Comment by bh42 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bh42 | Hacker News Reader

Adams is a smart and funny guy, but his great talent to simply often leads him to embarrassing oversimplification.

His bold assumption that no one could be sure if the BP rig was safe is complete BS. Watch the 60 Minutes report, listen to the interview, LOTS of people knew exactly how unsafe it was.

The same goes for Enron, both Bethany McLean and James Chanos pointed out the king is naked, long before Enron imploded.

Just because Scott Adams can't comprehend something, it does not mean that it is incomprehensible.

It is true that our modern lives are very complicated. But primitive people posses staggering amounts of knowledge, which just happen to be essential for their survival. We all had knowledge like that a long time ago. I have no idea exactly who knows more, but I bet we are all in the same ballpark, because we are all humans.

As they say, hindsight is 20/20.

It might be relatively easy post-hoc to trace a problem that has already occurred back to a relatively small set of causes, and then ask why these were overlooked - after all, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

But when the system itself is so complex that any of a thousand other factors might have gone wrong instead, you're really comparing a thousand ounces of prevention to a pound of cure. You can get really caught up in all of the plausible contingencies, which grow disproportionately with complexity.

If you were to audit that oil rig inch-by-inch, you might have found dozens of things which could have led to a problem of near the same impact as the current leak. And you might have even focused on fixing all of them. But you can't presume that some other factor that you didn't notice (or couldn't have noticed given the finite nature of your knowledge) wouldn't have triggered a slightly different failure, and you can spend an enormous amount of time fixing things that would not have caused a failure.

Adams makes a good point - the best way to ensure the reliability of a system is to understand the functioning of the system as a whole, and beyond a certain scale of complexity, this is extremely difficult and often impossible.

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