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Comment by xg15 | Hacker News Reader

Impressive feat - however, I was puzzled by this:

> Naturally, some of the workers were nervous about this idea. Matute Remus was sympathetic to their concerns, and wanted to reassure these operators and make them feel safe. So his wife Esmeralda agreed to also go into the building while it was being moved. She even took along their seven-year-old son, Juan Jorge.

Maybe this could work as a publicity stunt to persuade the general public that there is no risk, but I can't imagine that you can reassure an expert who is familiar with the actual risks by rising the stakes. (Not to mention putting his wife and child in danger for a psychological exercise)

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The nervous people were the telephone workers inside the building, presumably not experts. By having having his own wife and child inside the building, the responsible engineer puts his money where his mouth is, so to speak.

This is similar to the Chinese government ordering airline executives to be on a flight on new year's eve Y2K, so they won't cut corners to save money or whatever to make the fixes required.

You are correct in that… however I think that this harkens back to "talk is cheap, actions lead." That is, it is very easy to say "this is safe" even if you don't think that it is. By putting something that you value on the line, then you are showing your level of commitment to the statement that "this is safe".

I think that you will find it is not the "technical experts" who were afraid, but the workers in the building. This is exactly the sort of action that reassures these people, since they see that you have "skin in the game". It is also worth noting that he almost certainly didn't believe that he was placing his wife and child in danger.

There is also a tradition to have architect and engineer of the new bridge to float in the boat under it while the bridge is being load-tested.

See also the UK's minister of agriculture trying to feed his four-year-old daughter a beefburger during the mad cow disease era:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/may/16/news...

I'm getting a 404 from your BBC link, for some reason.

It's http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/may/16/news...

Apologies, i fat-fingered a 1 onto the end. Thanks for the correction, team!

He realized that the issue wasn't the stakes themselves, but rather the perception of the stakes.

Why shouldn't this reassure someone who is an expert in risks? Risk comes not only from the technical and scientific aspects of an operation but also the organizational processes, compliance, and actual execution. And for those, incentives and motivations matter a lot.

Knowing his wife and child were going to be in the building, you can bet he watched the workers like a hawk and triple-checked all the work and every calculation. Without his wife and child there, it's less certain whether he was equally thorough.

Risk is something like likelihood of failure multiplied by consequences of failure. If you increase the consequences some but decrease the likelihood more, you could have a net reduction in risk.

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