Ask HN: What is the word?
A coworker suggested that there is an engineering term that describes a decline in quality (in a product or process) to a point where there can never be a recovery to the initial state. Anyone know what the term might be?
This is a concept from SCUBA diving, imagine a slope that starts off shallow on the left hand side of a graph and becomes exponentially steeper as you go right. The horizontal axis is what has just gone wrong. The vertical axis is how much trouble you're in.
So over at the left hand side of the graph, something major can go wrong (moving you quite far to the right) but it doesn't move you very far vertically, so you're OK. The further to right you get, the smaller the movement to the right it takes to increase your trouble by the same amount. At the point where the graph gets asymptotic, a tiny movement to the right - an otherwise trivial thing going a tiny bit wrong - is enough to push you off the scale (i.e. you're dead).
The trap is that you can't see yourself falling into the pit, because it appears early on that problems aren't having a significant effect. This leads to overconfidence. Then once you're in the pit, it becomes harder and harder to get back out again (i.e. you need a huge vertical movement for a small horizontal movement back to the left). An experienced diver is hypersensitive and this is why you will see people abandon a dive for a seemingly trivial matter - they've felt themselves at the top of an incident pit.