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Comment by jdlshore | Hacker News Reader

Related: Studies of aviation and construction have found that as incident rates decline, fatalities increase:

"The underreporting that results from the implementation of such safety programs really means that you are shooting yourself in the foot. Your organization does not have a great safety culture because it has low numbers of incidents. In fact, the opposite is true. This has been shown in various industries already. A study of Finnish construction and manufacturing from 1977 to 1991, for example, showed a strong correlation between incident rate and fatalities, but reversed (r = –.82, p<0.001). In other words, the fewer incidents a construction site reported, the higher its fatality rate was (see Figure 7.1)."

—The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error', chapter 7

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My anecdotal experience corroborates your quote: when I was 13-14 I occasionally did truck unloading/stage construction for an entertainment company. When another below-legal-age friend of mine got injured while unloading a truck, the managers begged him to make up some story in the hospital. I stopped taking stage construction gigs after another kid was killed when a ton of sound equipment crushed him.

From what Amazon warehouse workers I know tell me, the safety measures are on a different level to anything I was used to when I did blue collar work.

edit: I looked up one of the events we did[1] to make sure I got the age right and I was 15 when it took place.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjHEMzyakrY

I've got limited exposure to this, but we see this in some other fields. I just worked with a group that said they had no "defects". Actually, what you have is no reported defects and no clue what you are missing.

The folks reporting defects in this space get a lot more hassle, but actually know what is going on in their ops.

I'm not sure. Today on work there is so much personal safety gear (glasses, helmets, safety shoes, gloves ...) small accidents maybe just don't hurt a person at all. So you just end up with the really bad accidents.

Of course, this is almost certainly true in medicine as well, if you can’t report mistakes you can never learn from them.

That also matches terrorist attacks.

As the frequency increases, the scale of them decrease

is it worth getting the new edition of this book (its like 25$ more for me)

Don’t know, I read it on Safari a few weeks ago. I didn’t compare the two editions.

Thanks

> that as incident rates decline, fatalities increase:

This happens with helmets in combat and seatbelts in cars.

Because small injuries go away, what's left over is the stuff that really kills you (like a gunshot right through the helmet or a crash where a seatbelt couldn't save you because of the speeds involved)

That doesn't explain why fatalities would increase.

Because we feel safer and are able to push the boundaries.

As cars got safer, people are more willing to push the boundaries of speed since they believe the airbags and automated braking systems will keep them safe.

Is this explanation based on a study, or just a guess?

There was a study which showed people have an "acceptable" level of perceived risk.

Your kids not buckled in the back and every time you take a corner hard your toddler rolls onto the floor? You drive more slowly.

Your kid in a child seat, five point harness, bolsters near the head? Fly around those corners!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation#Citations

Except safety improvements actually reduced automobile fatalities dramatically over time.

There are occasional edge cases, but safety equipment and procedures have made a huge difference over time. Just look at say the number of deaths from construction accidents over time. Five people died constructing the Empire State Building for example that wasn’t even a terrible record for the time period. At the extreme 30,609 people died building the Panama Canal.

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