeah

Reusable Orbital Rocket? Yeah

Reusable Heavy Orbital Rocket? Yeah

LEO satellite internet? Yeah.

Tunnels under every city? No.

I don't know why you're so skeptical of Starship? They've clearly been making tons of progress on it. Hell, they even launched a failed test.

Why am I supposed to get so excited about a failed test? Give me a fraction of the money Musk got, and I'll do a failed test too. As a bonus, I'll do none of the damage to the infrastructure, and environment that Musk did!

Electric cars? Yep

I'll stick to my Volkswagen, thanks.

Electric trucks? Yeah

Complete garbage that will never operate on anything close to the economy of a normal diesel truck.

Charging network? Yeah

Tons of battery manufacturing? Yeah

What's supposed to be so fancy about either of those, and where does Solar City fit into these?

Orbital Rocket? Yeah

Like I said, it's a decent rocket, but hardly mindblowing.

Reusable Orbital Rocket? Yeah

Reusable Heavy Orbital Rocket? Yeah

Reusability is way overblown, and I haven't seen much evidence it brings all that much (any?) savings.

LEO satellite internet? Yeah.

That's the thing he was crying about in the leaked email that is unprofitable, and why he needs Starship to make money.

Tunnels under every city? No.

Tunnels are an ancient technology, and his aren't any better. Also while we're here, let us meditate on how insane the idea of "hyperloop" is, and how it didn't go anywhere despite all the hype.

Like I said, it's a decent rocket, but hardly mindblowing.

Reusability is way overblown, and I haven't seen much evidence it brings all that much (any?) savings.

SpaceX resulted in massive price reduction of getting to orbit

But what you were saying is he doesn't deliver on things... not that you don't like the things.

More comments

But with silicon valley moving more and more prone to overtaking the meatspace - their physical products kinda suck.

confusing how this relates to silicon valley at all? What's the connection here? Oceangate isn't a company from or base in silicon valley.

The "move fast and break things" libertarian-style ethos is a common cultural type in Silicon Valley.

But i dont blame a random chinese company screwing up on silicon valley just cuz ethos is similar?

Diving tourism isnt exactly a silicon valley focus

So is Microsoft ... and yet it is considered a SV company.

Sure, but thats cuz their businesses are congruent with silicon valley, plus they have huge silicon valley presence, and talent revolve between msft and others…

A product manager from google isnt exactly the ideal candidate for this diving tourism company. Doesnt make sense to me at all

Surfaced a recording of the CEO bragging how they don't want to hire 50 years old white guys because they are not inspiring.

Didn't the CEO also fire a 50 year old white guy for points out the safety issues?

For a moment, let's consider how people would react if a different race/gender was put in there and something like this happened... I would imagine there would be a fair amount of smug going around.

If that guy was on record saying he wouldn’t hire black guys, he’d have a whole different set of problems. Imagine being trapped in a tin can with Papa John.

Imagine being trapped in a tin can with Papa John.

Easy there Satan... Some horrors are too much for mortal contemplation. lol

Would have been nice if papa John were on the sub tho

@netstack, @orangecat, @FiveHourMarathon

I got some reports about these comments being low effort, antagonistic, and "reddit tier commentary". I don't think the comments are bad enough to escalate to the level of being an official mod warning. But I do just want to put out a reminder that people come here for a certain level of quality in their posting, and they don't always appreciate these types of comments.

Imagine being trapped in a tin can with Papa John.

Easy there Satan... Some horrors are too much for mortal contemplation. lol

Would have been nice if papa John were on the sub tho

  • -11

I don't see a strong culture war aspect to this one actually. As far as I can tell, pretty much everyone thinks that thing was obviously a death-trap and the CEO was an idiot. There's only a little variance on how hard to sneer at the passengers for being foolish rich people and whether to trash the CEO for claiming he "didn't want to hire 50 year old white guys". Okay, they're foolish, but they've suffered pretty severe consequences for it. And the CEO sounds kinda racist with that statement, but I think he actually cares more about not bringing in anyone who would question the bad design and lax safety practices than their skin color - the staff pics I've seen look pretty lily-white.

A few other notes that I picked up in my reading about this:

The hatch is only rated to a third of the depth they were diving to, and the pressure vessel was never actually proofed to any depth at all. It's made of carbon fiber mostly, which tends to shatter instead of deform when over-stressed.

The life-support limit is a bullet point on a document, and a suspiciously round number. Nobody knows how they actually came up with this number or whether their life support systems were ever actually tested with 5 people for 96 hours. It's not clear how it works either or what its failure modes are. It's possible it could lead to an abnormally high oxygen level, which makes the environment highly flammable, and doesn't appear to have any firefighting capabilities or smoke mitigation systems.

The hatch is installed in the center of the endcap of the cylindrical vessel. It's pretty clearly designed to only be opened on the submersible sled thing it gets launched with. It seems likely to me that if the sub was floating on the surface and the hatch was opened, it would rapidly flood and sink. Maybe slow enough for people inside to get out, maybe not. I guess (if it made it to the surface) being able to maybe get out and float around on the surface in the middle of the Atlantic is better than definitely suffocating, but not a lot. I guess life vests, survival suits, and life rafts would be too much to expect here.

Right now it's looking like the submersible did indeed shatter. The more I read on their website, the crazier the whole thing seems: their previous version only went down to 500m, this one they were trying for 4000m.

It's hard to speak ill of the dead, given the CEO went down on this trip, but the entire philosophy seems like "try moonshots and don't be held back by the regulators" which is great if you're mucking around on land but not so great when an "oopsie!" means you're crushed to death by the water pressure of deep ocean.

'I don't want to hire the old guys like the other companies do, I want young and exciting original thinkers' is a bad decision because the old guys are the ones who've seen how things fail and when, and if they were saying "uh yeah I don't think so" then firing them to be replaced by 20+ year old who goes "totally let's use a game controller" is not the best idea, yes?

I really like how several people have already explained to you that the game controller is one of the sanest parts of the debacle, but you continue to treat it as a slam dunk.

Well, given their other design decisions, is the Logitech looking like such a good choice now?

Yes, it has been explained that game controllers are used elsewhere. I am not aware that other submersibles use them, please inform me if that is so. And while it may not have been the worst part of the whole package, I think that when you are doing something that could go very badly wrong very fast involving human life, being cautious and making sure you have robust systems in place is better than "Well the Navy use it for surface level machinery!"

The controller is the only sane-ish part. The xbox controller is ergonomic, sturdy, reliable and indestructible. My x360 one that I bought in 2006 is still going strong. PS4 is comparable although slightly more clumsier.

"try moonshots and don't be held back by the regulators"

It is also great in the water. As long as you don't put humans inside. Conduct couple of hundreds of tests - your consumables are literally bags of sand and pipes.

On the ‘floating on the surface of the Atlantic thing’, I believe the water above the titanic is too cold for that. You’d just have hypothermia listed on your death certificate instead of drowning.

A good point. Which means they'd need survival suits and/or a good life raft to not die of hypothermia in minutes. Which they may or may not actually have time to put on in their teeny little sub with freezing water gushing through the giant hatch on the side, even if they had them, which they probably don't. But is there even any point in bringing along that kind of gear given the other issues?

And all of this is probably irrelevant anyways, since it now looks like it did indeed shatter on the ocean floor. Which means the whole crew got mashed into paste faster than they could blink.

I guess it actually was cost-cutting! No need to make it reasonably practical to survive on the surface in this thing when it's already so shoddy it'll probably fail catastrophically at depth anyways.

Well, the idea is probably to put the survival suit on, then open the hatch. But they probably don’t have room for survival suits and life preservers and the record on sub accidents, even ones with experienced designers and no cost cutting, is not keen on crew survival anyways.

Indeed. Like the [H. L. Hunley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._L.Hunley(submarine) and it's famous 300% crew fatality rate.

Bit hilarious visiting the Titanic and... not making provisions to evacuate your vessel safely in case of unforseen events, though.

I'll just draw a brief comparison to my "Skin in the Game" rant from a couple days ago.

We have here a massive contrast to the problem I pointed out with most elite institutions.

In this case, the particular man responsible for the failures put his own life on the line as part of the process.

So, regardless of what else you think of the guy, he didn't slough the consequences of his decisions off on someone else. If they got stuck and had to suffer for days of slowly dwindling oxygen supply, he was down there suffering with them (unless they killed him or he killed himself first).

Compare that to this little bit from the aforementioned rant:

The overarching issue is that no matter how much damage an elite causes through their decisions, no matter how foreseeable that damage was, no matter how incompetent and unsuited for their position they are, the system as it currently operates does not allow them to actually suffer in any way that matters. There's no 'feedback loop' or filter that catches bad elites early on and keeps them from advancing to positions of greater power or enacts harsh consequences when needed to dissuade others from misbehavior.

In this case, the CEO willingly put himself into a position where his own survival and comfort would be compromised if the comfort or survival of his customers, riding in his vehicle, depending on his decisions, was compromised. His incompetence, to the extent it impacted the outcome, would impact him as well.

The feedback loop and consequences in this case were pretty much instantaneous. We don't even have to go through a lengthy investigation and trial, nor wait for a vengeful family member to attack him. If the submersible imploded, he died. If they survived for days in agony, he suffered... then died.

And now he has filtered himself out of the system, so whatever bad decisions and processes he may have been following are shown to be defective, and the person pushing those decisions and processes has no more influence.

And, in theory, this should make future incidents of this particular type substantially less likely, so the system as a whole is stronger for his absence, although we can certainly mourn for the people he took with him.

I call this issue "Tower Jumpers" versus "Arm Whirlers". I'm taking the names from Inventing Flight by John D. Anderson, Jr. The book is mostly about the Wright brothers. It starts with a discussion of the early history, with brave men inventing wings, strapping them on, and jumping out of towers. Jumping to their deaths. Others were more cautious and built gadgets to help them understand wings and lift. Wind tunnels were invented late. Before wind tunnels they used the whirling arm apparatus.

A theme of the book is that outsiders were taken by surprise by the success of the Wright brothers. Outsiders only got to hear of the passion and tragedy of the Tower Jumpers, who were making no progress. Only insiders knew of the Arm Whirlers with their gradual accumulation of knowledge and slow progress.

The distinction helps us understand "skin in the game". If you can distinguish between Tower Jumpers and Arm Whirlers, employ only Arm Whirlers. Insisting that they have "skin in the game" will ensure proper caution. If you cannot tell which is which, insisting on "skin in the game" will have an uneven record, with the Tower Jumpers ruining your safety record and their own skin.

The trickiest question is: how much skin in the game? Insist on too much and the Arm Whirlers will stay away; they were the risk averse ones. Then you only have Tower Jumpers and insisting on "skin in the game" will help you not at all.

It is utterly untrue that elites have no 'skin in the game'.

Where do elites live? The downtown core of major cities. If violent crime spikes in Manhattan or San Francisco, it's rich people who suffer more than the middle class. Middle class white picket fence Americans don't live in Manhattan, they don't live in downtown SF, they don't live in the Loop in Chicago. They live in safe suburbs that are themselves largely insulated from the effects of elite decisionmaking.

During the pandemic, my rich parents' neighborhood (Greenwich Village, Manhattan) which was and is one of the most expensive zip codes in the country, measurably got worse. They're tough on crime, but by and large, wealthy people in Manhattan voted for the most 'pro justice reform' mayoral candidates. They supported Alvin Bragg for DA. When garbage piles up and homeless people accost them in Washington Square Park, that's the direct impact of deinstitutionalization and 'justice reform'. When upper-middle class whites support affirmative action, they're directly making it harder for their kids to get into top colleges (yes, even with muh legacy admits factored in). I know tons of very wealthy people who truly believe and advocate for higher taxes on themselves. I know plenty who don't, of course. But many do. Rich parts of LA like Santa Monica are full of homeless encampments that directly make the lives of the wealthy people who live there worse. Again, much more skin in the game than in the average safe suburb of a midwestern city.

Sure, the absolute pinnacle of these movements are a little more insulated; I imagine that Alexander Soros has a bodyguard (although that's probably as much because of threats from schizo Qanon types as it is because of random dangers in the city). But in the merely moderately-wealthy segment of the PMC (say the 97th to 99.95th percentiles) there's a lot of skin in the game.

I think that in the San Francisco Bay Area, most of the truly rich live in very safe areas. For example, in San Francisco itself many of them live in Pacific Heights, a neighborhood that is extremely clean and has close to zero presence of homeless people. These rich people's exposure to violent crime is very small unless they deliberately go out of their way to travel into the more crime-ridden parts of the city. Incidents like what happened with Pelosi are exceptions that prove the rule.

The ordinary rich take the subway in Manhattan. The actual elite do not; they don't really have skin in the game as far as subway crime goes. That includes both the ultra-rich like Soros and the political elite... when's the last time Alvin Bragg took the subway when it wasn't a photo-op?

Does the Manhattan DA get a driver? Bragg’s only making $200k a year and seemingly has no family or business wealth (he’s worked for the state in various capacities for decades), so if he doesn’t I assume he’s taking the subway. I know multiple people who’ve seen de Blasio on the subway, have seen city council members on the subway, those are ‘political elite’ of the city I guess. I doubt Adams takes the subway, but that’s just because he’s a social climber who lives beyond his means.

And in any case, even rich people who don’t take the subway are still affected. My mother doesn’t, but my parents like taking a walk after dinner, like going to the park for long walks on weekends (last time I was there in [edit] December a couple of schizo homeless were ranting incoherently and scaring off tourists by the carousel). They deal with it, I know because they and all their rich friends discuss it all the time.

Yeah I mean when he was public advocate or the borough park councilor, I know the mayor gets a motorcade.

It is simply, absolutely and utterly untrue that elites have no 'skin in the game'.

So why do they continue to pursue measurably harmful policies, and indeed policies that fail on their own terms with very little to show for it? Like, when is the last time any big-name politician admitted their policy didn't work as intended and then stepped down or was punished in some way as to make amends for the failure?

The example I provided of Chesa Boudin, whose policies failed, abjectly, at reducing criminality in his district. But now he gets to teach a new generation of lawyers to carry his policies forward, probably to other towns around the country.

Why does anyone still take the man seriously?

When upper-middle class whites support affirmative action, they're directly making it harder for their kids to get into top colleges (yes, even with muh legacy admits factored in).

I'm really not sure I count the majority of "upper-middle class whites" as "elites" for our purposes. They don't have the sort of influence on policy outcomes, nor do they have the sort of wealth that can actually swing large-scale outcomes that marks someone as 'elite,' although perhaps they may be the elites of their local environment.

And I would bet you can't find any situation where a particular Congressperson's children were unable to gain admission to the school of their choice, even if they were rich and white.

And let us make the point clearer: by making it harder for your KIDS to get into school, you are in fact MAKING SOMEBODY ELSE SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES of your actions.

Show me people who are in favor of actively making their own chances of getting a particular job or promotion or admission to [institution] worse!

That upper-class whites are being made substantially worse off by a particular policy prescription while the persons in charge of setting and administering the policy endure no consequences is in fact the problem. Because upper-class whites who DON'T support the policy are still eating the consequences, and cannot do anything meaningful to fix it.

I know tons of super very wealthy people who truly believe and advocate for higher taxes on themselves.

Get back to me when they actually start signing checks to the government of their own free will. Literally nobody is stopping them.

"Supporting higher taxes" is really not putting more skin in the game. You would want the people who are in charge of spending the tax money they collect to be heavily motivated to spend it well, however.

Usually, the person most incentivized to spend money efficiently and effectively is the person who earned and properly owned it.

Rich parts of LA like Santa Monica are full of homeless encampments that directly make the lives of the wealthy people who live there worse. Again, much more skin in the game than in the average safe suburb of a midwestern city.

So why are the homeless encampments allowed to persist? Whose policy decisions lead to this outcome, and why aren't they being removed from power and run out of town on a rail (literally or figuratively) so their influence is completely eradicated?

If the persons whose job it is to resolve the homelessness issue is directly suffering from said problem, why aren't they extremely motivated to make progress on it?

The average safe suburb is safe BECAUSE the people in charge of handling such matters as vagrancy probably have a lot more to lose if they can't keep the homeless population down and the streets safe. The ones who failed will be selected out and won't keep influencing the outcome.

You're missing that the real key factor is that skin in the game means you get filtered out if you make bad decisions.

It doesn't have to be literal death, but you should be in a position to lose all your money, prestige, and/or influence in the event that you make decisions which demonstrably worsen the lives of thousands of people.

If you're a banker and you lose your depositors' money, you shouldn't get a golden parachute into another high-paying job. You should lose all your money along with them and never be given a job in the financial sector again.

If you're a politician and you implement a policy to eliminate homelessness, if the data shows no impact on homelessness after millions upon millions of dollars spent, you should probably be removed from office and possibly tarred and feathered. Or at least, maybe you should be required to live in the same conditions as the homeless folks you were trying to help.

The point is less that "elites aren't ever going to confront the results of their policy choices when the entire world is made worse off," and more "elites are never going to suffer consequences that are fully proportional to the harms their policy choices cause."

The issue is the asymmetry. An elite causes 100,000,000 units of dis-utility across a large population, but only suffers about 10 of those units themselves, so their incentive to fix things in minimal compared to the suffering as a whole. And perhaps worse, often the elite is able to extract 10 units of utility by causing 100,000,000 units of dis-utility, and is thus rewarded for it.

What I want is symmetry. If you're asking people to risk their lives on a submarine you designed and built yourself, the least you can do is risk your life alongside them!

If you're a banker and you lose your depositors' money, you shouldn't get a golden parachute into another high-paying job. You should lose all your money along with them and never be given a job in the financial sector again.

If you lose all their money because you committed fraud, sure. If you lose all their money because no decision has a 100% chance of working and there's some tiny but unavoidable chance of losing all their money, no, you shouldn't.

You could demand that people not be permitted to buy fire insurance so that if they do something bad that burns down their house, they have to suffer the consequences of their bad judgment. This is not normal practice, because insurance has a purpose. If they lost the money of their depositors for reasons that are not fraud or recklessness, the golden parachute is essentially insurance, even if they got it as part of industry practice rather than by paying a monthly premium.

If you lose all their money because no decision has a 100% chance of working and there's some tiny but unavoidable chance of losing all their money, no, you shouldn't.

As determined by whom?

I think the actual relevant question is whether you were making some kind of guarantee that the money would be safe or you were giving them an informed risk such that it was clear that if [extremely low probability event] happened, the money could be lost.

And again, the point here is to disincentivize taking bad risks, and incentivize good behavior, else they might decide to take certain risks that were not originally agreed to because why not?

If the risk is indeed that tiny, then holy cow they should have no problem putting their own money at risk as well!

If they're not willing to, I read that as a strong signal that they think the risk is actually larger than that!

You could demand that people not be permitted to buy fire insurance so that if they do something bad that burns down their house, they have to suffer the consequences of their bad judgment.

This is in fact why most insurance policies have exclusions for fires caused intentionally or by gross negligence.

It's also why people pay higher premiums if they're considered higher risk... or why deductibles exist.

If the risk is indeed that tiny, then holy cow they should have no problem putting their own money at risk as well!

That doesn't follow. Again, by this reasoning, we shouldn't have fire insurance, because if you want to do something with a non-zero risk of starting a fire, you need to assume the risk yourself. You point out that insurance has exclusions and deductibles, but by this reasoning people shouldn't have insurance at all, not just have exclusions and deductibles.

The entire point of insurance is so that you do not have to take on a risk with a tiny chance of happening but a large value if it happens.

I'm also pretty sure that a golden parachute is not as good for the banker as not losing his job and not needing to use the golden parachute, so considered as insurance, there's already a deductible built in, in the amount of (value of job - value of golden parachute).

You point out that insurance has exclusions and deductibles, but by this reasoning people shouldn't have insurance at all, not just have exclusions and deductibles.

Insurance companies are agreeing to 'assume' the risk of the fire occurring.

But they won't pay out of if set the building on fire intentionally (if they can prove that) and they calculate premiums based on various factors that increase or decrease fire risks.

There's a whole area of research behind moral hazard that examines how the knowledge that one is insured can change behavior.

Take this to the extreme, if a policymaker has reason to believe that a given policy is likely to result in more housefires occurring (say something stupid like mandating all houses have to be constructed of wood), but also that they, themselves, will pay no consequences as a result of this policy, then what actual incentives are there against implementing it?

We want our policymakers and decisionmakers' interests to align with the interests of the people they affect.

With housefires, they generally are aligned. Nobody wants their house to burn down, and they buy insurance to mitigate a relatively small risk that can have outsize influence on them but nobody else.

The problem arises when the person or persons who pays the cost is not the one who is making the decisions or policy.

Would you pay for fire insurance for a house you didn't own?

Insurance companies are agreeing to 'assume' the risk of the fire occurring. But they won't pay out of if set the building on fire intentionally (if they can prove that)

I agree that if you lose people's money because you committed fraud or negligence, sure, you shouldn't get a golden parachute, That's the equivalent to setting the building on fire intentionally.

and they calculate premiums based on various factors that increase or decrease fire risks.

The "premium" is "we're hiring you to run the bank, and part of your compensation is the possibility of getting a golden parachute if something bad happens". The premium isn't a separate line item, but the banker is still paying it--the bank wouldn't have been able to hire the banker without either providing it, or providing other compensation that makes up for its absence. And when they hired the banker, they certainly would have tried to assess how risky a banker he was when deciding how much and what kind of compensation to offer.

It's insurance, just with extra steps.

It’s possible that many elites just believe in ideologies that are both harmful to them and the wider population. In fact I think this is often true. I’m not sure why this is seemingly not included in your example.

Plenty of people believe in entirely stupid things and always have. The rich person who suffers because the ‘justice reform’ candidate they voted for wins by a hair and lets their environment deteriorate might just believe in a bunch of really dumb memes. “Everyone acts in their absolute self-interest all the time” is the logical flaw in your reasoning. People often do things that aren’t in their best interests.

It’s possible that many elites just believe in ideologies that are both harmful to them and the wider population. In fact I think this is often true.

Then these ideologies should hopefully die out when the adherents keep getting filtered out every time their policies fail and they lose any and all influence they might have accrued to that point.

Not enable them to make endless excuses and to continue on unabated.

If not, then it all just builds up to a much larger, catastrophic failure further down the line.

The issue, again, is that their ideologies ALSO often enable them to duck or shift consequences, possibly indefinitely... until the whole system blows up at once.

We want to filter out these problems early enough that they don't pose larger risks later.

“Everyone acts in their absolute self-interest all the time” is the logical flaw in your reasoning. People often do things that aren’t in their best interests.

And people should be positioned so their own screwups blow back on them in proportion to the damage they cause, so that the system as a whole can improve when they're removed from it.

It's not about being 'absolutely' self-interested all the time, but making sure that your self interest is at least aligned with those whose interests you represent so that there's an incentive for you to AVOID screwing them.

Most elites, seemingly, have gotten to a position where they can enrich themselves without regard as to whether they're causing damage or no.

My god, can you imagine the drama inside that tiny ship over the past days? I think I'd bet at 90% that the CEO is already long dead, killed by the 4 others in order to save oxygen. Two of the people are a father-son duo, and in a power struggle they might have killed the others too, knowing that they can only trust family. I really hope they find that thing so we get to know what actually happened.

Supposedly one of the ROVs has discovered something that looks like a (new) debris field, so I'm guessing they've all been dead since Sunday.

It's not super clear to me that a decaying body releasing gases (while in a tight container) actually extends the breathable atmosphere meaningfully for the remaining occupants.

It seems pretty clear to me that 5 people in an airtight box is a much better situation than four people and one cadaver in an airtight box.

EDIT: On reflection, if they’re stuck on the sea floor, 40 degrees might be cold enough for decomposition to be negligible. If they’re floating around on the surface, I still think it would be a terrible idea.

It's not clear to me either, and it wouldn't be clear to the occupants too, but life and death situations don't tend to make you more reasonable and level-headed, killing the CEO is the "we must do something, and this is something" option here.

There are many examples of similar cases of people getting trapped (often building collapses or mine collapses, expeditions getting lost, shipwrecks etc) and murder is very, very rare in them as far as I know.

In how many of those cases was the person responsible for the accident due to corner cutting trapped with them?

It’s not clear to me that they’d blame him.

For shipwrecks, the captain would certainly bear a lot of the responsibility. I don't know how rare captains getting murdered during shipwrecks was historically though.

This seems relevant.

Maybe in the age of sail... When Blithe could be court martialed for losing his ship to a mutiny or Byng be executed for failing to pursue the enemy...

But no one actually believes in classical responsibility any more where one is accountable for outcomes and any technical failure is prima facie evidence of a personal moral failure... Unless he was actually stupid enough to admit aloud the game controller's blue tooth wasn't working or something obscene, and "Accident" would be assumed to be an "Accident"

Bligh was found not guilty, given another ship, and sent back on the Providence to finish the job of bringing breadfruit to the Carribean. Alas, slaves would not eat the fruit. He was later captain of the Director on which he successfully engaged three Dutch vessels and captured one.

He played a critical role in the Battle of Copenhagen while captain of the Glatton. Nelson refused to acknowledge the signal to stop battle, and Bligh, who alone could see both signals stood by Nelson.

Nelson ordered that the signal be acknowledged, but not repeated. He turned to his flag captain, Thomas Foley, and said "You know, Foley, I only have one eye — I have the right to be blind sometimes," and then, holding his telescope to his blind eye, said "I really do not see the signal!" Rear Admiral Graves repeated the signal, but in a place invisible to most other ships while keeping Nelson's "close action" signal at his masthead.

Bligh was also court-martialed for the Rum Rebellion, and again acquitted.

More comments

I think more than these questions, it's the vast resources that have been marshalled to save these people that's been challenging me. A quick skim through the wiki article lists 9 ships and 5 planes with back-office coordination across 3 military branches and 4 countries. Despite this, the occupants are nearly certainly lost, and would be so even if the vessel had been located by now. The near-zero probability of a rescue was very quickly made apparent to everyone.

It is interesting, to say the least, which imperilled lives cause governments to move mountains without a second thought or rational hope, and which lives may be lucky to see a dime and only then after the case has been proven in a half dozen impact studies and feasibility examinations and pilot programs. Probably one of the more perverse urgency/importance failures yet, but one can't really go around saying the government is too good at reacting to acute crises.

It’s especially striking given that reports are coming out that navy sonar heard the implosion, but the search was launched anyway. Its not like it would have given away vital intelligence, I’m sure the implosion was pretty damn loud.

Oh, so my second guess was right about the navy knowing but not bothering to tell anyone. Wonder why they decided to keep the drama going for a whole week? Very convenient thing to have taking up the news cycle right now.

The Navy may have known it was something but they may not have known what it was until they got news about a missing civilian submersible. I don't think we can or should look for a conspiracy there.

The military is not generally in the business of giving away intelligence unprompted. I’m sure there are thousands of very important court cases the NSA could solve right now if they decided to peer through those giant datacenters they have.

Very convenient thing to have taking up the news cycle right now.

Interestingly, I had the opposite reaction. This story is only as big as it is because there was basically no other news this week.

I mean, they could guess, but you keep the search going until you're certain anyway. You never want to err on the side of assuming they're dead if there's a chance they're alive, however slim.

It is interesting, to say the least, which imperilled lives cause governments to move mountains without a second thought or rational hope, and which lives may be lucky to see a dime and only then after the case has been proven in a half dozen impact studies and feasibility examinations and pilot programs.

Well, there's the fact that these folks are rich, sure. But you'll get vast resources sent your way for a rescue if you're a collection of children as well: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-65871238

To be fair I also have had very similar thoughts about the response.

OP also missed another angle of the culture war - that some of the people in the sub were "GOP Donors" and therefore deserved to die. Just as insane as using reasonably affordable components to justify their demise. Wild!

The El Faro and Emmy Rose are all also pretty well-known examples of significant search and rescue resources being sent and continued long after any serious chance of rescue have long turned into recovery.

You’d be surprised how often something like this happens.

Even when it’s a mass, impersonal threat, we can really throw a lot of resources at the problem.

it's the vast resources that have been marshalled to save these people that's been challenging me. A quick skim through the wiki article lists 9 ships and 5 planes with back-office coordination across 3 military branches and 4 countries.

Well, what else were we supposed to be doing with all those ships for the last 4 days?

It is good training that creates nice PR, it is relatively cheap - all of the people involved are on someone's payroll already.

The message - we got your back is important into building a common identity. And the most important thing - it is easy and requires comparatively little recourses compared to something like homelessness, public safety or low educational results. It is a well defined goal that even if technically challenging is not quagmire.

A quick skim through the wiki article lists 9 ships and 5 planes with back-office coordination across 3 military branches and 4 countries.

It's good skills practice for everyone involved, and unlike many "life-saving" expenditures, if these people are saved they have a very high likelihood of going on to live productive lives that are a net-benefit to those around them.

I mean… one of the people on board was the CEO.

Seems like he had a net negative impact on everyone who went on this particular expedition.

Yeah, but he was almost certainly going to face charges for operating an uninspected submarine if he survived. Even if it’s not technically illegal, that’s because it never occurred to anyone there was a need for creating a specific law against opening to the public a poorly tested submarine where the qualified personnel had been replaced by diversity hires and a PlayStation controller, and the process is the punishment.

The steelman: if the occupants of the submarine are saved (which is nigh impossible at this point) he would be made an example of: his company discredited, he himself fined and possibly jailed. As it is, the sub will either not be found, or it will be found filled with corpses, which also serves as an example of what not to do but is arguably not as effective as having a person to haul in front of a courtroom.

and unlike many "life-saving" expenditures, if these people are saved they have a very high likelihood of going on to live productive lives that are a net-benefit to those around them.

I can take "we're spending all this money on training personell, we might as well give them an exercise in something that looks like IRL conditions", but:

  • this feels a bit callous

  • oh yeah? What are they gonna do, invent a new proprietary smart-device juice squeezer that will lock you out if it hears you do a racism?

oh yeah? What are they gonna do, invent a new proprietary smart-device juice squeezer that will lock you out if it hears you do a racism?

Go on the speaking circuit to present their cautionary tale.

And present a ghostwritten book on daytime TV.

The way the vessel was built and operated embodied the SV ethos. There are reports that it was not certified or audited by anyone, that the hull testing procedures were not adequate, that the company moved fast and broke things. So right now said ethos is having torn a new one.

How important this is probably depends a lot on how bad it is if this fails.

The death of everyone inside probably warrants the caution.

3 - if a small error could lead to death - hire the most safety oriented, pedantic and boring people there are to design your product.

Really sounds like Oceantech is just a big grift. What if the 50-year-old white guy grimaced visibly upon seeing this death-trap and demanded all kinds of expensive tests and redesign work? 'Not inspiring' might well be code for 'knows what he's doing and wouldn't touch our work with a barge pole'.

Couldn't agree more about the unsuitability of 'move fast and break things' in areas with big downsides. Most software is non-critical, yet stuff like AI or bioweapons/gain-of-function should be treated with extreme care. But it's not just Silicon Valley that is to blame - random research groups like EcoHealth and so on messed up bigtime.

What if the 50-year-old white guy grimaced visibly upon seeing this death-trap and demanded all kinds of expensive tests and redesign work?

https://abc7chicago.com/missing-titanic-sub-oceangate-lawsuit-david-lochridge-submersible/13409850/

Exactly that happened. And they fired him.

I don't think the firing had anything to do with his race or age though, it appears to have happened purely because he was saying "wait a minute, I don't think this thing is safe".

They seem to be counter-claiming he wasn't an engineer and didn't listen to their senior engineer saying it was safe.

But - (1) if your CEO is making a big point out of "I don't hire 50 year old white men", how senior/experienced is that engineer? and (2) if he's not hiring the experienced older submariners/Naval guys, then he's leaving a lot of valuable knowledge on the ground (e.g. "nah that won't work, we tried it fifteen years ago and Johnson exploded").

The way the vessel was built and operated embodied the SV ethos. There are reports that it was not certified or audited by anyone, that the hull testing procedures were not adequate, that the company moved fast and broke things. So right now said ethos is having torn a new one.

there have probably been thousands of dives since the 80s. something like this was inevitable given the inherent risks. the problem with engineering are the unknown unknowns. Maybe some corrosion or weakness in a wire caused the sub to fail--something that hardly anyone considers and seemingly mundane...like a piece of foam hitting a tile at takeoff, a piece of metal on a runway, a rubber seal leaking due to unforeseen cold, etc.. Had this occurred 20+ years ago, it would have gotten a lot of media coverage but not like we are seeing now. twitter as always showing its power to create news cycles in and of itself.

Yeah, but from their own website, there's a lot of "exciting new tech!" they're boasting about, which seems to turn out to be "so we made it lighter by using carbon fibre but heh heh nobody's tested if carbon fibre can handle those depths but we're not gonna wait around for someone to do that as it could take years, trust us you won't die (unless you do, please sign this waiver)".

there have probably been thousands of dives since the 80s

An order of magnitude less, in my estimation. A dive expedition is extremely expensive, and there were none at all between 2005 and 2019.

If you read the history of the vessel - I am sure it was the known knowns. So was the challenger - they knew it was too cold for launch. They knew about the o ring erosion that shouldn't be happening. And in the foam case - they knew there were debris. I have been trying to explain for a long time to people I work with - if it works and you don't know why or in a way you haven't anticipated - that it is just trouble waiting to happen. Even the 737 max was quite easily predictable, and on the A440 that crashed over the Atlantic was from known issue.

In the deep you have completely different envelope - mostly your weight is virtually unlimited compared to aerospace. Which can get a lot more leeway to design first the oh-shit modes and then the normal ones. Proper real time communication with the mothership, more supplies, hatch opening from inside, spare logitech controller. I know that all of sudden all internet virologists and trans/gender scientists right now took a fast phd in submarine design - but this project specifically seems to have had a lot of bad ideas and practices from the start.

mostly your weight is virtually unlimited compared to aerospace

Your weight is virtually unlimited, but your density can be an issue. I'm reading that a major reason they went with a carbon fiber section in the hull was that they could maintain significantly more buoyancy that way, whereas if they'd used titanium everywhere they'd have needed to add separate syntactic foam floats too.

Proper real time communication with the mothership

It's supposed to have this, isn't it? The history of "communication was lost, at least briefly, every single time" is another one of those normalization-of-deviance red flags that's come up.

I can't seem to find any details on the communication system, though, other than a debunking of the "Starlink broke!!1!one!" idiots. Cameron had voice contact at the bottom of the Mariana Trench via acoustic modems, so it's not impossible, but what did Oceangate actually choose?

I'm reading that a major reason they went with a carbon fiber section in the hull was that they could maintain significantly more buoyancy that way, whereas if they'd used titanium everywhere they'd have needed to add separate syntactic foam floats too.

Apparently pressure-capable syntactic foam is expensive, but another traditional solution for deep sea exploration is to use gasoline tanks, which are slightly bouyant and not compressible. See the original Trieste, which reached Challenger Deep in 1960, and also managed to surface automatically in the event of electrical failure.

Or maybe they could have used the carbon fiber tanks as floats, and if they shatter, you make sure you have enough excess buoyancy to still surface if one of them goes, because you'll be unlikely to lose more than one at a time.

Proper real time communication with the mothership

This would require a cable connection which gets tricky for 4000 meter deep dives. Radio communication rather famously doesn't work underwater. You can only get ground to sub data transmission at a few bits per second and even that requires tens of kilometer long antennas with megawatts of transmission power.

If the ship was directly above, I don't see why a few kilometres of cable wouldn't work.

Alternatively, acoustic communication.

Bouys that maintain their depth are not an option? It's not like the sub needs completely freedom of movement if they're just exploring a wrecked ship.

You still need a cable all the way to the surface, whether that's a single long one or multiple shorter ones (much more likely to break). There's a reason deep sea dives have traditionally had the support ship right above the sub.

Somehow it feels counterintuitive that you can't use buoyancy for support.

I saw some tweets saying that a cable would buckle under its own weight, but some quick math shows that not to be much of a problem. Amazon shows 100ft coax cables are about 2.5 pounds. A 4km version would be roughly 330 pounds. And that's in water, where bouyant force is going to reduce the apparent weight by quite a lot, especially if you jacket the cable with something not so dense.

And that's in water, where bouyant force is going to reduce the apparent weight by quite a lot, especially if you jacket the cable with something not so dense.

That's exactly the principle that seems to be in question. Whether you rest the cable on a bouy, or jacket it in something buoyant, the result should be the same. Though I can't tell you whether that means it's going to work or not.

spare logitech controller

I refuse to believe that they only brought one.

… I forgot to charge the back up…

This really does seem plausible given this company and what is coming out regarding it.

There are spare controllers kept onboard, but is not clear whether the submersible also had manual controls or other redundancies.

It was tongue in cheek ... on the other hand whether they were tested before every mission is anyone's guess. So is whether there is Bluetooth redundancy on the receiver. It will be combed over by the authorities.

It would be insane if they did. Game controllers break all the time.

Especially those shitty logitech ones.

Already some discussion on this topic happening over in the Small-Scale Questions thread

In the emerging Culture War aspect: it's interesting that the "50 year old" part is relatively much more operative than the "white guys" part than usual.

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