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Why you've never been in a plane crash

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Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash

#291

Post by josephg »

defrost wrote: post #288
josephg wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social media would like a word. The suicide rates of teen girls have tripled since the introduction of social media. To say nothing of the corrosive force on democracy and our ability to make sense of the world as a society. A building collapsing might kill 10 people. A rare tragedy. Social media impacts billions. Even if you want to downplay the negative impact on each person, the total impact across the globe is ma…

> The suicide rates of teen girls have tripled since the introduction of social media. In what country? In what year comapred against what base year? Disclaimer - not Australia anytime betwwen 1910 and now: https://www.aihw.gov.au/suicide-self-harm-monitoring/data/de... In the USofA: Adolescent suicides rose from 8.4 per 100,000 during the 2012-2014 timeframe to 10.8 deaths per 100,000 in 2018-2020, according to the…

> Or is this just over zealous hyperbole?

I'm referencing Jonathan Haidt's work: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/facebooks-...

But regardless, I find it pretty ridiculous to claim that us software engineers don't have a massive impact on the world. We've inserted software into every crevice of human civilisation, from my washing machine and how I interact with loved ones, all the way up to global finance and voting systems. You think technology companies would be the largest industry on the planet if we didn't have an impact on people's lives?

Leaving the social media point aside, all I'm arguing is that when harm actually occurs due to negligence, companies needs to actually be held responsible. Just like in every other industry that doesn't have convenient EULAs to protect them from liability. For example, if Medibank leaks the health records of all of their customers, they should be punished in some way as a result - either fined by a regulatory agency or sued by their customers. Right now, they shift all of the harm caused by negligent behaviour onto their customers. And as a result, they have no incentive to actually fix their crappy software.

I don't want companies the world over to look at things like that and say "Well, I guess Medibank got away with leaking all their customer's data. Lets invest even less time and effort into information security". I don't want my data getting leaked to be a natural and inevitable consequence of using someone's app.

Even from a selfish point of view, people will slowly use less and less information technology as a result, because they have no ability to know which companies they can trust. This is already happening in the IoT space. And thats ultimately terrible for our industry.

Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash

#292

Post by rcxdude »

izacus wrote: post #33
josephg wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the number of data breaches we see cropping up, I wonder if a similar law could be written to hold companies liable for the safe handling of personal data.

TBH having software engineer output in general be liable to some minimum safety, correctness and quality standard would be a god send for the world. But of course the developers will revolt against that.

The EU is doing something like this with some proposed legislation. Basically it's a CE mark for software. The current version is very much a bare minimum, though. But it does impose liability on people selling software.

Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash

#293

Post by defrost »

josephg wrote: post #291
defrost wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The suicide rates of teen girls have tripled since the introduction of social media. In what country? In what year comapred against what base year? Disclaimer - not Australia anytime betwwen 1910 and now: https://www.aihw.gov.au/suicide-self-harm-monitoring/data/de... In the USofA: Adolescent suicides rose from 8.4 per 100,000 during the 2012-2014 timeframe to 10.8 deaths per 100,000 in 2018-2020, according to the…

> Or is this just over zealous hyperbole? I'm referencing Jonathan Haidt's work: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/facebooks-... But regardless, I find it pretty ridiculous to claim that us software engineers don't have a massive impact on the world. We've inserted software into every crevice of human civilisation, from my washing machine and how I interact with loved ones, all the way up to global fi…

Oh, social media companies have an enormous impact on the world - through decisions made at C-suite and senior management level about what to demand of software engineers and how to deploy that work.

The impact by software engineers perhaps falls more in the "failed to whistle blow" category than the "evil Dr. Strangelove" box .. save for those very few that actually rise to a position of signifigance in strategic decision making.

That aside, the teen girl suicide rate underpinning your reference seems to be about 2x, from 2.8 per 100K (ish) circa 2000 to 5.5 per 100K in 2017

Jonathan Haidt links to this paper: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/27358...

which doesn't include the figures. The full reproduced JAMA Research Letter from 2019 with figures and all is here: https://sci-hub.ru/10.1001/jama.2019.5054

As a research letter from JAMA I take that as fair reporting of some raw CDC data - I don't know how representative that result is in the fullness of reflection, normalisation, and other things that happen with data over time. To be clear I'm not quibblling and I thank you for the link.

Haidt also makes clear that Correlation does not prove causation and argues that No other suspect is equally plausible.

I'm 100% willing to align myself with the "social media as it stands is a scourge on humanity and young minds (for the most part)" camp.

I'm equally onboard with corporations are shit at personal data security and should be held with feet to the fire until they improve.

Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash

#294

Post by rcxdude »

mattrick wrote: post #268
ssl232 wrote: post #12

One of the most important pieces of legislation in the UK that helped improve safety in workplaces was the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, which placed a duty of care on organisations to look after the wellbeing of their staff. One of the tenets is to take near misses seriously. According to a health and safety engineer in a course I attended, near misses are like gifts from the heavens, as they show you exactly…

I've been obsessed with the US Chemical Safety Board videos on YouTube that describe in great detail the events that lead up to industrial accidents. One of the common themes I've seen among them is that there's usually some sort of warning sign or near miss that goes ignored by the people responsible for them since they don't cause any major damage. Then a few days or months later that system fails in an entirely pr…

It is worth keeping in mind that you don't see the other side of the equation in these reports: how many warning signs and near misses that didn't result in a major accident. Part of that is just the odds, and why people and organisations can become complacent to them, and part of it is that while most of them may be addressed, some can still slip through the cracks.

Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash

#295

Post by xorcist »

josephg wrote: post #291
defrost wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The suicide rates of teen girls have tripled since the introduction of social media. In what country? In what year comapred against what base year? Disclaimer - not Australia anytime betwwen 1910 and now: https://www.aihw.gov.au/suicide-self-harm-monitoring/data/de... In the USofA: Adolescent suicides rose from 8.4 per 100,000 during the 2012-2014 timeframe to 10.8 deaths per 100,000 in 2018-2020, according to the…

> Or is this just over zealous hyperbole? I'm referencing Jonathan Haidt's work: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/facebooks-... But regardless, I find it pretty ridiculous to claim that us software engineers don't have a massive impact on the world. We've inserted software into every crevice of human civilisation, from my washing machine and how I interact with loved ones, all the way up to global fi…

The link to mental health and suicide rates is far from shown, and could have any number of confounding factors.

Perhaps a better example would be the situation in Myanmar. It has been shown beyond doubt that it was in fact a genocide in the full meaning of the term, and that it was made much worse by Facebook.

Both by design where their algorithms are designed to maximize the impact of this type of social contagion, but also by their manned staff which were either unwilling or not allowed to help. Both situations are equally bad.

Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash

#296

Post by xorcist »

foofie wrote: post #256
beAbU wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... does not motivate a strong response from society ... Is it not time things change? How many lives have been destroyed by shoddy software? UK post office scandal? Therac-25? Leaked personal, intimate or payment data?

> Is it not time things change? No. There is absolutely no use case for misuse of any mundane service or desktop app that comes even close to match the impact on society of an apartment building collapsing and killing occupants. > How many lives have been destroyed by shoddy software? In relative terms, if you compare any grievance you might have with the sheer volume of services and applications running 24/7 all ove…

> misuse of any mundane service or desktop app

That's way, way over-trivializing the issue.

Self-driving cars absolutely will kill someone. The driver may be at fault for being distracted, but as long as the system allows for distracted drivers, the software is the process. See: Aviation post-mortems.

Medical equipment is another example. We do not need to go as far as Therac, there has been a number of near-misses which in the absence of independent post-mortems, are never recorded anywhere.

Drones and autonomous warfare also occupies many developers.

Social scoring systems, and taxation and payment systems, should also not be trivialized. Even if they do not make spectacular media coverage, they absolutely kill people. No indenpendent post-mortems to be seen, blameless or otherwise.

Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash

#297

Post by mulmen »

manojlds wrote: post #80
mulmen wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a blameless culture there is no one person responsible. It should not have been possible for one person to take the site down. There should have been controls in place to prevent it. There shouldn’t even be someone that “everyone knows” is responsible, because by definition that’s impossible.

What part of "so let’s just consider it an expensive learning opportunity to redesign the system so it can’t happen again" doesn't mean that it's happened, but let's see how we get there. "It should not have been possible for one person to take the site down" - yes, and that's exactly what Zuck is addressing here? May be such controls are there across the development teams and some SRE did something to bring it down…

As told this is clearly not a Zuck quote because it’s shitty leadership. There’s no way Facebook got where it is with such incompetence. This is clearly a mistelling of older more coherent anecdotes.

Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash

#298

Post by DanBC »

josephg wrote: post #287
foofie wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it not time things change? No. There is absolutely no use case for misuse of any mundane service or desktop app that comes even close to match the impact on society of an apartment building collapsing and killing occupants. > How many lives have been destroyed by shoddy software? In relative terms, if you compare any grievance you might have with the sheer volume of services and applications running 24/7 all ove…

Social media would like a word. The suicide rates of teen girls have tripled since the introduction of social media. To say nothing of the corrosive force on democracy and our ability to make sense of the world as a society. A building collapsing might kill 10 people. A rare tragedy. Social media impacts billions. Even if you want to downplay the negative impact on each person, the total impact across the globe is ma…

> . The suicide rates of teen girls have tripled since the introduction of social media.

This is simply false.

Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash

#299

Post by DanBC »

josephg wrote: post #291
defrost wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The suicide rates of teen girls have tripled since the introduction of social media. In what country? In what year comapred against what base year? Disclaimer - not Australia anytime betwwen 1910 and now: https://www.aihw.gov.au/suicide-self-harm-monitoring/data/de... In the USofA: Adolescent suicides rose from 8.4 per 100,000 during the 2012-2014 timeframe to 10.8 deaths per 100,000 in 2018-2020, according to the…

> Or is this just over zealous hyperbole? I'm referencing Jonathan Haidt's work: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/facebooks-... But regardless, I find it pretty ridiculous to claim that us software engineers don't have a massive impact on the world. We've inserted software into every crevice of human civilisation, from my washing machine and how I interact with loved ones, all the way up to global fi…

> I'm referencing Jonathan Haidt's work

Why not link to real numbers though? Haidt doesn't understand the numbers, misquotes them out of context, and mangles the data.

Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash

#300

Post by P_I_Staker »

rainsford wrote: post #276
P_I_Staker wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unpopular opinion, but the truth: We have to drive and it's a right. I agree about the infrastructure issues. Still the modern "safe driving" mentality that people want is at odds with that REALITY. This could change with public transit, however we don't do this. Even the best countries fall short, and most don't get close. It's actively discouraged in the USA. Actually, you could argue that people already have to de…

At least in the US I can see a reasonable argument for most people needing to drive, but it's much less obvious people need to drive the vehicles they do the way that they do to meet basic transportation requirements. One obvious if almost certainly unpopular solution would be to have the basic drivers license you get now with essentially no effort only cover small speed limited cars that would pose far less risk to…

They see it as an "entitlement", because that's how society works. Don't want to drive and you will immediately start to experience discrimination, including microaggressions (no it's not like being the victim of racial oppression, just another way wind up in an outgroup).

The REALITY that I think is still being ignored in this thread is we don't rely on planes for our day to day travel, on average. I'm never going to need to hop in a plane just to eat, make it to work, or meet my friends.

I don't think it's "an entitlement" to want food, to get to work, and not be treated as a burdensome freak. To the vast vast majority of people, even frequent business travelers, flying is for occasional long distance travel, never for day to day activities.

If we really get to the point where non-driving is treated equally to driving, I might agree. However this seems exceedingly unlikely and is incredibly expensive. It would require me to be able to get around as a non-driver with the same cost and convenience. This turns out not to be economically feasible.

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