Traffic accidents are not mainly caused by a certain car model being sold with faulty breaks, and airplane crashes are incredibly rare occurances.
In other words: what is the greater moral tragedy, losing 40,000 of your fellow citizens at the hands of aggressive or uneducated or unskilled drivers, or 400 deaths largely due to corporate cost cutting? My mental framework suggests we should optimize for addressing maximal number of deaths, but we rarely make that choice.
We don't need to imagine this. There's a car called a Tesla which sometimes unexpectedly and fatally decides to steer in a different direction, and its management invariably blame the driver. Weirdly, HNers not only generally don't want Tesla's entire management and design team to be fired, they actually tend towards defending their approach...
Edit: would love it if the people who apparently disagree could make some arguments why Tesla's fatality-inducing electronic driver support system deserves a different response to Boeing's
Who says we aren't?
Modern cars have much, much better passive safety systems and active safety systems are light years of what was available before, and improving rapidly.
One random example: I have a Volvo V40 and I can barely see around the A pillar. And I see this in all modern cars. I don't remember feeling the same way about cars from 20-30 years ago. I'm quite confident that if the V40 would roll over, even at somewhat high speed, my chances of getting out relatively unscathed would be better than even those in a sports car from, say, 30 years ago.
Are deaths from terrorism fat tailed? Terrorists can get access to biological weapons, the electricity grid, the water supply, a skyscraper with thousands of people in it, the parliament building of a country... I think it is fat tailed.
"In cars, one person died per 5.5 million passenger hours traveled, versus one death per 6 million passenger hours in commercial airline flights-a slim difference at best!"
Also , I can't cross london by plane, so what do I do with that information?
This whole argument smells of whataboutism of sorts 'well if cars kill so many people we shouldn't give boeing such hard time for killing a few"
https://observer.com/1998/03/driving-versus-flying-the-debat...
In that case planes have the same chance of failing (mechanically or through human error) as cars do. It is very difficult to increase that safety factor, maybe impossible.
The conclusion to draw from that, is that you can't point at car manufacturers and blame them for producing unreliable / bad quality machines.
On the other hand, measurement per kilometer implies that as a traveller you should use a plane where possible, but obviously they can't replace car in a daily commute.
Maybe it makes the crew a little more fatigued on descent and approach to landing, likely partially offset by it making air travel less appealing to pax, resulting in fewer people per fatal accident.
When I'm boarding an aircraft, I care more about that than how many people would die with me.
This is of course abstracting away from details like the aircraft travelling 10x further and walking to the airport, but the real problem is aircraft not serving the routes you want to drive. General Aviation is a lot more dangerous than commercial flights, especially when it involves clumsy pilots ;-)
Did they die because the car had issues or was it some other reason?
I'd further suppose that simply put, it's easier to stop 400 deaths due to a failure to regulate than it is to change the driving habits of citizens, and that's why --even if one is 100x worse-- it doesn't draw the attention, and it makes me feel like my loss doesn't matter, even though others are far more likely to experience the loss I did, rather than the main post subject, and I will admit that shaped my view entering the discussion.
That is like saying oranges and apples are the same because they are fruits.
It matters how they died because the car victims died due human error not because the car was defective, the plane victims died because of the plane itself was defective.
If the planes were not ground many more people who have died and people on ground if the plane fell on them.
Would you drive in a car which is known to crash into walls?
This argument is nonsensical. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Not_as_bad_as
Anyone can go, buy a $100 car from some guy on craigslist and drive it around. I'd wager that makes a big difference to road fatalities.
That and the drunk driving. I guess it depends on the place, but in Austin it was awful. I was out drinking with some guys from work, we had maybe 6 beers? Then they all walked back to the office, got their cars and drove home. It made me much more paranoid about crossing the road.
It depends on the state: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_inspection_in_the_Unit...
The accidents are much more similar, both in frequency (they happen all the time, with little public interest) and causes.
People fly their planes while drunk or ill, they fly planes that haven't been properly maintained, they fly when the weather is awful and it's recommended not to, they don't have good plans for what they'll do if anything goes wrong, they haven't practised skills they know they might need... and most of the time they came back down safe. But not always.
When people say "Plane crash" they're normally thinking about Scheduled Aviation, at the far end of the safety categories from GA. If you bought tickets to go from one place to another at a particular time, that's scheduled aviation, the aeroplanes used, the crews flying them, even the company operating them is far more closely regulated and as you'd expect the result is far greater safety.
I'd suggest comparing these accidents to bus crashes. A crash in which a greyhound smashes into a gorge and everybody dies would make the TV news, just as a crashed jetliner would. Like the plane, that bus was required to be properly maintained, its driver underwent training including periodic refreshers, and the company operating it is under much more scrutiny than some random guy in a pick-up.
All of the decisions led to huge changes on the MCAS. But basically nobody was told about it, so pilots didn't know how to react to the changes.
I won't repeat the whole thread, but you can check here:
Flying on an absolute sense is an insane activity. As Louis CK put it, you're "sitting on a chair, IN THE SKY!" The only reason we take it for granted is the Stellar safety record (which is even better than cars?). If all you do is just match the safety profile of ground transportation, the optics of the combination of perception and real events would just grind this industry down. In some ways it's actually bad for the industry in the long term but these suits and their next quarter bonuses don't care about that! Only the public can.
Of course not. So that's a false parallel i.e. whataboutism.
I think whataboutism is like
She says The storming of the Capitol was wrong because people died and our institution’s citadel was trashed
And he says
What about the BLM protests - xxx people died and yyy buildings were vandalised at a cost of zzz millions
It seems to be some kind of parallel, but not to draw an analogy - rather to excuse an action by making a distraction out of a superficially similar form(?)
It was 355 people killed plus one on the response dive team for JT610.