I got the privilege of having lunch with Mr. McDonald when I was an IEEE officer during college. He gave a lecture at my university on ethics, and the IEEE council got to take him for lunch afterwards.
He was not shy at all about saying whatever was on his mind. It was pretty awesome to hear him dunk on his VP, right in the middle of lying to the Rogers commission's face. He was also really open about the fact that nobody at Morton Thiokol trusted him for the better part of a decade after he did that. He said something to the effect of, "It definitely made my career harder, but on the bright side, I never had any major crises of conscience for lying about it.
He also didn't give a single fuck about getting a lunch beer at a student gathering. I wish I'd joined him in drinking beer at noon on a Tuesday on IEEE dime.
It didn't hurt that Congress basically threatened to administer the corporate death penalty to Morton Thiokol if they retaliated against McDonald and others in any way:
That's post fact. He blew the whistle before and very publicly.
This event almost doesn't matter because he didn't care he would have gotten demoted - he was driven by being able to do the right thing.
I believe there's a moment before he doesn't sign off on the launch or maybe just before he speaks out against his employer in front of the presidential commission... what will happen to me? what will happen to my family, 4 children? What work will I do? How do I make money? this is all I know...
If you've ever worried about your future, job prospects, the unknown, the fear of not being able to provide, these thoughts are heavy. He made this decision and would gladly make it again regardless of outcome.
Nothing remotely close. I'm simply asking, that given the situation, would I have made the same decision? That I could be such a hero.
But am I willing to stick my neck out? Risk my career, who will hire me? Maybe someone will, but I just put a huge black mark in many's eyes. I have 2 children, a wife, and myself who rely on my income stream. Am I willing to let that go? Do I have to sell my house to make ends meet if I can't get a job?
I want to be able to say I could do what McDonald or Snowden did, but if I'm honest, probably not.
>It's almost like we are blackmailed into doing the wrong things all the time (on different levels of "importance").
This right here is one of the main reasons why I've worked so hard to achieve financial independence.
Every time someone in my life has told me that I have to do something I'm uncomfortable with, 'or else', they've simply been trying to cover the fact that I'm being exploited. Every. Time.
I'm quite happy to have reached a place in my life where I can tell someone 'No' with whatever level of politeness they deserve.
Advertisers tell us all day every day that a living should cost us much more than Maslow’s hierarchy would dictate.
And so we mortgage our agency every time we believe them. Advertising was part of the military industrial complex during world war 2. Maybe we should take umbrage at that.
This is the basic nature of a modern American corporation where the culture of the leadership implicitly believes there is a fiduciary obligation to shareholders to generate a profit.
There is a self-selecting process where people promote other people who make those small decisions in a particular way.
If you climb well or are unlucky enough to look under the wrong rocks you get to an inflection point where your option is to become a whistle blower, leave, ask for a promotion, or become the patsy.
Often you can avoid this (if that's your desire) by frequently and vocally asking about the audit requirements of a particular business process...
It goes beyond profit motive. Independent of any business concerns, there's a lot of cultural value placed on optimism, and on appearing competent and confident. Which means that there can be great personal shame in saying things like, "I don't know," or, "This might not work out." There's constant pressure to smile, look on the bright side, and, at all costs, avoid doing something that might earn you a reputation as a debbie downer.
I think that's actually a much bigger factor in some of these situations than any profit motive. Profit motive doesn't push rational people to keep doubling down no matter what; there is room for risk management concerns. But a corporation is not a single mind, it's a bunch of individuals acting in their own interest. Individuals' concern for their social capital within their teams tends to be a much more immediate and pressing motive than relatively remote and abstract things like shareholder profit.
It runs deeper than that. Basic human nature throughout history has been to demonstrate loyalty to those giving you your livelihood. Up to and including fighting wars and providing resources to war fighters, and supporting them when they committed what we today would consider war crimes. Progress as a species can be looked at as a progression from more violent ways to organize to less violent ways, and corporations are less violent than what they came from, royal charters.
Whistleblowing is and will always be considered an act of treason, or direct disloyalty, against those who are expecting you to support the enterprise.
Thats our business culture. You don't really get rewarded for doing the RIGHT THING. Hell your stock options will go down if you do the whistle blower thing.
You don't get punished for NOT doing the right thing. Precious few CEOs and CFOs in jail.
Ultimately it comes down to your own conscience and being able to sleep at night.
No need to abolish money, it would be enough to guarantee housing, food, education and healthcare to everyone. Just remove the conditions for people to be blackmailed/taken advantage of.
Your name hints that you had that, just as I had. It didn't work out so well anywhere it was tried, but I'm sure the next time will be different. /sarc
If you refer to the communist dictatorship in Romania, well that didn't work out, but to say it failed because of the will to guarantee the basic needs to everyone, that would be a gross misconception.
Regarding Italy:
We have social housing that is crippled by bureocracy and corruption, you have to wait years in line to get a flat, so I can't really say we guarantee that.
We guarantee education, but we couldn't guarantee the same (good) level of education to everyone yet. Also we don't guarantee post high school education. If you need to work because you're poor and you don't have time to pursue a degree, that's mostly your problem.
Food is not guaranteed either, although we have several monetary aids to partially reduce the issue.
Healthcare is guaranteed, and excluding waiting times that are a bit long, I can say that healthcare really worked well for us. Nothing is perfect, but nobody is left to die because of preventable disease. No matter how poor you are, you will be treated.
So I wouldn't say in Italy we ever experienced what I propose, just a tiny taste of it.
This gets at one of the core beliefs lots of people seem to have about socialism: that human nature means it will be implemented poorly.
It's pretty hard to test that out, though, when one side of the political spectrum is so convinced it will happen that they devote a significant amount of political effort to making sure it happens, preventing us from ever finding out what a well-funded and run socialist experiment would look like in the US.
> socialist entities EVER is a very strong factual argument
But it's false.
Vietnam works for example, it even handled covid much better than other turbo capitalist powers.
And every socialist experiment has been characterized by different approaches and circumstances.
Rather than a factual argument, it's more an uninformed generalization, that sounds too close to the propaganda we are pushed on by media/politicians.
Do you want a strong factual argument?
Despite their claims, not a single capitalist nation has managed to solve poverty. And they won't ever, because without poverty there can't be the hierarchy much needed to force people to behave like cogs into the capitalist machine.
Money is a measure of importance. Without it you make it VERY hard to determine what to do next, or whether what you did so far is sustainable.
For example, at the end of the current month I "spent" five chicken and twenty bushes of lavender (I live in the countryside :D) and acquired two dogs and fifty kilos of grain. Was that good? Can I keep doing the same thing next month, or should I change my "prices"?
Do not dismiss money lightly, it's far more important than you might think.
On the contrary, I would say that money is a (admittedly sometimes useful) abstraction that detached us from the real value and scarcity of things.
> Was that good?
Only you can tell. Has your quality of life improved? Do you have what you need to live well? Then it was good, otherwise not. Money won't help you at all to understand this. Only you can tell the value something has for you.
And I'm sure you do this already all the time. How many times were you advertised a great deal (in terms of price/product value) that you decided wasn't necessary?
That was you overriding the value money gives to something. Even though just looking at the price it seemed like a great deal, you realized that maybe you didn't need a third washing machine.
Societies which aren't/weren't heavily monetized (and did most of their transactions in kind) tended to not really understand most of the basic theories of modern economics. Merchants (like you just described) actually tended to be held in very low esteem precisely because they were applying the foundations of ideas like supply and demand - ideas that weren't well understood, and thus it just seemed like merchants were preying on you and providing nothing of value in return. tl;dr you can't just undo monetization but keep everything else intact.
We are always free to chose between cowardice and heroism. If you aren't sure you would blow the whistle to save actual human lives you may want to reassess priorities and realities.
I heard this sentence so many times, that by now I'm convinced people who believe we are free don't really know what freedom means.
Today, you are free to choose in the same sense that you are free to commit crime. You can kill the next random person you meet on the streets, you can do that as long as you're ready to pay the consequences.
Does that mean we have freedom to commit homicide?
For the same reason, we aren't free to choose between keeping a job or starving our family and ending under the bridge.
Especially in a corrupt economy that relies entirely on people being in debt to live under modern standards.
Abolish debt, guarantee the basic needs to everyone, then we can talk about freedom of leaving a job.
That's an interesting zero sum game. The reality does not match, but it's a convenient excuse to never face a lack of moral character.
You can quit and find a new job. Most would do it in a heartbeat for a tiny change in total comp, but struggle to make the decision when lives matter but might come at an economic cost?
That seems problematic and extremely self serving.
An interesting insight into the tech industry and its lack of 1. moral character 2. engineer accountability in general.
The hard part is when you aren't at all confident you can "quit and find a new job."
It takes courage to take actual risks and make actual sacrifices to do the right thing.
You are right that it takes a lot less courage if you are sure you can just "quit and find a new job" and end up just fine. I'm sure most people would do the right thing when there is no cost to them at all of doing so and they are confident that is so, that's not the issue.
Honestly your confidence that of course you would do the right thing always just makes me think you've never faced a hard decision, or have always convinced yourself that no decision that would involve a significant personal sacrifice or loss was ever the right thing.
The latter is what lots of people do, it's not that they say "oh yeah I'm going to kill the astronauts because my career is more important", all those other people who overruled McDonald convinced themselves that it's not gonna kill the astronauts at all, so they didn't have to face the choice.
(It's also interesting that McDonald did NOT "quit and find a new job" -- he stayed there! Even though he thinks people treated him poorly and it harmed his career. Maybe it wasn't so easy for him to quit and find a new job either).
If by "you" you mean tech/white collar skilled worker, perhaps. But you're failing to consider the majority of low wage workers who don't really have this privilege.
I also believe in personal responsibility, like you do, but the biggest issue is in the system, rather than in individual behaviour.
Low wage workers do much less consequential decisions. The issue of making unethical decisions for career is very much issue of white collar people who often have choice.
Most people believe that they'd do the right thing, and yet most people don't do the right thing when the shit hits the fan. It's like how everyone thinks they are above average.
You can always justify it to yourself -- well, I'm not sure the thing will blow up, all these other smart people disagree, do I really want to risk being unemployed and my family living in poverty for it? We have an immense capacity to convince ourselves that doing the right thing coincides with our personal advantage and convenience.
What can do we do to make it more likely that we'll do the right thing when it matters? Only practice. One can ask oneself, when was the last time I risked personal advantage or security to do the right thing, when was the last time I gave up something to do the right thing for others? If one hasn't been practicing it when the stakes are smaller, one possibly hasn't built up the muscle to do so when the stakes are huge.
If a society punishes people for blowing the whistle, then perhaps that society should reassess priorities and realities. Why should I blame any person for choosing their own lives in a society that would see them punished for doing otherwise? People respond to incentives and as a consequence of this the blame should be placed on the cause of those incentives.
When the choice is so black and white, it's easy to make. I hope that no one would willingly condemn someone to death simply for the sake of their job.
What if it's simply a probability though? 1%? .1%? .01%? Look at auto companies. They make decisions all the time that will kill 1 out of 1,000,000 people. Hell, the EPA and other regulators do this math every day. A coal power plant will kill x number of people over it's lifetime. Every time they make a regulation, they do this math and determine that saving a life is worth the economic cost.
>We are always free to chose between cowardice and heroism. If you aren't sure you would blow the whistle to save actual human lives you may want to reassess priorities and realities.
Seems like you're trying to say something in a roundabout way.
These tropes make for easy internet virtue points but "just shun all risk" is a terrible heuristic for decision making and it's rarely clear without hindsight if/when/to what extent the risks are meaningfully greater than some previously agreed upon acceptable level. (Challenger blew up because the decision makers didn't understand how risky things actually were during a normal low temperature launch and decided to cut things even closer)
If everyone in the supply chain padded their estimates to reduce risk and cover their ass we wouldn't have space flight.
At nigh-on 40 years old, I’ve come to believe that ethical violations are routinely perpetrated on the world because good people who would
otherwise speak out ‘have a wife and kids to feed’. As if that life decision to start a family, for all of the happiness and wonder that comes from it, plays right into the hands of the management structure inevitably looming over it.
I once heard an executive react with glee to the news that a senior compliance officer’s wife was pregnant: “Well now he’s going to have to play nice!”
The employee had a reputation for being... particular... before he was willing to sign off on certain things.
> I want to be able to say I could do what McDonald or Snowden did, but if I'm honest, probably not.
I suspect that same can be said of most people. In cases like this, it is incredibly hard to make the right decision before the fact since there are only two scenarios in which you will be redeemed: you're ignored and disaster ensues, or you're acknowledged and further inspection reveals the component failure. A successful launch or inspection does not change the fact that it was the right decision, yet it will most likely have a deeply negative personal impact. The bit about being trusted to make decisions is apparently irrelevant.
Because "keeping it reasonable" doesn't scale so BigCos frequently dis-allow drinking during/immediately prior to work as a blanket policy in order to have grounds for firing anyone who does it to excess.
Also drinking on lunch break is unprofessional (even if you don't do it to excess) in a lot of blue collar fields. How many white collar people lamenting the lack of beer at lunch would turn around and lose their shit if their crane operator had a couple beers? That's a double standard no workplace needs.
I guess we're digressing, but I don't think the US introduced urinals. And I fail to see how talking in elevators is incompatible with being a prude (or is there some subtle sexual innuendo that's flying over my head here?)
You forget that the US is incredibly heterogenous and the distribution of moral flavors varies widely. I have found Europeans to be prudish in certain domains when compared to mass US opinions (e.g. relatively conservative attitudes toward casual drug use in Scandinavia)
I've lived all over the United States. The local culture varies drastically. Where I work, no one would even blink if I opened a beer in the office, let alone on a video call. They typically send us DoorDash vouchers whenever we have to do lunch calls.
Not in a casual setting, but when you're on lunch break and going back to work/a conference/whatever else you're doing professionally after that, it is unusual (and not only in the US, even the Germans, who love beer, tend to only indulge in it after "Feierabend").
Got taken over by a foreign company, first thing was a complete ban on alcohol, second was an attempt to replace all our systems with Windows. We produce software for Linux, our customers run Linux, the first few weeks were not very impressive.
Saw another corporate takeover from another point of view, that of the acquiring company. The company being acquired used Windows, C#, MSSQL etc for everything. At first nothing was changed, they could use their technology and we could use ours (we used free open source technologies). But they weren't very profitable or efficient. They paid large amounts of money for licenses. Some years later they had managed to move some of their stuff to the cloud but they were now in that particular cloud vendor lock in, paying a lot of fees there. Five years later, almost everything there was shut down and development moved to headquarters to be done with almost a blank slate by mostly new hires.
Buying companies is hard. I'm pretty sure this was a big net negative for the buyer.
I accept that it isn't easy and the requirements were lessened, weeks after they tried to enforce them. One of my dev. systems now dual boots into windows, it will probably be stuck in update hell if I ever need it.
My team is in Canada. When I visited them (pre-pandemic) it was routine for the group to have a beer at lunch and maybe even two on a Friday. I've literally never seen anyone do that on any team I've worked on in the States and I've heard it both implied and stated directly, depending on the boss, that doing so could lead to termination. I ordered a beer a few times on those trips and it felt scandalous!
The film “Challenger: The Final Flight” on Netflix includes interviews with the most important participants in the launch decision, including McDonald. (It also has interviews with many of the astronauts’ families and does a great job at putting their experience front and centre.)
The guy whose job it was to send the fax because he happened to be the one who knew how to operate the fax machine is to this day utterly devastated; weeping.
The MTI VP who signed off (although the decision was made above his head) admits that he agreed with it at the time, but acknowledges it was a mistake. He’s being interviewed in a large room full of very expensive furniture.
The NASA manager who bullied them into agreeing to launch because they couldn’t prove that it was unsafe basically says that if he had his time over he would kill all of the astronauts again. Truly terrifying.
It's interesting to contrast this with the Chernobyl HBO documentary. Both are engineering disasters, both have very complicated cultural and political underpinnings to why they were allowed to happen. It's not to say the Challenger disaster is comparable to the scale of the Chernobyl disaster, but more crucially: what if the same poor incentives and decisions in place that cause Challenger caused other engineering disasters in the US.
HBO’s Chernobyl is more of a dramatization than a documentary. It certainly doesn’t contain interviews of people who were actually involved. There are quite a few good bits highlighting the dangers of nuclear energy, particularly in the context of the Soviet bureaucracy, but there also a few liberties taken with the science and reality of the event. The fact that people think of it is a documentary despite that is also concerning.
I'd go even further and say that the way most people treat "documentary" to be equivalent to "unbiased recitation of factual events" is problematic itself.
I love docs but often research the subject after watching and it's INCREDIBLY rare to see a doc that doesn't play fast and loose with the facts for the sake of creating a dramatic arc or thrilling moments.
It's ESPECIALLY true in "true crime" docs. The director has an idea of painting the subject as either sympathetic guy who was wronged by a corrupt system (Making a Murderer) or evil mastermind (The Jinx) just to give two recent examples.
Turned out years later the giant reveal at the center of The Jinx which made it such a viral hit was 100% manufactured by the director cutting up audio to make Durst say things he didn't. He also lied to the police about the audio so it wouldn't spoil the ending of the doc.
Jarecki never had to apologize for the blatant dishonesty in the doc, never had to give back the Emmy. It's still universally acclaimed.
It's because with documentaries, the target audience is someone who is expecting to get some semblance of truth from the thing. But the issue is that given two documentaries, A and B, if A is more narratively/cinematically/etc titillating, it will get produced over B. Which means that the cost function of engagement will drive a documentary right up to the constraint of "not lying" as it can possibly go.
If you really care about accuracy, don't watch documentaries. And please if you are one of my friends stop recommending that I watch them to get informed about something.
The incentives are definitely misaligned. Viewers want and expect accuracy, but most of all what they want is to be entertained and most aren't going to look to hard to see how accurate a really entertaining doc is.
And as you said the incentive for filmmakers is to produce the most entertaining doc possible to get more butts in seats and more streams which means funding and continued work in the industry. Accuracy doesn't really play much into what gets produced and released.
Agreed that people don't understand that documentaries are still narrative. My cinema studies professor emphasized that it's impossible to make an unbiased documentary. You could take security cam footage and it'd still have some bias from where the camera was placed and which footage you decided to show.
Serhii Plokhy’s Chernobyl: History of Tragedy seems a great text on the subject, and while the tv series is undoubtedly dramatised and many characters are morphed into one, the tv series seems to broadly follow the history of events as described in the book. Serhii seems to have a favourable view of the tv series.
It is worth listening to the podcast that accompanied the TV show. One of the things they mention quite a bit is where they deliberately deviated from the truth for practical/dramatic/pacing reasons[†], had to pick a narrative path from conflicting records, or had to make bits up to fill gaps in the (publicly available) records, and one or two cases where they toned down rather than ramped up an issue for tonal or "no one would believe it was quite that way" reasons.
It is both an enlightening insight into the process of making a show like that, and gives useful context to start on your journey if you want to delve deeper into the real reality of the events.
[†] merging many people into a single character, exaggerating immediate effects, reordering/repurposing actual events (a helicopter did crash but not at that point), pretty much that entire courtroom scene in the final episode, ...
There are quite a few scientific or technical aspects of the HBO show which are completely fantastical and typical Hollywood tropes. Like that the core might blow up like a megaton bomb, or render all of Ukraine uninhabitable.
Edit: oh and that’s without mentioning all the factual errors in the story itself. Like the three volunteers who went into the plant to open the drains didn’t die, but are alive today, cancer free and collecting their pensions. So are most of the people who watched the plant burn the first night on the bridge.
From what I know about it whether or not the core blew up (again, a small part of it blew up in the beginning of the incident and spewed radioactive graphite all over the site) was a dime on its side, the core was well underway towards landing in the water underneath it, the resulting steam explosion could have thrown all of the core all over the surrounding site. That it didn't happen is due to the heroics of a couple of people who never really made a big deal of it, they went underneath the reactor core to manually open the valves that drained the basin.
This is correct. However the writers for the show played it up to be much larger than that. In one of the episodes Gorbachov asked how big the explosion would be, and the reply was somewhere in the multi-megaton range IIRC, complete with a description of the predicted damage to the surrounding area equivalent to a major nuclear blast.
The biggest steam boiler explosions in history were still many orders of magnitude less than that, and those were purpose-built pressure vessels. The core wasn't going to drop into a pressure vessel, just whatever makeshift containment they had enacted at that time. Had the core come in contact with the water it would have converted a large chunk of it into steam, which would within moments blow open whatever cracks or leaks existed in the containment, blowing a lot of radioactive rubble into the surrounding environment.
That would have been a huge setback, but nothing near a multi-megaton nuclear explosion.
Temporary is a bit of an understatement, to this day there are large numbers of people in the Ukraine and in Eastern Poland as well as areas of Russia that ended up with Thyroid cancer due to this.
I'm not debating that. I'm just saying it would not have been a multi-megaton hydrogen-bomb-like explosion physically destroying not just the plant, but the surrounding city as well, like the characters said it would be on the show.
Indeed, in fact if that steam explosion had happened it would have likely reduced the chance of the core going critical rather than increased it. It still would have been pretty bad though, especially given that they didn't really have a good way of cleaning up the highly radioactive graphite other than to have guys pick it up by hand...
The epilogue of the show makes it very clear that the three survived and at the time of broadcast two were still alive.
Also, I believe the Soviet authorities at the time may have incorrectly believed that a large explosion was possible - in that respect the show may be correctly repeating a mistake that was made at the time.
I have to read the official reports yet, both of them. But from what I understood, while it turned out the massive steam explosion was no real threat, the sincerely believed it would happen. And the three guys draining the reservoirs lived, one died in 200X (I can't remember), the other two are still alive.
There are other things I don't like about the mini series, but really just minor ones. The last episode was a wasted opportunity, so. Using the Vienna meeting would have been the perfect setting to cover the international reaction as well.
That being said, I saw a lot of similar decision processes in my career in purely capitalist jobs to the ones that lead to the screwed up test in Chernobyl.
Thanks for pointing the bridge thing out. For starters, nobody knows who was there that night. And since nobody counted deaths, because nobody wanted to know, the series final just put a lot of urban legends out there. Not that the fact the nobody wanted to count isn't troubling enough in itself.
> The fact that people think of it is a documentary despite that is also concerning.
That's why I don't like entertainment that stylizes itself as factual. For general audience, there are only two modes of understanding: either something is obviously fiction, or obviously reporting. There's no middle line.
From the shows that try to blend the two, you get things like people believing fictionalizations in HBO's Chernobyl and then becoming opinionated on nuclear energy; people learning history from docudramas; people thinking Top Gear is factual and not staged; people thinking all those performers on talent shows are actually doing these things for real...
I had assumed from the comment that there were two shows, one a dramatization and one a documentary. Surely no one thinks that fiction was a documentary?!
And I was confused by that word choice, thinking I was/am unaware of HBO's Chernobyl documentary, which they must have produced to accompany the excellent film/miniseries.
I have friends who keep citing 'The Big Short' for what's wrong with our financial system.
A lot of people can't tell the difference between fact movies and fiction movies.
And that doesn't even get into clearly biased documentaries (but I assume that most documentaries are at least trying to be factual instead of entertainment...)
The book “The Big Short” is a documentary. The movie is based reasonably closely on the book. The movie is a fictional re-telling, but the people are real and their motivations and actions are accurate.
The Jenga scene to describe CBOs is quite cringe to me.
If a BBB tranche goes under, the investors in the BBB tranche get nothing to protect the AAA tranche (and above). In effect: BBB tranche can fail safely, that's the entire point of them.
That's why they only shorted the BBB tranche (with exception of Brownfield Capital, who did go all the way to the AA tranche). AA was safer and more reliable: so for a short its a riskier move to short.
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The scene does in fact lay the ground basis of tranches and CDOs, which is better than most Hollywood movies. But its still filled with misconceptions, and the Jenga tower (though dramatic) isn't helping at all.
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Synthetic CDOs was very poorly described. The "rating agency" scenes were pretty much purely fiction and just designed to enrage the audience and IMO unhelpful to the general discussion. Etc. etc.
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CDOs of CDOs were accurately described IMO. Hammed up by explaining the "yesterday's fish in today's soup), but that at least is somewhat of an accurate analog.
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I mean, it was a solid movie. But look, I know how reality works. I've actually taken the time to look at (some) of the Congressional Hearings and read some of the papers for how that whole thing worked back in 2008. And there are also some good Frontline Documentaries on the whole 2008 crisis in general.
AIG insured many of the AAA tranches. Once those started becoming at risk, AIG had to respond to a collateral call--which they couldn't (as the AAA tranches were so huge).
They were further hurt by the fact they kept a huge amount of their assets in AAA MBS. Which had now become illiquid and (temporarily) lost value.
AIG's bailout by the government was a critical inflection point; if they hadn't, the entire insurance/financial services industry was at risk.
That's beside the point...the movie is only two hours and can't include everything...the upshot that the AAA's were in a position to be unstable and possibly cause an economic collapse was in fact very true, and your comment is not very accurate.
A lot of banks saw what was going on in the market, and decided to "cover their ass" just in case the mortgage industry collapsed. They didn't quite go short like Burry (and everyone else in the movie), they just "hedged", to protect themselves just in case of a collapse.
Any bank that was worried about what was going on would have bought a few credit-default swaps from AIG (not that everyone knew that AIG was the main CDO counterparty: they bought CDS from the market and AIG happened to be one of those sellers).
If AIG went bankrupt, a huge number of shorts (well, "protection buyers") on the mortgage market would have gone bankrupt with them.
AIG isn't covered in the movie because it runs entirely counter to the narritive the movie is trying to build. A huge number of banks did in fact see the mortgage crisis and take moves to protect themselves.
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That's the thing about CDS and going short on the mortgage market: even if you were right about it, you had to also be right about the so called "counterparty risk". The bank who took up the long-side of the bet against you still needed to be around to make the payout.
That's why AIG was bailed out. Also: because the collapse of Lehman Brothers / Washington Mutual and other financial companies was wreaking havoc on the economy.
The movie wanted to focus on the narrative that "Bailouts are bad". Well, sure. But its pretty easy to build that narrative by ignoring the AIG situation, as well as Lehman Brothers / Washington Mutual.
If you go back and look at the actual history and debate of the bailout, the question is way more ambiguous.
>> the upshot that the AAA's were in a position to be unstable and possibly cause an economic collapse was in fact very true
You know what a number of my friends took from that scene?
"Wow, the banks are so stupid. Why would AAAs rely upon the B-tranche?"
Yeah, cause that scene is misinformed. The Jenga Tower is upside-down. America's Mortgage market wouldn't really collapse until the AAAs were being threatened (which eventually, they were, but because of CDO-squared and Synthetic CDO leverage).
But yeah, its a long story. You'd expect that the core of the story would be covered by a reasonable documentary. But "The Big Short" isn't one, its an entertainment movie.
Hmmm... that's a good question. Its been a while since I studied the 2008 collapse.
What I can say is that a CDS wasn't purchased directly in most cases. It was indirect.
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So for example: if you're a bank looking at a bunch of CDOs (and therefore: CDO-squared, which people didn't realize was a problem yet). You're seeing default rates creep up in 2006 and you're worried that things might collapse.
You then see a CDO that's insurance-protected. It has a lower %yield, but that's because some of the % is going towards CDS / insurance to protect your basket of mortgages. You check with the ratings agencies and they rate the bond at AAA (because even if the underlying mortgage fails, you have a big-bank providing the CDS protecting the mortgage).
You purchase the CDO (aka: buy a bunch of mortgages on the market), WITH CDS insurance. The CDS portion is sold to the highest-bidder at a separate time. The CDO-buyer didn't care "who" insured the CDO, they just wanted some kind of insurance.
That turned out to be a problem when AIG was revealed to be the owner of $500+ Billion in CDS. As such, the "insurance payout" protecting those CDOs ended up being vaporware.
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So now you're the US Government, looking at this problem. Do you let AIG collapse? If you do, all $500 Billion worth of AIG's CDSes fail (and therefore the CDOs fail). But if you let that happen, other banks also fail (and these other banks made the CORRECT decision: buying insurance to cover their ass).
This is the "Toxic Debt" problem. The toxic debt was passed from company-to-company: everyone "related" to AIG was going to be affected, and no one really had an idea of who AIG was related to.
Note: Bush let the first few banks (ex: Lehman Brothers) fail. They saw in realtime as the "toxic debt" of Lehman Brothers brought down the rest of the market.
By the time AIG was at risk, George Bush had seen enough. When one bank collapses, it causes many other banks to collapse in ways that cannot be foreseen.
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I admit that one could make the argument that it was the smaller-bank's fault for forgetting about counterparty risk (not caring who took up the other side of the CDS).
But by the time banks were falling and collapsing like dominoes in 2008, I think Bush didn't care about the morals of this particular case. It was about stopping the domino effect in general.
Its like the Options market. You can be the seller of a call option without knowing who your counterparty is. Similarly: you don't necessarily know who the counterparty to your CDS is.
The CDS was not a standard instrument like the options market. The details of each-and-every CDS changes with each prospectus. This is very common in the bond market: bonds change (callable vs non-callable vs puttable, vs tax free vs taxed, in a CDO or CDO-squared or Synthetic CDO, or a SLAB or an MBS or... etc. etc. Lots of differing details).
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So when you buy a CDO-squared in 2006, you didn't necessarily know that AIG was providing the CDS-insurance associated with that CDO. (Hypothetically. I'm assuming that such a product existed back then...)
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If it helps, consider a $600 call option on TSLA that expires a month from now. Lets say you want to be the seller of this call option (which is a kinda-sorta insurance-like product on the price of TSLA).
You can sell this Tesla-insurance on the options market. But you will NEVER figure out who is on the buyer-side of your deal.
And vice versa: the buyer of the TSLA insurance (call option) will never know that you were the one selling that insurance. A middleman handles all the details. Neither side really cares "who" is the counterparty is, they just expect that the other side can pay up.
(In the case of options: the clearing house / middleman is a very large bank who guarantees the payment. It turns out that the middlemen of the CDS deals in 2008 were less reliable)
Thanks, I had assumed that the banks organising CDSs were setting things up but the actual final transaction was directly between the two parties. So were they really in the middle selling the CDS and offloading the risk onto the likes of AIG - who was presumably thought to have zero counterparty risk?).
> who was presumably thought to have zero counterparty risk?
By my understanding: people just forgot about counterparty risk in 2008.
You have to remember: banks like Lehman Brothers have been around for over 100 years. The idea that a big bank would collapse was a completely alien thought in 2007.
It was one of those "don't care" situations. Oh, they're a big bank. They wouldn't choose to take on more insurance than they can handle (or whatever). I don't care which bank is the CDS insurance, I just want some insurance from somebody. Besides, mortgages have been reliable for decades, getting CDSes to cover my ass on an already safe mortgage is the height of paranoia. Etc. etc.
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You also have to remember that various banks work pretty hard to "hide their hands". If you hear that a big bank is selling CDOs, the all the smaller banks will similarly sell CDOs (trying to get a "piece of the action").
If you're a big bank deciding to make a $500 Billion bet, you really want to make sure that the details of your bet remains a secret. Otherwise, the smaller banks (who are more agile than you) will make those deals before you finish your deal.
Yes, it's a Hollywood movie, about a very technical subject. I would not expect someone to come away with a strong working knowledge of how credit default swaps work, any more than I would expect someone to come away from watching the miniseries "Chernobyl" and understand what caused the reactor explosion.
The Jenga tower should really be inverted. The BBB tranche gets knocked off the tower to protect the AAA tranche at the base.
The ratings agency scenes are fictional in the sense that no conversation actually happened, to our knowledge, but it's 100% true that the ratings agencies played right along with the industry, and were incentivized to give higher ratings, just like the FAA was incentivized not to ground Boeing after the first 737 Max crash.
A docudrama might be a more appropriate description. Nevertheless, Chernobyl on HBO was haunting and forces you to stop and think how a similar tragedy could be avoided. More broadly speaking it forces you to think about systemic power structures and perverse inventives that lead to these situations. These two are outliers, you need to ask yourself how many millions of times does this happen with localized/limited consequences.
The only "soviet" factor was, IMHO, the reactor design and the fact that the behaviour during shut down was kept secret. All other decisions can happen exactly like that in any other environment. Upper management ignoring risks for promotion? Yep. Bad risk management and safety culture? Check. Ignoring procedure to meet deadlines? Check. That emphasis on the "soviet" angle is the one criticism I have against the HBO series. Small things like getting the evacuation of Pripyat wrong (they evacuated before the west knew what happened, not after), and especially during the final episode which completely ignored the international reaction, or non-reaction. Also the over dramatic death toll, nobody knows how many people died because nobody wanted to know, not the Soviets nor the West.
I am in the middle of INSAG-7, the revised Chernobyl accident report from the 90s. And the positive reactivity effect of the control rods was, as shown in the HBO series, known since 83. The RBMK chief engineer suggested changes, technical and in procedure, immediately after that. These have not been implemented, because it was considered to be an extreme edge case. Might have been nice to portray it that way.
After all, I love the HBO series, watched it three times by now. Still one of the best mini series ever produced. As shown by the fact that you have to dig that deep to find deviations from reality. In most other cases, you don't even have to scratch the surface.
INSAG-7 includes a soviet report as annex. That report is really fascinating. Already in 1976 the soviet authorities and relevant institutes were aware of the design related issues of RBMK reactors and had identified necessary changes and modifications. Obviously, none were taken, but all these recommendations were included in the initial soviet report on the Chernobyl disaster.
And in my lay man eyes, the RBMK reactor (which was also found to violate soviet requirements from the 70s) was a disaster waiting to happen. Inherently unstable, optimized for grid stability instead of safety, lacking control and monitoring, erratic behaviour under certain conditions and no clear operating procedures.
Edit: Also nice is that the first reaction was to blame the operators and not the system as a whole. Kind of what always happens with aviation accidents as well, it always the pilots fault first.
We all deal with the "normalization of deviance" all the time, in large and small ways. Like being in a group where it's "ok to take off your mask" or basically any form of teenage peer pressure. These flaws are basic to humans for obvious reasons (we want to be cool / successful / not problematic) and it takes massive courage to blow the whistle.
I think both of these events together undermined people's general faith in governments to accomplish large scale projects. The two largest superpowers each failed in a big way at a task which should have been within their capabilities.
It shook the assumptions and foundations of modernity and we lurched closer to overvaluing the virtual accomplishments of economic growth and financialization. Wealth is being used to create more wealth, it is not serving any productive purpose, directly or indirectly:
>In the United States, probably more money has been made through the appreciation of real estate than in any other way. What are the long-term consequences if an increasing percentage of savings and wealth, as it now seems, is used to inflate the prices of already existing assets - real estate and stocks - instead of to create new production and innovation?
We kept trying after the Apollo 1 fire, we didn't really keep trying after Challenger or Chernobyl. Instead of trying to accomplish truly great and difficult things, we became satisfied with making numbers go up on a Bloomberg terminal.
> The NASA manager who bullied them into agreeing to launch because they couldn’t prove that it was unsafe basically says that if he had his time over he would kill all of the astronauts again. Truly terrifying.
I only know two people who spent their careers at NASA, but with my small sample size this isn't surprising at all. Both of them have never been wrong in their lives. Their hubris is off the charts.
Well I did work at NASA, although I left for the private sector to finish my career, and this does not describe 99% of the people I met. In the circles I ran in there was a great deal of humility and respect for process as something which saves lives. Maybe it depends on the center? Which part of NASA did your friends work at?
While we’re dunking on nasa , I gave my resume to a recruiter for the nasa jet propulsion lab at a career fair and he said they’d call me and they never called me. Bunch of liars!
You don't manage to get that high up the ladder if you let a silly thing like your conscience bother you.
(This is not a good thing, to be clear, and whoever figures out a systematic solution to this problem will save countless lives in many generations to come.)
I think there are people in both the camps. There are some with consciences that believe in doing the right thing, but also those that are in the sociopath camp. The news is full of the bad leaders that take ridiculous risks (e.g. Boeing) but the good guys don't make the news often.
If there had been good people in power at NASA at the time, the most important thing they could have done to save lives (not to mention run an effective organization) would be to refuse to promote folks without a demonstrable conscience to management positions.
It's all well and good to celebrate Allan McDonald for courageously speaking up, but the hard question is this: had Larry Mulloy or George Hardy ever been in the position where they had to make a decision about whether to courageously speak up, at any point between when they joined NASA and when they got their management roles?
If your promotion criteria says that someone's qualified for a higher-level job because they've been doing good work in fair weather, you have absolutely no way to know whether they listen to their conscience - you simply have no data about what happens when they have to make tough calls. And in fact your process is slightly biased against people who do, because sometimes people who don't will take an unwise risk and get lucky. And so over time, as long as disasters remain less common as worries about disasters, the folks who don't listen to their consciences get a little bit more done during their career compared to their peers.
We know that Thiokol demoted McDonald for speaking up and sidelined the others who also did. This is a system that systematically avoids empowering the good guys.
(And, from all evidence, Mulloy and Hardy were highly capable engineers. I'm not saying NASA should have never hired them - they should have had senior IC roles to fit their strengths and NASA should have looked for folks more like McDonald to make the launch decisions.)
> If your promotion criteria says that someone's qualified for a higher-level job because they've been doing good work in fair weather, you have absolutely no way to know whether they listen to their conscience
How can we possibly know if someone else listens to their conscience? Their conscience is not accessible to anyone else.
I mean, we can go back to the original article for that. Why are we praising McDonald? Why did his obituary get posted here, and why did Mulloy, who passed in October, not get any press? Their consciences were unknowable, yes, but fortunately we're not actually looking for the ineffable conscience. McDonald did a praiseworthy thing, which we wish to encourage. And maybe Mulloy had a stronger conscience, but he just was more deferential to the pressure on him to launch. Maybe he did listen carefully to his conscience, but he had too much of a sense of optimism and so didn't internalize the worry. Who knows? In the end, whatever the reason, he pushed for Challenger to launch.
We're looking for whether someone is empirically willing to make a decision that's unpopular but right, whatever the reason. If they did something like McDonald did, where they were under pressure (including career pressure) to do something, they refuse to do it, and the data eventually shows they had good reason for it, then you've got some data. If they do like his colleague Bob Ebeling did and they write a memo to upper management because they don't feel their direct management is taking concerns seriously, you've got some data, too.
What I'm saying is that, if the person you're considering promoting has never faced a hard decision, and you're promoting them because they had the good fortune to face years of easy decisions through which they could do high-quality work, you know you don't have any data. I agree that it's hard to get the data (and there are obvious problems with that metric turning into a target), but if you don't even try, you're certainly not going to succeed.
All the engineering process in the world will not save you if your hiring and promotion processes incentivize the wrong things. Hence my question: did NASA have a process for deciding that Mulloy and Hardy were good at making life-or-death decisions, or did it simply have a process that determined that they were good engineers?
> 1.2% of a US sample scored 13 or more out of 24, indicating "potential psychopathy"
Those 1.2% are only "potential psychopaths" so the real number might be even less. An illness that only affects <1% of a population can definitely be seen as rare.
Alan McDonald, the subject of this thread, is clear proof that this is obviously false.
The fact that so many people believe this is true, however, is why avoidable accidents like this happen. Being willing to compromise your ethics isn’t bravery.
Not a single person with McDonald's sense of ethics had the authority to scrub the launch. And multiple ICs, not just McDonald, had serious reservations.
If you want to say that my "You don't" is technically false because, if you listen to your conscience, you might get proven right after seven people die and a major investigation happens that remains world news for decades afterwards, and even then you'll get demoted and sidelined until the US Congress intervenes, then ... yes, you can. I will rephrase to "You usually don't." (But even so, that just gets you promoted at Thiokol, and my statement stands for NASA.)
Why didn't anyone scrub Columbia's launch? Why did the investigation board say that NASA had most of the same cultural and leadership flaws that the Rogers Commission had raised concerns about?
The SREs have a saying, "Hope is not a strategy." You can hope that the person you promote will have a sense of ethics, and maybe they will, but that does nothing to ensure that you'll have ethical decision-making.
I saw the interview you're talking about and I admit I respect it.
He had two choices: cowardly pretend it's not his fault or admit that given all he knew, he took a risk to break it or make it and broke it.
You don't know how liberating hearing a guy like that say that. In my company, no way someone says that, they'd rather do absolutely nothing than risk anything.
> You don't know how liberating hearing a guy like that say that. In my company, no way someone says that, they'd rather do absolutely nothing than risk anything.
It's also worth understanding the difference in risks and incentives.
Do you work in an industry where someone failing to speak up about issues with the work will directly risk other coworkers lives?
Where I work, the worst that happens from bad decisions is reduced profits. Besides the personal glory of "being right", there's no upside to sticking ones neck out. Especially if your manager is vindictive, and takes your "being right" over him as a reason to punish you. Better to let bad things happen, and then help fix the inevitable clusterfuck.
At the end of the day, reduced profits aren't great, but they're not an existential threat for the biz where I work.
I had the same takeaway. The guys attitude was “if you want to travel in space you need to take risks and based on what I knew this was a risk worth taking”.
Of course it comes across as quite callous considering it’s not his life that’s at risk, but he does have a point (not necessarily a valid one for the o-ring issue, but more generally speaking).
That's what Feynman's issue was as he reported it in the Roger's Commission[0]. Is they _didn't_ understand the risk when they thought.
Management thought the risk of lost was 1 in 100,000 which is launching everyday for 274 years. Engineers polled was 1:50 to 1:200. Obviously a massive disconnect.
The thing that gets me is they broke their own protocol operating below 53'F. This wasn't a calculated risk where it's 1-2 degrees out of spec, it's wildly out of spec, below freezing into a completely unknown, untested and un-spec'ed space.
Since we are already comparing Challenger to Chernobyl, that fact is a common thread isn't it? Ignoring temp specs, and at Chernobyl they ignored power and operation specs. In case of Challenger to get a launch, and in case of Chernobyl to conduct a test.
He had no idea whether it was a risk worth taking or not, because they rejected any evidence short of certainty that the O-rings would fail on a given flight. The results of the Rogers Commission make this abundantly clear to anybody who cares to pay attention, yet he professes to have learned nothing.
So easy to gamble with other people's lives and money. Let's admit it was really about his position and career, not 'wanting to travel in space'. He wasn't travelling; he was approving dangerous vehicles. He was trusted to delay launches when necessary. It was a complete fail on the VP's part, and all to improve his own 'numbers'. Not some noble goal.
I'm sure he rewrote it in his mind later, so he could live with himself. Because, of course, he was the kind of guy that rewrote things to suit his agenda.
> “if you want to travel in space you need to take risks and based on what I knew this was a risk worth taking”
The first thing we sent into space wasn't alive. The first living thing we sent into space wasn't a human. Taking risks is for idiots, not researchers or engineers.
It appears that there are enormous differences of opinion as to the probability of a failure with loss of vehicle and of human life. The estimates range from roughly 1 in 100 to 1 in 100,000. The higher figures come from the working engineers, and the very low figures from management. What are the causes and consequences of this lack of agreement? Since 1 part in 100,000 would imply that one could put a Shuttle up each day for 300 years expecting to lose only one, we could properly ask "What is the cause of management's fantastic faith in the machinery?"
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For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
The Rogers comission was also just going to bury the problem and almost absolve NASA of guilt, Feynman fought to get his appendix in the report, and he also later said that he was being gently lead to discover the O-rings issue during his investigations.
I enjoyed reading that. Feynman doesn't sugar coat things. I also recommend "what do you care what other people think" book. The second half covers Challenger investigation wich is quite amusing to read.
There is only one place in that article where an actual course of action is discussed, and this is it.
> That has her less focused on moderation policies and more on actually educating young people because they're going to be the ones who have to fix this mess.
So no to censorship, yes to educating the public. Nowhere do they advocate any form of censorship, and they even argue against moderation. So where exactly did you get that opinion from if it’s not actually in the article?
So you compare the words of someone on the website with the format of this website.
OP just praised them for their page layout.
Tomato and apple comparison.
I remember as a young expat engineer, I've worked for one large consulting job doing UK's NHS's NPfIT project in 2005. I've refused to signoff the architecture due to one of the providers not meeting requirements. One year later I've written a 6 point warning to the C-level of the company, that it's going to fail. Then quit the project and left. Years later, I read that the project was a failure for UK. I still keep my warning letter as a badge of honor, showing to my family and friends.
While I really do respect this person, I can't help but wondering how many people today on HN could make such a decision, especially those who insist to "move fast and break things" or "rough consensus and working code", etc, etc.
Probably not many. (Probably I couldn't either.)
It's one thing to praise a hero like him... but how can we be that guy while having a stable job?
99% of folks here don’t deal with life and death matters. When you do, you get a lot of practice at canceling, which helps. There’s also the fact that you can say, “if you do this, people will die,” which is a pretty bright line when you’ve got something to back it up. I actually found it more difficult to take a stand in less consequential fields. But it’s still very, very hard to look someone more powerful in the eye and tell them no. I’ve had to do it and it’s not fun. (Nothing on the scale of a Shuttle launch. I once had to effectively revoke a judge’s flying privileges, for instance.)
McDonald is on a whole other level though. That’s not just your employer, that’s the entire space program. I hope I never have to find out whether I’m made of the same stuff he was.
In my experience, this is not how it works. Very rarely can you say definitively that “people will die”. Reliability is shrouded in uncertainty and the best you can say is, “people may die, eventually ”. If you make too absolute of a claim and it didn’t occur you will gradually erode credibility. Look at Columbia... they knew the foam shedding was out of spec but had so many instances of probability being on their side, if you claimed people would die act each of those launches soon you just become noise. Over a long enough timeline you may be right, but phrasing in that way is unlikely to help in low probability events.
Mullane was on STS-27 -- that was a disaster on the level of Challenger or Columbia but by pure luck they avoided a deadly ending. The failures were predictable. And this was the second flight after Challenger's last.
I think the underlying point is that there are cognitive biases that prevent decision makers from effectively understanding that risk. It’s very much like financial crashes; after the fact it becomes obvious the risk was there but our biases prevent most people from seeing/understanding it effectively in the moment
There was an anecdote from one of Czech researches in Papua-New Guinea who said he was surprised that local hunters absolutely refused to sleep under suspicious, not entirely healthy trees, and were very careful about examining the spot before they chose it for rest. He considered the chance of the trees falling down very low, perhaps less than one in thousand.
He changed his attitude when the elders explained to him that while the chance was very low, the hunters took a lot of naps in the forest throughout their lives and over decades, the low chance translated to almost-certainty.
No, it's the 10% that kills people. They knew the O-rings were failing because they had analyzed previously discarded rockets. So the engineers said, "We got lucky this time; eventually this is going to kill people." But after launching 4-5 times and having O-ring failures with no problems, management (and probably everyone) started thinking it wasn't really as dangerous as it was.
The percentage loses meaning without an expected number of opportunities to calculate the expected value. 10% risk x 1 flight might be deemed acceptable. 10% risk x 100 flights means you should plan on losing 10 shuttles. Neither statement about risk probability is wrong (0.001% vs 10%), but both are incomplete. The actual shuttle risk was calculated between 1/78 to 1/254, if I remember correctly
It's enough that people may die (or even get injured) as a consequence of your work. That's the line you shouldn't cross and it actually helps to have such a clear and unambiguous definition of that line.
I understand that stance, but when humans are the decision makers and have all kinds of other pressures (cost, schedule, etc.) it’s often not enough that people “may” die. Especially if we’re talking about risky endeavors like human-rated space travel, “may” is only one level across the gradient, and that level could be considered an acceptable risk by some. You will never drive risk down to zero, so “people may die” will almost always be true. If that’s your threshold, you will never launch.
The real difficulty is accurately gauging risk, especially when there isn’t substantial data.
The failure mode was known (hence why it was considered out-of-spec) but it didn’t translate to an accurate risk assessment. It was deemed “in family” meaning it was known to be outside of spec but not a risk. Somehow, over many flights, something that was originally characterized as a safety risk lost its credibility as a risk. It’s not that it was unknown, but the understanding of the risk was changed. I wonder if STS-27 led to a false sense of confidence
I'm curious to hear what you think about the Therac-25 situation because the line between a code change and fatalities isn't as clear cut as with Challenger, but definitely still there.
Hey, whatever it was, I appreciate people like you are out there regardless of whether the thing got done anyway.
I'm in currently in the valley of death phase of startup life working on a tiny piece of the climate problem, but when the day comes that I'm in a position to hire teams I want them to be able to look me in the eye and oppose me when I'm going off the ethics track. How we got here to needing the climate problem fixed was people making their peace with consequences of their actions, and it's not going to be solved by doubling down on that approach.
In my experience big tech is no more ethical than startups. I respect where you are coming from though, there are plenty of other reasons startups are hard. Much of the ethical tapestry at a startup is on the founders.
I’ve done it too. So it’s you + me + McDonald + ...
You know, for all its evils, it is sometimes surprising that the world is relatively peaceful (for 60% of the globe), full of donators, people fighting for women, people refusing to participate to bad schemes. Even in opposing views, most people are doing it because they believe the world will be better like this. Also, absolute stupid people have always been the norm, and the bad ones have always been assertive and powerful and yet, the world is not so bad, so we are on a good streak.
Well, dog walking apps have pretty major safety issues. They've had problems with crime, serious injuries, pets have died, and all sorts of lawsuits documenting it.
Your broader point is correct, I'm just not so sure everyone is as good at judging where that line is as they think they are.
> It's one thing to praise a hero like him... but how can we be that guy while having a stable job?
You decide that ethics and life are more important that your next few paychecks years before the event that makes you stand up and speak out. Sort of the stoic version of dress for the job you want.
For many businesses, from the regular employee perspective, a lot of the hard ethical questions unfortunately got answers and built into policy years agoz often well before platforms and products got big for those that succeeded. Getting old discussions resurrected is and likely will remain a hard problem in human organizations forever.
Perhaps counterintuitively, working on systems with clear life safety concerns often makes it easier since there are very clear consequences. It's one of the reasons for very harsh regulatory penalties, to be big and shocking enough for those that don't have strong ethical paradigms. In the industries I deal with there are several "million dollar per day" fine structures I hear people going on about that I never correct with more accurate information because if they're oblivious enough to not understand they're also oblivious enough to need that fear.
You can't, you have to be galactic citizen and do the right thing or best we end up like the Borg.
If you want to remain true, you have to have FU money and know where that line is. Some peopled don't need that moral cushion, others do, it isn't a value judgement. We need to construct a world where Allan McDonald's can flourish.
I think people with this kind of integrity are very few in general. Being HN participant does not really increase the chances. Might even be the other way around as being smart asses it is easier for us to come up with the reason to keep our conscience quiet.
I do not think it has anything to do with "move fast and break things" way of doing things though. You can't expect the same approach and investment in safety in generic company vs some nuclear power plant or likes.
I've never been faced with a decision so grave as McDonald, but I've done my best over the years and I'm content. There are lots of opportunities to move the needle ethically that don't require sacrifice at all. At least one time the organization actually changed — credit due to the people who listened with open ears.
(Throwaway account because making a difference doesn't necessarily mean making a public show.)
>I can't help but wondering how many people today on HN could make such a decision, especially those who insist to "move fast and break things"
This gets into the argument about whether people who write software should be called engineers. There is good reason why nearly every engineering body out there has something along the lines of "Hold paramount their duty to public welfare" as the first item in the code of conduct. "Move fast and break things" is pretty much incompatible with engineering.
I think it’s kinda like how once digital photography became good enough you didn’t have to worry about wasting film. You can take 20 pics and later pick the best one, rather than spending 20 minutes trying to get the perfect shot.
With software how it is today the “outer software” engineering has created a little virtual realm where things can go haywire and fail but it’s in a mostly padded room. And of course it’s all running within very well regulated and stable hardware.
Maybe coding itself isn’t engineering anymore than welding or running cables is but both computer and software engineering was required for coding and to make the code do anything significant it takes some engineering, or you could just start welding shit together!
>There is good reason why nearly every engineering body out there has something along the lines of "Hold paramount their duty to public welfare" as the first item in the code of conduct. "Move fast and break things" is pretty much incompatible with engineering.
Those aren't mutually excluisive.
Move fast and break things when it comes to crud apps is totally different thing.
You can also use "move fast and break things" in order to achieve "Hold paramount their duty to public welfare"
Yea, I don't think I've really been under that gun either.
About the closest I came was when working in telecom, for a new tech deployment I had my hands pretty deep in the lab environment, so when things were broken in the lab, bad config, etc I would get pulled in troubleshoot and solve the problems.
Well one day 911 wasn't working in the lab and the problem got thrown my way, and it wasn't an obvious problem like someone miss configured something or broke some config somewhere. In telco at the time it was all vendor driven solutions, so I intentionally left the system broken to bring in the vendor to troubleshoot, and it was clear, this is a lab, let's not treat it like production and as such we don't need immediate recovery, we want to get to the root cause so it doesn't happen in production.
The next day, the handset verification team was on me, saying they need this to work immediately since they need to validate some device by such and such date. And I basically said listen, there's a software problem in this product, and we don't want it to go to production. And if I don't get it fixed it could blow up in production on us. I also told them if I don't make progress in a day or two, I would try and reconfigure another environment for them so they would get unblocked, but otherwise was not willing to just reset this system so the problem went away.
I was also doing my own investigation as much as I could since the vendor wasn't always the most reliable, and I encountered something unexpected. It looked like a node was rebooted, so I tracked that down, and found a senior architect who new I was working on solving the issue had rebooted one of the blades. His answer was basically the device team was complaining so he just went in and rebooted the node so they would stop complaining to him.
Luckily, he didn't know enough on how to really reboot the system, so it just synced back with it's backup and still had the problem for us to investigate.
The vendor comes back and goes ah yea, the 911 handler is using the wrong memory region for storing emergency calls, so instead of being able to allocate a hundred thousand records or whatever it was for active emergency calls it was using an administrative region that could only allocate something like 5 calls. This was enough years ago that I forget the exact number, but it was less than 10. Not just that, but there was a second bug, a certain 911 call flow would allocate the call but not release it, which is why we couldn't make any 911 calls in the lab, we had leaked all of the reserved memory for emergency calls.
I just remember being so livid, because the culture for anyone who dealt with that system was it's failure is just in their way, so lets just escalate and try and make it go away so we can continue on with our jobs.
And it would've been so easy to just reset the whole thing so that people would stop complaining. It was just a lab after all.
When you work in the industry writing software which can kill people, it is not so difficult to raise up your voice and say no when it could threaten life of people. Even if you are wrong it is still useful to raise your concern, as this would trigger an in depth analysis. I would say that it is even easier when your company experienced deaths due to products they make.
But.. I am not in the position of being responsible for signing the design which makes my life easier. If an accident happens I have my conscience for myself and proof that I objected.
However, it is much more difficult to gain attention when you cry foul to something unethical being done (diesel gate comes to mind here), even though it can remotely leads to deaths.
It's difficult for sure. It will draw out every ounce of your political skills. It sometimes means leaving your job, and although it doesn't necessarily mean sacrificing your whole career, optimizing for ethics may impede your ability to optimize for other things like compensation or power.
> usually not up to the task
Hmm, "usually"? It sounds like you've done at least something sometime, even though you may not have been satisfied. Kudos for doing what you could under the circumstances. Not everyone needs to go full martyr.
Thank you for your kind words. I have done my best, when I can. Not always comfortable, but I am doing just fine. Still feels like I could have done more.
It is so true. I've done it, not out of ego, but out of passion and belief that it was the right thing, and I've paid the price physically and mentally for it.
I respect and honor this man for what he did. RIP Allan McDonald, and thank you for what you left behind.
This quote from the article helped me, right here, right now:
--- excerpt ---
"What we should remember about Al McDonald [is] he would often stress his laws of the seven R's," Maire says. "It was always, always do the right thing, for the right reason at the right time with the right people. [And] you will have no regrets for the rest of your life."
--- end excerpt ---
When people say that it is not just about about what you do, or why you do it, but who you do it with, it is so easy to gloss over that sometimes, it's about doing your part with the right people.
" "It was always, always do the Right thing, for the Right Reason at the Right time with the Right people. [And] you will have no Regrets for the Rest of your life.""
NASA leadership escaped consequences for designing a ridiculously unsafe launch system, and playing politics to choose their 4th rated SRB design to get Utah’s congressional vote.
There was amazing amount of fear and ass covering after the accident.
NASA engineers gave information about O-ring only to Sally Ride (a member of Rogers commission). Sally Ride then gave the information to her friend General Donald Kutyna (an another member of Rogers commission) who she trusted to not to implicate her or the engineers. Then Kutyna found way to inform Feynman so that Feynman could "discover it independently" without the risk of revealing the real source.
Alan McDonald spoke up in the first closed meeting as the article says and told that they have suggested not launching. Focus of the commission started to change but it didn't happen overnight. He didn't "blow whistle to congress".
I mean you are free to believe whatever you want, but, unless you also believe that it’s a large secret conspiracy to fill the important positions with incompetence just in time for a crisis (or to create a crisis down the road), you’re going to have a tough time explaining similar disasters that show similar behavior from your fellow man.
At most you can say that greed causes leaders to promote and hire this kind of person, but that’s a tenuous argument in my opinion. The real world observation of WW2, the Milford experiments, Stanford prisoner experiments, Asch conformity experiments, and so many cases of corporate malfeasance, at least to me, show pretty directly that people like Allan McDonald are the exception. The reason also makes sense to me. Social conformity, if you’re in the “in” group yields a lot of benefits and being in the “out” group has a lot of costs. You’re talking not just about societal conformance pressures through things like being a pariah at work or being passed over for promotion. This can be personal pressures where you suddenly have financial pressures you didn’t have before because no one is willing to give you a break. You’ve got your family either putting pressure on you to ease their lives or your own guilt that your family is paying a price for your actions. To withstand that is a minority of people, like those who have strong support from family and trusted friends for whom the societal bonds aren’t as important.
To be fair, situations were the objector is listened to are non-events the public will never know of, so it is hard to know the true ratio.
I do agree that ethics seems to take a saddeningly low priority in most powerful leaders in the world, but there are some areas in society where this isn't the case: I remember reading a thread a little while ago here on HN about how seriously safety is taken in nuclear power and how anyone involved in the process can object.
I think we’re in agreement. All I’m saying is that that’s the default behavior for most people - no one wants to be left holding the bag. If you actually strive to create a different culture you can have different results. I don’t think this is a lack of ethics in the political class per se. It’s really hard to build this kind of structure, there’s no credit involved (since you’re preventing hypothetical future catastrophes), and politically difficult to defend to constituencies that don’t agree with your caution (“repeal regulations”). You might also be wrong and your opponents could be right so you’re taking a gamble on something that has little to no upside and lots of risk.
That being said, (and as a person with a pro-nuclear bias) I will note though that Fukushima had engineers raising dissent about it and warning/begging/pleading with the bureaucracy to harden the defenses against a tsunami. Admittedly maybe you’re talking about Western policies.
Personally, I assume that these kinds of people, by and large, do get away with it (although I guess that's just a way of restating the original assumption).
I don't think this is true as an unqualified statement. But I think it is true that many/most people who are making technical decisions without the proper technical understanding behave. The technical experts in all of the organizations involved were doing the right thing, raising alarms and recommending against flying the Shuttle under risky conditions. But the managers over them were not listening or overruling them, because the managers did not understand the actual impact of the technical decisions they were making until after the disaster occurred.
Except that there are millions of scientists being ignored every day in just about every field you could imagine. Being ignored doesn't make you wrong or right. It's part of being a scientist. It's in the noise.
I would bet good money that every disaster movie could also be tied to a Nostradamus prediction. It doesn't make it relevant.
> "his laws of the seven R's ... always do the right thing for the right reason at the right time with the right people. [And] you will have no regrets for the rest of your life."
I did too the first several times I read through it -- until I read every word individually. Most of the "r's" are on words at the beginning of a word group, but two of them are on words right next to each other.
While it is undoubtedly tragic, I kinda wish it were more acceptable for people to die exploring space, now and then. This focus on absolute safety seems crippling.
The difference is you don’t need 20 years of training and multiple post-doc diplomas to join the army. Every loss there is insanely expensive in terms of human capital.
There is an absolute focus on safety not just for manned missions. Spaceflight is expensive and any small fuckup can cause a loss of many many millions.
I think what you’re saying is true. I want to add that there are other armies of “volunteers” in other areas of life who didn’t actually volunteer in a fully free way
Have you considered the value that an astronaut represents? AFAIK, they are basically genetic anomalies along with extreme learned discipline and intelligence. They're like an asset. Replacement cost of an engineer in tech is estimated to something like 3x their pay, think about how much money it costs to replace an astronaut.
A particularly relevant snippet: The report delved deeply into the underlying organizational and cultural issues that the board believed contributed to the accident. The report was highly critical of NASA's decision-making and risk-assessment processes.
At least SLS puts its solid rocket boosters well below the crew capsule, though. So compared with the Shuttle, there's some nonzero possibility of safe abort in the event of an SRB explosion.
While Allan McDonald was obviously right, for one case where it was justified, how many other instances there are where an engineer/scientist expressed concerns, was ignored, and everything went fine.
I'd say that as a rule, a good engineer will always be concerned. With his knowledge and experience, he will know everything that can go wrong. And asking him to make life-and-death decisions must be really hard when you know that your contraption can always be made safer, given enough time you don't have.
How many big milestones were made possible because some clueless executive decided to risk the life of people? How to make the difference, without the benefit of hindsight, between an overly cautious engineer and a savior?
I think you’re being very, very generous in your interpretation of roles. You don’t just risk “innovating” when human lives are at stake, and in this case the danger was very well known: the engineers knew exactly what, and how, it could fail, due to the temperature being way out of spec.
Launching under freezing weather was no particular achievement. They could have delayed the launch for better weather with no loss of “big milestones”.
You do risk innovating when human lives are at stake, we wouldn't have a moon landing otherwise.
And I never said engineers concerns were unfounded, quite the opposite in fact, engineers know what can go wrong. If your engineers don't say "no", either they are incompetent or they are heartless. And because Allan McDonald was a great engineer and human being, he said "no".
My point was more general than the Challenger disaster. When to listen to engineers and when to take unreasonable risks? Here, the answer is obvious, and we know that in general, Allan McDonald was someone to listen to but we have hindsight. How do we make the difference between chances you can't take and over-caution that can drag project forever?
It would be interesting to know how risk was calculated in the space shuttle program since we have problems going both ways: two catastrophic accidents, and runaway costs which are, for a large parts, safety-related in response to these accidents.
You went right over the main point - there was nothing “innovative” in risking a launch under bad weather. The exact same launch would happen later. Any rationalization of “somebody has to take the risks the wimpy engineers won’t” is pure bad manager romanticizing.
You have not understood the main lesson from the Challenger accident: the fact that everything went fine is not proof that everything is fine. That's exactly what normalization of deviance is all about.
I have been wondering what law or mechanism (perhaps already existing in other countries) could prevent upper management coverups?
For a while I though that press was that mechanism, however after 'embedded press' in Iraq War and governments going after press sources with impunity, or White House refusing to deal with it all together, we know that press can be coopted. We need something better, perhaps a law...or a gofundme for whistleblowers?
I'm not seeing it. The fundamental dynamic is the balance of power between the individual and the organization, and in the US at least, thanks to a number of Supreme Court decisions, the organization is at an extreme advantage.
Middling. He keeps making decisions based on how he thinks (and I emphasize _thinks_, because this sort of evaluation of mass public reaction is not really his core expertise) they will play out in the media and politically. The most recent example is him basically saying "yeah, it makes sense for the UK to do first-doses-first, but it doesn't make sense for the US, because people here would not stand for it" and completely dodging the actual question at hand, which is which vaccination regime is better for most rapidly decreasing SARS-Cov-2 infection and COVID-19 deaths. Which is first-doses-first, from everything I can tell of the actual scientific evidence, and I am quite sure he knows that.
So basically, he's walking a line between making the right scientific decisions and protecting his position enough (in his estimation) that he gets to make decisions at all, which is compromising some of the decisions he's making.
> He also told NASA officials, "If anything happens to this launch, I wouldn't want to be the person that has to stand in front of a board of inquiry to explain why we launched... ."
Wise words, very wise words
But one thing that just came to my mind: were the allowed launch temperatures specified at design time? Yes, Florida is hot but it does get chilly sometimes (not rarely, sometimes).
Of course my cartoon solution to that launch would be to hold the launch with engines running for 1 or 2 seconds while giant baffles would divert the massive amounts of vapour back into the orbiter and heat it a bit
I think what's interesting about this is that his ethical action was against his own company's interest. He spoke up for his engineering team and what he believed to be true, to an external body, at the expense of the executives and business partners at his company.
I feel like there are a lot of parallels in modern-day situations. The common wisdom around PR is to get control of this kind of situation to prevent it.
Are there any guidelines on how to prevent such incidents in the future where management overrules engineers /subject matter experts because of deadlines / profit etc ?
Can we learn from other professions such as doctors on how to handle these better? I believe it's very rare for a hospital administrator to over rule a doctors decision when it comes to patients health.
Great read about something I never knew about. I tip my hat to those people who are able to stand up for whats right (and not grandstanding) given intense pressures to do otherwise. It's also somewhat shocking that NASA would push forward given the very strong push back. Seems like some incredibly strange decision logic for such a high risk situation.
I don't know specifics here, except to say that the important thing is not whether or not he warned of the disaster or withheld his consent, but how _infrequent_ that event was.
Did he sign off on STS-61-C?
My understanding is that there were numerous warnings about the Challenger, but the same warnings had been made constantly for every single launch. Sometimes they resulted in delays, etc., but the engineers and managers in charge of the launches had ample evidence of predictions of failure not being borne out because the system was resilient to them.
Similar to warnings about 9/11, or Fukushima, or the 2008 GFC, there were people who predicted them. But, like the saying goes "they predicted 25 of the last 7 recessions".
I can't say whether McDonald fits this mold, but if he did not -- if he made an unusual prediction -- then that should be front and center here.
That is a great story. I am so used to hearing Richard Feynman credited with leading the blue-ribbon panel that spoke truth to power in a plain-as-dirt method, as well as exposing the mechanism of the O-ring's thermal characteristic.
Did Allan McDonald also give a tip to Richard Feynman? He was the first one who talked about the O-Rings, and everyone was wondering how he got the idea in the first place (or wasn't wondering, since Feynman was an undisputed genius)
Sally Ride had insight into the O-ring failures, and tipped general Donald Kutyna. Kutyna subtly tipped Feynman. Kutyna had invited Feynman over dinner where they talked about Kutyna's car and the O-rings inside of them.. So the story goes.
> Is Einstein an expert on “listening to one’s conscience”? If not, then it’s just mumbo-jumbo.
What rubbish logic. I think we can agree that Einstein was a generally incredibly intelligent and remarkable human. That is enough of an argument to pause for 5 seconds and hear this one sentence out. Then you can discard it as you see fit.
In other words, Einstein's status is what has you listening, but the content of what is said has to stand on its own two legs and does not necessarily rely on an argument from authority.
There is a parallel here with Boeing and 737 MAX. In both cases an executive or high-level manager interfered with the engineers.
In the case of Boeing it actually started right from the beginning with the decision to create a kludge based on very dated designs to try to meet new requirements and save a buck rather than create a new design.
Engineers should be in charge of engineering companies and they should also continue to be incentivised to operate as engineering supervisors in those roles rather than just salespeople or accountants.
I actually think it's not just the people or the incentives but the nature of money. It's a fundamental technology but I think we should find ways to upgrade it as a high technology so that it integrates better all of our values that might not currently be in the bottom line.
He was not shy at all about saying whatever was on his mind. It was pretty awesome to hear him dunk on his VP, right in the middle of lying to the Rogers commission's face. He was also really open about the fact that nobody at Morton Thiokol trusted him for the better part of a decade after he did that. He said something to the effect of, "It definitely made my career harder, but on the bright side, I never had any major crises of conscience for lying about it.
He also didn't give a single fuck about getting a lunch beer at a student gathering. I wish I'd joined him in drinking beer at noon on a Tuesday on IEEE dime.