Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. I think it really shows how reckless and deceitful he was.
In a rare case, the cavalier founder faces natural consequences for their attitudes.
Physics cannot be bribed or intimidated with lawsuits.
The Titan Submersible Was “An Accident Waiting to Happen”
91–98 of 98 posts
Re: The Titan Submersible Was “An Accident Waiting to Happen”
#92Maybe somewhat off-topic, but if you don't know, there is a video on YouTube published 11 months ago by "CBC NL - Newfoundland and Labrador" titled "This submersible takes passengers to The Titanic wreck. Climb in!" (see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClkytJa0ghc ) If I put myself 11 months in the past watching that video, I would probably think this company OceanGate is so professional with zero possibility of mer…
> But 11 months... that's long enough time for someone to generate doubts on the thing to either fix it or speak out.
There were enough doubts and enough competent people speaking out in the five previous years.
The problem seems that Mr. Rush was just not willing to listen.
You don't fuck with physics, especially not in 4000 metres depth.
Reading this (excellent) story I caught myself almost permanently shaking my head about the callousy of that guy.
Re: The Titan Submersible Was “An Accident Waiting to Happen”
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Anyone who has worked on a challenging project has heard concerns like this at various stages. It's absurd to conclude the project was doomed or reckless, just because someone expresseed concerns about success or not enough precaution. This is almost certainly what Rush told people and a refutation of this claim is exactly why I think stories like this are valuable. It's all a matter of degree. When one or two peop…
I agree with all that you said, except that we as outsiders don't have enough information to make the conclusions you want to make. The best evidence for recklessness would be a pattern of similar failures. > the absolute worst reaction is to take it as a personal affront, especially if it's coming from all directions. This is a good point. Especially if that's the response given to other insiders working on the proj…
> I agree with all that you said, except that we as outsiders don't have enough information to make the conclusions you want to make.
> The best evidence for recklessness would be a pattern of similar failures.
There was a pattern of similar failures though as the article points out. OceanGate had only been doing deep dives since 2021 and every year of deep dive operation there was at least one serious mechanical malfunction (at least that was caught on camera). In 2021 the system that was supposed to drop the sub's weights failed. This one one is not quite as egregious in that it only points at some engineering difficulties and therefore only indirectly at recklessness (although the fact that Rush seemed unsure that the mechanical backup would work and suggested the final failsafe of 24 hours at the bottom of the ocean before finagling the mechanical backup is worrying).
The 2022 malfunction is much more egregious. One of the thrusters on the sub was installed in the wrong direction. Not only was this not caught until the sub was on the ocean floor (which hints at a very worrisome pre-check procedure), the worst part was when it was caught Rush didn't abort the mission. This seems to be a level of risk-seeking far beyond what is appropriate for a deep-sea mission. When you have such a major mechanical oversight, which would easily suggest that other problems might exist, and decide nonetheless to continue, that is a level of risk-seeking I'm willing to say exceeds what is appropriate for manned deep-sea operations.
If you're looking for literally repeats of a manned sub imploding and people dying, well... that gets to happen once when your CEO is the one manning the sub so almost by definition you can't get repeats of that.
I think I know where you're coming from. Which is even if you had an extremely safe operation, with only a 1 in a million chance of failure, over a long enough period, you will have a catastrophic loss of life. And when that happens people are going to come out of the woodwork saying how unsafe everything was leading up to it and news articles are going to be written about it and it's going to seem like a fiasco after the fact, because people are going to come up with all sorts of post-hoc explanations talking about how obviously bad everything is.
This isn't that. All of the concerns that the article airs were "pre-registered" so to speak. They weren't people after the fact saying "oh yeah I definitely knew that was a bad idea" or people after the fact exaggerating how serious their warnings were to make themselves look good. These were all people putting in writing their concerns and telling Rush straight up that he's going to kill people without mincing their words.
> we as outsiders don't have enough information to make the conclusions you want to make.
There is a place for epistemic humility and recognizing that some things are beyond our grasp and especially that a news article is potentially just cherry-picking quotes to create a narrative, but you're swinging too far the other way. Insiders are not the only people who have the standing to have an opinion on what they're doing. Otherwise, e.g. fraud would be definitionally impossible (did they intend to do x? Well you'll never know because you're an outsider!).
Re: The Titan Submersible Was “An Accident Waiting to Happen”
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure but we're in a string of silicon valley come to Jesus moments and finally having a case where the founder was so deluded they got even themselves killed is going to get airtime. I don't think there's be nearly as much interest in this story if we weren't in also dealing with Theranos and FTX and the aftereffects of Cambridge analytica etc etc
OceanGate, FTX, and Cambridge Analytica were not headquartered in Silicon Valley. Out of the companies on your list Silicon Valley can only take the blame for Theranos.
The term silicon valley has long since transcended geographic boundaries to signify the tech and vc/startup sectors as a whole. Facebook and Amazon and Uber and Theranos and FTX are all a part of it. It's about the culture and the people that participate in that culture, move fast break things etc. That's what's been going through trainwreck after public trainwreck. And even if you wanted to tie it to a geographic region, which frankly is irrelevant - the vcs are based out of here
Re: The Titan Submersible Was “An Accident Waiting to Happen”
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
OceanGate, FTX, and Cambridge Analytica were not headquartered in Silicon Valley. Out of the companies on your list Silicon Valley can only take the blame for Theranos.
Silicon Valley investors rejected Theranos. Most of them actually consider Tharanos a great victory. Tharanos funding come from lots of large private investors, like family fortunes and so on.
That particular overconfidence in bashing Theranos as an outsider company who would never have been able to fool Real Silicon Valley (tm) is definitely a core part of the narrative that's developing, since nobody believes they'd have disowned her if she had succeeded, and those very same VCs got rugpulled with FTX not that long after making all those confident assertions look very silly in hindsight.
Re: The Titan Submersible Was “An Accident Waiting to Happen”
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article mentions that at one point the viewport only had a depth rating only 1,300 meters, but it’s not clear if it was upgraded later on. The more I think about it, would it have been able to withstand even the first dive to Titanic depths without it being upgraded?
The articles comments on acrilic conversion factors are (obliquely) about that. Essentially for any construction material you have a failure rating and a factor of safety - the allowable load is failure divided by FOS, so your materials working load is usually significantly under its failure load. Equipment rated for depths of 1,300 will be capable of several times that, possibly only reaching immediate material fail…
According to the article:
> Ramsay grabbed a copy of Stachiw’s acrylic handbook from his spare bedroom. When Stachiw’s team was doing its tests, “they would pressurize it really fast, the acrylic would implode, and then they would assign a conversion factor, to tabulate a safe diving depth,” he explained. “So let’s say the sample imploded at twelve hundred metres. You apply a conversion factor of six, and you get a rating of two hundred metres.” He paused, and spoke slowly, to make sure I understood the gravity of what followed. “It’s specifically not called a safety factor, because the acrylic is not safe to twelve hundred metres,” he said. “I’ve got a massive report on all of this, because we’ve just had to reverse engineer all of Jerry Statchiw’s work to determine when our own acrylic will fail.” The risk zone begins at about twice the depth rating.
So apparently acrylic is not tested or rated in a way that gives you a simple "safety factor." But going by this quote, the acrylic might have hypothetically been tested to implode around 7,800 meters, which means that anything over 2,600 would be in the "risk zone."
A more important lesson is that once you know you're dealing with a narcissist or a liar, you can't "correct" for their lies. You basically need to throw out all the data they provided, and redo any analysis from scratch.
Re: The Titan Submersible Was “An Accident Waiting to Happen”
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Silicon Valley investors rejected Theranos. Most of them actually consider Tharanos a great victory. Tharanos funding come from lots of large private investors, like family fortunes and so on.
That particular overconfidence in bashing Theranos as an outsider company who would never have been able to fool Real Silicon Valley (tm) is definitely a core part of the narrative that's developing, since nobody believes they'd have disowned her if she had succeeded, and those very same VCs got rugpulled with FTX not that long after making all those confident assertions look very silly in hindsight.
> who would never have been able to fool Real Silicon Valley
I mean its a fact. They were rejected by the traditional VCs.
> since nobody believes they'd have disowned her if she had succeeded
I mean why would they? VCs always talk about companies they could have gotten in early and didn't.
If Theranos was actually successful, then there would be no reason to 'disown' her.
> and those very same VCs got rugpulled with FTX not that long after making all those confident assertions look very silly in hindsight.
What confident assertions?
I don't get what they have to do with each other. Getting FTX wrong (if they did) has nothing to do if they got Tharanos right.
Re: The Titan Submersible Was “An Accident Waiting to Happen”
#98All these people knew about it but didn't make any public warnings? The pilot is somewhat aware but says nothing to the customers?
One guy did, he got sued by OceanGate and withdrew his complaint as he didn't wanna spend his life being litigated against.
Rush bought (his definition of) justice as a product. Justice isn’t a right in the U.S. it’s a product you buy, via an attorney willing to use the legal system to bully truthsayers into submission. Any feudal lord will tell you this is their right. This playground, that he alone created, is his fief. Lochridge was fucking with it.
I’m not super bothered by one lord getting other lords killed. Lawyers and insurance will settle this to the relative dissatisfaction of the other parties (lawyers and insurance companies never lose). What is a travesty is how often this happens in aggregate, lords consistently winning their idea of justice against serfs and peasants. And there’s an entire industry now damaged by this one person’s hubris.