Hacker News Reader

Comment by QuantumGood | Hacker News Reader

It was very clearly very early on that critical risks were known, unmitigated, and misrepresented. I don't think the kind of person(s) that know and misrepresent are the kind to learn and avoid similar mistakes, though publicizing issues like this will increase pressure on them to hide their lies better. They had a messianic CEO dismissing concerns with bluster and bravado

View on HN

One thing to keep in mind here is that the CEO didn't hide the flaws to make a profit, otherwise he wouldn't have been on board the submersible. He hid them because he believed they were wrong.

He believed they were wrong because they got in his way: https://www.businessinsider.com/titan-submarine-ceo-complain...

In his way towards what?

Building a submersible without concern for the safety of his customers, or himself.

making money

Ultimately, yeah. Rush's goal was to make money by taking paying customers on undersea tours. Calling the Titan a "research vessel" was a farce; what little research it performed, like sampling ocean salinity at different depths, was a fig-leaf at best, not the purpose of its activities. (And, per the report, even that was neglected on some of the vessel's later dives.)

I think he caved in to the pressure from outside because his company was sinking and financially underwater.

> One thing to keep in mind here is that the CEO didn't hide the flaws to make a profit

Didn't they try to hide the fact that they had to recast the entire hull because the previous one had too many structural deficiencies? I mean, they were monitoring all the tears all the time and had several test hulls crack in the R&D phase.

He probably just thought he could take the gamble, thread the needle and come out victorious, the way SpaceX almost bankrupted before going to bigger things, and his financing issues would melt away. High risk tollerance and wishful thinking.

"The most important thing is not to fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool."

You cannot divine the motives of a person with self-delusional tendencies by assuming that their behavior was rational.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com