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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33524 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023

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3 - if a small error could lead to death - hire the most safety oriented, pedantic and boring people there are to design your product.

Really sounds like Oceantech is just a big grift. What if the 50-year-old white guy grimaced visibly upon seeing this death-trap and demanded all kinds of expensive tests and redesign work? 'Not inspiring' might well be code for 'knows what he's doing and wouldn't touch our work with a barge pole'.

Couldn't agree more about the unsuitability of 'move fast and break things' in areas with big downsides. Most software is non-critical, yet stuff like AI or bioweapons/gain-of-function should be treated with extreme care. But it's not just Silicon Valley that is to blame - random research groups like EcoHealth and so on messed up bigtime.

What if the 50-year-old white guy grimaced visibly upon seeing this death-trap and demanded all kinds of expensive tests and redesign work?

https://abc7chicago.com/missing-titanic-sub-oceangate-lawsuit-david-lochridge-submersible/13409850/

Exactly that happened. And they fired him.

I don't think the firing had anything to do with his race or age though, it appears to have happened purely because he was saying "wait a minute, I don't think this thing is safe".

They seem to be counter-claiming he wasn't an engineer and didn't listen to their senior engineer saying it was safe.

But - (1) if your CEO is making a big point out of "I don't hire 50 year old white men", how senior/experienced is that engineer? and (2) if he's not hiring the experienced older submariners/Naval guys, then he's leaving a lot of valuable knowledge on the ground (e.g. "nah that won't work, we tried it fifteen years ago and Johnson exploded").

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