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Normalization of Deviance (2015)

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Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#71

Post by sokoloff »

kurthr wrote: post #32
stevehawk wrote: post #8

This is a big term in aviation, because in most cases in order for something catastrophic to happen it requires a lot of things to have failed. And one way to ensure that enough things fail is to start deviating from your maintenance, inspections, or general responsibilities. Related: the swiss cheese models.

It's also why things in aviation are so fixed and difficult to change. Not having any new civil aviation planes for 30 years worked... how about 40, 50? When will it break? Well, when someone develops an easy to build, easy to fly, inexpensive experimental craft and zillions of people do it all at once (hasn't happened yet). One of the more interesting things I've found is that a huge number (easily a majority) of in…

> Not having any new civil aviation planes for 30 years worked...

The A220, A350, and A380 are all newer than 30 years old. (A321 is barely younger than that and A330 barely older.) Boeing has released the 777 and 787 in the last 30 years. The Cirrus SR20 and SR22 are newer than that, as is the SF50 jet. The Diamond DA40, DA42, and DA62 are newer. The Honda Jet is newer. Cessna has a handful of business jets newer than that. The Embraer Phenom 100 and 300 are newer than that. There are variants of the CRJ newer than that (-700, -900, -1000).

That's a lot of new civil aviation aircraft designs in the last 30 years.

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#73

Post by pja »

kurthr wrote: post #32
stevehawk wrote: post #8

This is a big term in aviation, because in most cases in order for something catastrophic to happen it requires a lot of things to have failed. And one way to ensure that enough things fail is to start deviating from your maintenance, inspections, or general responsibilities. Related: the swiss cheese models.

It's also why things in aviation are so fixed and difficult to change. Not having any new civil aviation planes for 30 years worked... how about 40, 50? When will it break? Well, when someone develops an easy to build, easy to fly, inexpensive experimental craft and zillions of people do it all at once (hasn't happened yet). One of the more interesting things I've found is that a huge number (easily a majority) of in…

> Those people can also be fun/terrifying to fly with, because they will take risks.

Risk homeostasis in action!

https://soaringeconomist.com/2019/10/30/experience-can-kill-...

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#74

Post by Ma8ee »

a4isms wrote: post #19
giobox wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's often a wise tradeoff between criticizing systems you've just seen after being at the company 5 minutes and actually spending some time at the company to learn the historical context of why the thing you think is insane/shit is insane/shit before telling everyone who built it how insane/shit it is. People generally don't wake up in the morning and go into work motivated to make insane/shit things - context, t…

"Making good decisions, therefore, requires understanding past decisions. Without knowing how things came to be, it’s easy to make things worse." — https://thoughtbot.com/blog/chestertons-fence

The problem is that the historical context of a decision often becomes a defence of the status quo, even when most people understand it is bad.

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#75

Post by mixmastamyk »

ryandrake wrote: post #50
xnorswap wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't have a reader view in your browser, just paste this into your global CSS: p { line-height: 1.7; max-width: 60em; font-size: 1.2em; margin-left: 5em; } It pretty much fixes the default readability which is essentially zero on this site otherwise.

Yuck! I hate it when sites monkey around with max-width. I've got a nice 27 inch monitor. I want to use all of it. It's refreshing to see a site that doesn't insist on second-guessing the width that I set my browser window.

Too hard to read. See newspapers. Multiple windows are a thing.

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#76

Post by dec0dedab0de »

namaria wrote: post #69
Aeolun wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the issue is people using it when they’re too lazy to fix the test case.

I find quite interesting that people will prefer a highly malleable language like Python, and then orgs have to adopt testing to get around all the inconsistencies caused by absent type system. And then people will write libraries to get around the pesky tests to get their flexibility back. It's fascinating really... Complex systems are always in partial failure mode and that applies to collective optimization challe…

Type systems do not replace testing, and if a test works after retrying it then it is probably not something that a type system would be able to catch.

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#77

Post by aliqot »

DiggyJohnson wrote: post #64
aliqot wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not important and this ain't the place to ask otherwise they'd have told us.

> this ain't the place to ask Am I double-whooshing here? How is a Hacker News comment thread not the right place to respectfully ask questions in response to interesting comments. I know I'm not entitled to an answer, nor do I intend to start a flame war. Sheesh

It is personal information that risks identifying them more than they already had at the time of posting. It took about two seconds to put everything together. I don't have a dog in this fight politically one way or the other, people don't need to identify themselves IRL here.

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#78

Post by somat »

A thought experiment.

When is it "Normalization of Deviance"? and when is it a "Efficiency Optimization"?

I mean, the difference is pretty clear after something has failed, But very murky before.

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#79

Post by chaps »

riffic wrote: post #65
chaps wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We weren't able to reliably install security daemons on a client's machine because the entire automation system didn't account for autoscaling. The issues were raised well before I joined and the project head legitimately didn't understand it as a problem that needed solving. The hosts were for a presidential candidate's webserver, and they noticed the webservers were missing security daemons days before the election…

are "security daemons" truly necessary though? this whole thing sounds like a troll with enough convincing language to seem plausible

We could debate security daemons until our minds bleed, but.. man, I wish that all didn't happen.

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#80

Post by ryandrake »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #75
ryandrake wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yuck! I hate it when sites monkey around with max-width. I've got a nice 27 inch monitor. I want to use all of it. It's refreshing to see a site that doesn't insist on second-guessing the width that I set my browser window.

Too hard to read. See newspapers. Multiple windows are a thing.

So, leave the choice to the user. If I want to read text in a small column, I can easily resize my window. Don't try to force one way.
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