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The Titan Submersible Disaster. The Inside Story Is More Disturbing

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Re: The Titan Submersible Disaster. The Inside Story Is More Disturbing

#31

Post by Tepix »

EgregiousCube wrote: post #24
mellosouls wrote: post #3

Deep-sea experts criticized OceanGate’s choices, from Titan’s carbon-fiber construction to Rush’s [CEO] public disdain for industry regulations, which he believed stifled innovation Seems a remarkably similar sentiment to the e/acc types currently loudly influencing tech and business discourse on various media. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_accelerationism

One shouldn’t conclude that regulations lead to positive outcomes from this. In addition to having a disdain for regulation, OceanGate was doing bad engineering. Projects that follow regulation strictly can fail due to bad engineering too.

Arguably we're seeing bad engineering by OpenAI leading to their superalignment team quitting and raise the alarm.

Re: The Titan Submersible Disaster. The Inside Story Is More Disturbing

#32

Post by 725686 »

rvnx wrote: post #4

He already got punished by life, no need to blame him posthumous. He is like one of the inventors of the parachute (Franz Karl Reichelt), still wanted to try because he believed in it. Unfortunately believing is not enough when it comes to reliability. Effort was good though, as apparently it worked at some point. > This submersible design, later renamed Titan, eventually made it down to the Titanic in 2021. It even…

What are you talking about? They tested a prototype. It failed. Anyway, they built a full size thing based on the prototype that failed. They charged a lot of money to unsuspecting rich guys. Then, eventually it failed, just as the test suggested it would.

Re: The Titan Submersible Disaster. The Inside Story Is More Disturbing

#33

Post by Pxtl »

dale_glass wrote: post #16
nathan_compton wrote: post #13

[flagged]

> This is such an amazingly delicious piece of schadenfreude. It doesn't work out that way for me due to the deaths of passengers that had no responsibility for anything here, and whose only mistake was trusting Rush too much.

I feel genuinely awful for the 19-year-old boy who was in that suicide-tube just to please his father. His whole life, which would've been a happy one of wealth and freedom, snuffed out because of these utterly stupid risks.

But for Rush himself? He deserves all the posthumous mockery and jeering he gets and more. He was quite literally too stupid to live.

Everybody else in that boat is on a spectrum of "you had more means than anybody else in the world to know this was extremely unsafe and you're part of a political class that by-and-large celebrates libertarianism so there's some irony and culpability here but still it's sad that you trusted a guy and he murdered you with utter incompetence".

Re: The Titan Submersible Disaster. The Inside Story Is More Disturbing

#34

Post by rvnx »

725686 wrote: post #32
rvnx wrote: post #4

He already got punished by life, no need to blame him posthumous. He is like one of the inventors of the parachute (Franz Karl Reichelt), still wanted to try because he believed in it. Unfortunately believing is not enough when it comes to reliability. Effort was good though, as apparently it worked at some point. > This submersible design, later renamed Titan, eventually made it down to the Titanic in 2021. It even…

What are you talking about? They tested a prototype. It failed. Anyway, they built a full size thing based on the prototype that failed. They charged a lot of money to unsuspecting rich guys. Then, eventually it failed, just as the test suggested it would.

This is where it's actually interesting, it's not prototype -> live and boom.

It's the fifth mission or something, and worked for two years.

They actually went to the Titanic with that sub and previously succeeded to reach the Titanic, then it's later on, that the vehicle started to become fragile due to multiple reuses.

Re: The Titan Submersible Disaster. The Inside Story Is More Disturbing

#36

Post by p_l »

gravescale wrote: post #30
rvnx wrote: post #4

He already got punished by life, no need to blame him posthumous. He is like one of the inventors of the parachute (Franz Karl Reichelt), still wanted to try because he believed in it. Unfortunately believing is not enough when it comes to reliability. Effort was good though, as apparently it worked at some point. > This submersible design, later renamed Titan, eventually made it down to the Titanic in 2021. It even…

Falcon 9s have 2 failures and one partial from 354 launches, so they're proving to be an extremely reliable vehicle on the scale of rockets. The current model is 289 of them and has a perfect record so far. That's substantially more successful than Soyuz which crashed a lot more and killed someone by parachute failure and crew by depressurisation (and another crew escaped the exploding rocket by launch abort system a…

For all that I personally like to dunk on Musk, SpaceX follows majorly classic incremental engineering pipeline, and there are people who check things thrice. Some of it because as "new" product in aerospace they can't just skirt things like Boeing did with airliners. Some of it being customer due diligence.

And even Musk personally acknowledged that he nearly tanked SpaceX early on - because they didn't have experienced engineering lead to take the project - and he ended up hiring one when they scraped enough on government money to get there.

Re: The Titan Submersible Disaster. The Inside Story Is More Disturbing

#37

Post by lolinder »

EgregiousCube wrote: post #24
mellosouls wrote: post #3

Deep-sea experts criticized OceanGate’s choices, from Titan’s carbon-fiber construction to Rush’s [CEO] public disdain for industry regulations, which he believed stifled innovation Seems a remarkably similar sentiment to the e/acc types currently loudly influencing tech and business discourse on various media. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_accelerationism

One shouldn’t conclude that regulations lead to positive outcomes from this. In addition to having a disdain for regulation, OceanGate was doing bad engineering. Projects that follow regulation strictly can fail due to bad engineering too.

> Projects that follow regulation strictly can fail due to bad engineering too.

Which in the world of regulated engineering disciplines usually translates to new regulations to prevent the newly discovered failure modes. The point of regulation isn't to eliminate 100% of bad engineering, it's to rigorously define and enforce the current standard of good engineering so that the vast majority of cases don't fail.

Re: The Titan Submersible Disaster. The Inside Story Is More Disturbing

#38

Post by rapsey »

Tepix wrote: post #31
EgregiousCube wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One shouldn’t conclude that regulations lead to positive outcomes from this. In addition to having a disdain for regulation, OceanGate was doing bad engineering. Projects that follow regulation strictly can fail due to bad engineering too.

Arguably we're seeing bad engineering by OpenAI leading to their superalignment team quitting and raise the alarm.

Philosophy majors judging bad engineering and making grand stands.

Re: The Titan Submersible Disaster. The Inside Story Is More Disturbing

#40

Post by psychoslave »

ubermonkey wrote: post #26

Is it "more disturbing," though, really? I mean, privileged rich dude who thinks he knows better than experts wins Darwin award, and some people dumb enough to trust him got to go along for the (one way) ride. I'm not any more disturbed by it now than I was a year ago, and a year ago it barely moved the needle. And then it was only about the 19 year old son of one of the passengers -- even at that age, a child ought…

I didn’t delve this story, I just remember I saw a five minutes info at some tv channel in France, which was interviewing a guy who refused to for the ride just before the launch as he estimated the safety level he was expecting was not there. I don’t know if other riders were aware of that fact, which should have been communicated to them as a big red alert.

Sad story, really. These people at least died while actively pursuing a dream, though it finished in a dramatic way. This is unlike so many people in Gaza or Ukraine just to mention what pop out of my mind. :’(

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