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Why Being Wrong Makes Humans So Smart
Hugh Pickens sends in an excerpt in last week's Boston Globe from Kathryn Schulz's book Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error. "The more scientists understand about cognitive functioning, the more it becomes clear that our capacity to make mistakes is utterly inextricable from what makes the human brain so swift, adaptable, and intelligent. Rather than treating errors like the bedbugs of the intellect — an appalling and embarrassing nuisance we try to pretend out of existence — we need to recognize that human fallibility is part and parcel of human brilliance. Neuroscientists increasingly think that inductive reasoning undergirds virtually all of human cognition. Humans use inductive reasoning to learn language, organize the world into meaningful categories, and grasp the relationship between cause and effect. Thanks to inductive reasoning, we are able to form nearly instantaneous beliefs and take action accordingly. However, Schulz writes, 'The distinctive thing about inductive reasoning is that it generates conclusions that aren't necessarily true. They are, instead, probabilistically true — which means they are possibly false.' Schulz recommends that we respond to the mistakes (or putative mistakes) of those around us with empathy and generosity and demand that our business and political leaders acknowledge and redress their errors rather than ignoring or denying them. 'Once we recognize that we do not err out of laziness, stupidity, or evil intent, we can liberate ourselves from the impossible burden of trying to be permanently right. We can take seriously the proposition that we could be in error, without deeming ourselves idiotic or unworthy.'"
Interesting way of looking at our failures. So... let's see if BP uses this to prove their genius.
Once we recognize that we do not err out of laziness, stupidity, or evil intent, we can liberate ourselves from the impossible burden of trying to be permanently right.
Sometimes people do "err" out of laziness, stupidity of evil intent!
We can take seriously the proposition that we could be in error, without deeming ourselves idiotic or unworthy
Any suitably intelligent person already knows that failures are as much a part of learning as always being "right". And sometimes we do make really silly mistakes by overlooking things that should have been obvious. I know I do. Then again, often what is obvious to me, isn't to others..
which is totally what she said
I'm never wrong.
I thought I was once, but it turns out I wasn't.
Its called prejudice.
I'm sure we've all noticed that the people who make the biggest mistakes get promoted the fastest.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I think people focus their criticism more on those that make errors that seem glaringly obvious to everyone else. We tend to call those "stupid" errors. It's true however people tend to become far too critical of others who seem to be unable to reach the same conclusions at a high speed that we have already come to.
On the other hand, there are obvious mistakes that should not be conflated with probabilistic errors due to inductive reasoning. When the heads of BP cut corners that result in a giant explosion, a several month long oil leak, and billions of dollars in damage to the environment and people's lives, we can attribute that to gross negligence.
When a politician decides to engage in 2 costly wars while lowering taxes for the rich, or when a majority of society elects politicians who repeatedly punish the poor and middle class while rewarding the rich, and then complain about not having enough money to support their expensive lifestyles, you can attribute that to stupidity.
The funny thing about that is your post wasn't all that funny. So you're even more wrong than you think.
I have known this for most of my life. The name reflects the idea. I'm not afraid of being wrong... at least not as much as others seem to be.
The depth of the value of errors goes much further than the topic describes. The animal brain itself is a noisy collection of errors. The reason correct processing happens at all is because nearly all possibilities are explored in neural pathways to get to the correct responses. Once correct responses are identified, neural pathways to the correct response are established. This is what we call learning in the lowest level sense of the word.
I have always found it amusing and interesting that computers work the way they do. They work in ways that are the complete opposite of the animal neuromechanism. Computers, originally derived from numerical processing devices, rely on accuracy and seek to prevent errors in every way possible. Memory is storage rather than a path. In a way, computers are our biggest hangups about being wrong put into mechanical practice.
I find it to be far from ironic that we are now trying to get computers to "learn" under these conditions. The fact that it doesn't work particularly well. When every measure is taken to always be right, how can a machine learn? It is also far from surprising to me to see that people who are so afraid of being wrong are also the least capable of learning anything new or useful or being able to adapt to new circumstances. It all fits neatly within my own observations about mistakes and learning.
Just because being wrong doesn't necessarily make you an idiot, that doesn't make you not an idiot for being wrong.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
Mistakes can cost us time and money, expose us to danger or inflict harm on others, and erode the trust extended to us by our community.
Or being ridiculed and humiliated by assholes who gain a false sense of superiority by belittling people over mistakes - many times trivial ones. Which then leads the other person to dig their heals in, argue pedantic points to stay "right" which then leads to counter pedantic arguments from the other, and round and round we go!
But hey! That's what you get when you post on Slashdot or work in IT.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
While it might be true that "we do not err out of laziness, stupidity, or evil intent", it is definitely also the case that laziness can and does lead to ignoring procedural correctness that would have caught error, stupidity can and does delay the recognition of error until it has had time to balloon into something more serious, and evil intent can cause the willfull application of anything that laziness or stupidity would lead to; but carried on much more intelligently(and thus dangerously). Not to mention, of course, that little class of statements we know as "lies", which are essentially calculated to cause errors in those receiving them.
Obviously, in a trivial sense, nobody wakes up in the morning and says "Gosh, I sure do feel like really fucking up today!"; but some people take measures that reduce the probability of error(and, where possible, measure it) and others do not. Just because virtually all human reasoning, outside of (some) math and syllogisms, is inductive does not imply that all human reasoning is on equally firm ground. In fact, given that deductive logic is useful pretty much only in certain types of math and in carefully controlled toy situations, the ability to distinguish various statements of inductive logic by quality or probability is probably the most vital aspect of epistemology as an applied science...
So, it is possibly false... In my opinion it's the best working model you can come up with. I have yet to encounter anything that isn't "possibly false"... There is no such thing as an absolute truth, it only exists if you blind yourself to all other truths. But since humans are apparently built to account for the possibility of failure there should be no problem with a 'good enough' truth...
It only raises one important question: Why are people fighting, kicking and screaming, every step of the way when their absolute truths appear to be probabilistically (or even provably) false in hindsight? It should be expected, right???
To #ERR is human, to forgive divine.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I've only been wrong once; when I thought I was wrong for the first time, but I was actually right.
that we could be in error, without deeming ourselves idiotic or unworthy."
i guess Schulz has never read a comment board
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If loving you is wrong, I don't want to be right!
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
So that's why I feel smarter after staying at a Holiday Inn.
There, there. It's OK that you're wrong and stupid.
John
In people under the age of about 30 or so. Disclaimer: This is a generalization based on people with whom I work.
There is a noticable inability to acknowledge errors on the part of young people - especially those in their teens and twenties. If there's one thing they're good at it's denying and shifting blame. Rarely do you hear...wow I screwed that up... what can we do to fix it? They either act as if the error didn't occur - try to make it your fault - or deliver an eye rolling "My Bad".
None of these conclusions make sense in an Eastern shame culture/honor culture. These conclusions, do, however, dovetail nicely with Western guilt culture. Correctly pointing out the mistakes of others can result in massive loss of face for the correctee. This will have real consequences for the finger-pointer. Publically admitting that you were wrong and redressing your errors is career suicide in many places throughout the world. I see it all the time, Westerners are shocked that their culture of "it's OK to make mistakes and it's a positive thing to admit when you are wrong" doesn't apply everywhere.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Look at what happens in Japan when a major mistake is make and in the west. Has anyone from BP taken accountability? Has anyone from Boeing ever laid down their jobs because they killed a couple of hundred people with their bad decision? Has any airline director every left? No.
But in Japan the higher ups DO feel that they are at fault for mistakes.
Your explenation of western attitude often becomes: A fault is nobodies fault.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom_filter
I'm almost always open to the possibility that I'm wrong on any subject. The way I look at it is if I'm wrong about something, and someone has given me the correct information, I'm better off for it.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
...for Lucy is never wrong. (There is some kind of circular logic there...pumpkin-shaped, possibly.)
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
and they were right, just look at how many times he was wrong!
Monstar L
Or deliberately ignoring your own engineers saying, "This is a bad idea. The wellhead will blow out." Then try to act all surprised to discover the engineers knew what they were talking about, and blame the engineers instead of your own stupidity Mr. BP Manager.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Not only are we stupid, We don't even know how stupid we are!
Now we just need to get some people to realize that they aren't always right! After that we can move to those that feel their belief is the only correct one. (Phelps clan, I'm looking at you...) Seriously though, it seems like a good number of the problems we "suffer" is due to people not wanting to admit they may be wrong.
2 079 460 347 to 1 against.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Often, the only way to get answers to your questions on the internet is to claim things about the subject you know are wrong. Then heaps of people will jump on you to tell you what is correct.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
Well, *Probably*...
Shulz is precise, just not quite accurate in her descriptions, assertions and conclusions.
It's not (just) inductive reasoning that produces the humans' results, it's heuristics. We create the fastest good enough result rather than the best possible result more slowly. The former proved conclusions that are correct enough but very fast, which evolution favors over slower but more accurate decision making. You can be right as god, but if you get ate you're just very right poop.
Heuristics works in all directions, top-down, bottom-up and side-to-side. Inductive, deductive and all the rest is labels we developed much later to try to describe what we could figure out about what's really going on in our heads. We can do those things because they're all part of how we work, but on the fly we never work in only one direction. Heuristics develops chains of thought according to associations, and so can fill in the chain (more often, the tree)
There are some things that defy logical reasoning, such as language. We can use reasoning to figure out how to talk about the arrangement in memory of the items we can recall and so talk about, but learning to communicate happens far faster than learning can account for. Hence "generative grammar" and the utterly arbitrary nature of language production. Such things are predetermined in the way of species specific behaviors. We are genetically predisposed for these, and no logic could possibly keep up. This could be hardwired heuristics, though nobody can prove that as yet, but it certainly acts like it.
So, heuristics, not induction, plus hardwired exceptions. Thus, we're never right, but we're right enough (to varying degrees) fast enough to survive.
Top Shulz's cake with that frosting, and her precision becomes accurate also when it comes to our (neuroscientists) present best picture of how we think.
It's not in the article above, but thinking that's always completely right has the major failing of being unable to produce novel responses. Heuristics allow the adaptability which novel situations require (another ability favored by evolution as well as Dr. Chandra), and which allows for creativity.
Sounds like a very good book. Adequately correct too. Must have been written heuristically.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
I realize paranoia is delectable, but you will feel much better if you seek peaceful oblivion before the Illuminati win.
I suggest suicide.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
This sounds a lot like a book I read a few years ago:
To engineer is human: the role of failure in successful design By Henry Petroski
http://books.google.com/books?id=mkLB8dasvPYC&dq=engineering+failure+book&printsec=frontcover&source=in&hl=en&ei=wGcfTKjnD8mOlAfquKTACw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=11&ved=0CEkQ6AEwCg#v=onepage&q=engineering%20failure%20book&f=false
-Rich
Be Strong Be Wrong.
As a PhD student of Machine Learning, I used to ask myself this same question:
Is practically error-free hardware to blame for our shortcomings in solving Machine Learning problems?
The short answer: IMHO, no.
The long answer:
On error-free hardware, software can simulate erroneous processes. Such approaches are attempted all the time in ML.
True, this simulation would be more efficiently implemented in hardware than in software (in terms of running time, not R&D time or cost), and efficiency is key in ML.
But the inefficiency is not why it hasn't been successfully done yet.
The reason is that we don't know how. We're trying different things, but nothing has been good enough yet.
When a working "Strong AI" learning algorithm is found, if it relies on the simulation of random error in its calculations (which, to be honest, I'm not sure it must),
it may indeed be worthwhile to produce hardware that is erroneous in the "right" way to accelerate these calculations.
But at the moment we don't know what errors are helpful for an algorithm we don't have.
The speedup of hardware vs. software, while occasionally huge, shouldn't prevent us from demonstrating in software, even if only on small test-cases, a good general learning algorithm when one is found.
And I am very Human
Once upon a time the U.S. Army brass came up with a policy called 'No mistakes, no excuses.'
'No excuses' we could understand, but 'no mistakes?' On a battlefield? What stupid little Ivy League wonk came up with this idiocy?
So, we all became liars.
Regards;
David Hume pointed all of this out hundreds of years ago. And he backed up all his claims with plenty of evidence that was readily available at the time.
I wonder if Kathryn Schulz's is aware of this?
it is kind of insulting to talk of eastern culture as this "shame culture/ honor culture", or a western "guilt" culture
it implies there is no shame/ honor in the west, and no guilt in the east. it also implies motivations in the east, or west, can be understood with simplistic facile concepts
what your words above really say is that some people, yourself, are simpleminded: that you buy into overly broad brushstrokes, surface level pop psychology ideas about other groups of people you know little about
i don't know how many stupid movies or bad television shows i've seen with an exotic "oriental" plotline where the sudden shock twist that the guest character feels shame, because he's chinese/ japanese. i can only guess in japan or china they have exotic western guest stars in television serials where the shocking plot twist is that the character is burdened with catholic guilt. pffffffft
this whole notion of shame/ honor in the east, or guilt in the west, as if those concepts don't motivate people in the west/ east, as if everyone in the east/ west were one dimensional stock hollywood characters, is stereotyping, plain and simple. it does not expand your mind to think in these ways about other cultures, it stultifies your mind and REDUCES your ability to understand other people in other cultures, to trade in puerile ideas about whole groups of people
guess what: we're all human beings. cultural differences are shallow surface level conceits, not deep mystical differences. there are no deep mystical differences. we all sit on the toilet in the morning, and we all laugh at bad jokes
stop with the shallow exoticizing of peoples and places you barely know
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Artificial intelligence is the study of how to make real computers act like the ones in the movies.
"Once we recognize that we do not err out of laziness, stupidity, or evil intent, we can liberate ourselves from the impossible burden of trying to be permanently right."
This is almost too self-referential, but the fact that most mistakes are honest does not mean that all mistakes are honest. That would be an error of inductive reasoning. And in fact that inductive reasoning (assumption of honesty/ fair play/ empathy) is exactly the vulnerability that makes sociopath-type behavior rewarding. It is, in short, the reward behind the "defect" option in your Prisoner's Dilemma game.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Why is the "BP manager" currently out on a yacht at some annual event instead of sat in court, desperately defending himself from a public prosecutor with a battery of lawyers funded by the US government, WWF, and GreenPeace? No doubt they all want a piece of his personal fortune... Especially the lawyers.
He shouldn't be out sailing, he should be taking a plea bargain involving a few hundred million dollars in personal fines and 15 years in a federal prison.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
we need to recognize that human fallibility is part and parcel of human brilliance
Yet another reason why the idiots pushing for instant replays in baseball should STFU.
You told me, but you didn't convince me. People need to be convinced. If an engineer doesn't show faith in his calculations/estimations/conclusions, then you won't convince the leaders of the need to do something differently. Just because an engineer says something doesn't mean others will follow. You need engineering leaders that trust their teams that can communicate the level of risk associated with each path.
Lots of driving yesterday, no sleep last night, totally thought it was an article about how Microsoft fails.
Everybody "recognizes that we do not err out of laziness, stupidity, or evil intent," but those are still the reasons behind most errors. I don't think the society has imposed an "impossible burden of trying to be permanently right" on anybody; it just imposes a reasonable burden of trying not to make mistakes because they are lazy, stupid, incompetent, untrained, evil, etc... AFAIK, that's the whole point behind trials and parliament hearings. One more thing, we can't rule out the fact that some people are stupid. To put it in the theory's lingo: the inductive reasoning of those people generates conclusions are probabilistically false.
I think that anyone who has dabbled in machine learning would not be too shocked (weather by Hume's version or this post). It's the error term in machine learning, adaptive filtering, etc. that really drives the learning. As a stupid but simple example: Least Mean Squares in adaptive filtering (essentially gradient descent over the error surface).
@humanity: *facepalm*
This reminds me of an idea I read recently, that the feeling of being right is an enormous barrier to creativity, because once we're certain we no longer need to experiment.
"Never make any mistaeks." (Anonymous, in a mail discussion about to a kernel bug report.)
"If you're a (partially) foreign company operating in US territory, under US regulations (that have been entirely ignored by both your corporation and by your bribed hack pals at the MMS), at the behest of the US (and foreign shareholders), employing US citizens, and using US contractors, (the expert engineering opinions of which are ignored by management), then if something goes wrong (due to corporate-wide systematic disregard for any reasonable standards of safety, responsibility, risk management, and basic competence), expect completely justified rage from every fucking citizen affected by the unprecedented oil eruption resulting in the worst environmental catastrophe in the US, and furthermore expect to see your corporation liquidated to clean up your fucking mess, and the corrupt assholes that you bribed off in the MMS to soon be sharing your prison cell."
Fixed that for you, Congressman Barton. Now please dump a barrel of crude over your head and set it alight. Then your apology might be accepted.
you must be one of them? that is scary. everybody who suspects anyone of anything should off themselves, right? carry on.
never a better time for all of us to consult with/trust in our creators. the lights are coming up rapidly all over now. see you there?
greed, fear & ego (in any order) are unprecedented evile's primary weapons. those, along with deception & coercion, helps most of us remain (unwittingly?) dependent on its' life0cidal hired goons' agenda. most of our dwindling resources are being squandered on the 'wars', & continuation of the billionerrors stock markup FraUD/pyramid schemes. nobody ever mentions the real long term costs of those debacles in both life & any notion of prosperity for us, or our children. not to mention the abuse of the consciences of those of us who still have one, & the terminal damage to our atmosphere (see also: manufactured 'weather', hot etc...). see you on the other side of it? the lights are coming up all over now. the fairytail is winding down now. let your conscience be your guide. you can be more helpful than you might have imagined. we now have some choices. meanwhile; don't forget to get a little more oxygen on your brain, & look up in the sky from time to time, starting early in the day. there's lots going on up there.
"The current rate of extinction is around 10 to 100 times the usual background level, and has been elevated above the background level since the Pleistocene. The current extinction rate is more rapid than in any other extinction event in earth history, and 50% of species could be extinct by the end of this century. While the role of humans is unclear in the longer-term extinction pattern, it is clear that factors such as deforestation, habitat destruction, hunting, the introduction of non-native species, pollution and climate change have reduced biodiversity profoundly.' (wiki)
"I think the bottom line is, what kind of a world do you want to leave for your children," Andrew Smith, a professor in the Arizona State University School of Life Sciences, said in a telephone interview. "How impoverished we would be if we lost 25 percent of the world's mammals," said Smith, one of more than 100 co-authors of the report. "Within our lifetime hundreds of species could be lost as a result of our own actions, a frightening sign of what is happening to the ecosystems where they live," added Julia Marton-Lefevre, IUCN director general. "We must now set clear targets for the future to reverse this trend to ensure that our enduring legacy is not to wipe out many of our closest relatives."--
"The wealth of the universe is for me. Every thing is explicable and practical for me .... I am defeated all the time; yet to victory I am born." --emerson
no need to confuse 'religion' with being a spiritual being. our soul purpose here is to care for one another. failing that, we're simply passing through (excess baggage) being distracted/consumed by the guaranteed to fail illusionary trappings of man'kind'. & recently (about 10,000 years ago) it was determined that hoarding & excess by a few, resulted in negative consequences for all.
consult with/trust in your creators. providing more than enough of everything for everyone (without any distracting/spiritdead personal gain motives), whilst badtolling unprecedented evile, using an unlimited supply of newclear power, since/until forever. see you there?
"If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land." )one does not need to agree whois in charge to grasp the notion that there may be some assistance available to us(
boeing, boeing, gone.
This article confirms my response to anyone who starts to say the old phrase "Assumptions make an..."--I cut them off and complete it with "...intelligent higher-order self-aware being out of you and me, for without the power to make assumptions, we would be stupid or dead."
Anyone cares to try and explain this to his boss, without fear of being fired?
Don't understand me wrong, i'm not saying they can't take a mistake, but at the third one i wouldn't dare put this to the front...
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice - Grey's Law
My neighbour must be a fucking genius.
Circular reasoning is the most one can get out of it. We do because of we do. Because of this is our nature, thats why we do. Our nature is this, because of we do that and this and there. We do that and this and there, because of that is our nature. We are not stupid, because of we are smart. We are smart, because of we aren't stupid. Circular reasoning is the most one can get out of it.
Susie: "Yeah, that's it. Your grades are low because you're too _smart_ for the class." Calvin: "Believe it, lady. You know how Einstein got bad grades when he was a kid? Well mine are even _worse_!"
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
Isn't that what management does best? Takes credit for success, and passes blame for failure? It's the only way to get into the Fortune 100 C*O offices that I'm aware of.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
DEDUCTION: Rule + Case -> Conclusion
Induction and Abduction use the elements in a different way:
INDUCTION: Case + Conclusion -> Rule
ABDUCTION: Conclusion + Rule -> Case
Only deduction provides a valid inference. But humans default to using abduction and learn induction and deduction only slowly through formal training.
My personal sum of 50+ years of inductive reasoning, refined by experience and considerable reflection thereof, formal and informal - over decades, leads me to infer that :
- self-interest varies according to immediacy and extent considered - both social and material - and is composed of the totality of these principles.
- avoiding necesssary action or improvement is laziness.
- refusing to acknowledge the necessity of action, and reincurring in detrimental action and avoiding corrective or beneficial action is stupidity.
- willfully supporting detrimental action is evil.
Corporate serfdom is - from the point of view of the general ndividual, and humanity - immediately and ultimately evil, stupid, and lazy - through greed. Greed is irrational. Detrimental. Limited. Stupid. And evil.
Inference does not exist in a vacuum.
It is refined and improved by experience and reflection.
The immediate product of this process is your basic common-sense.
Due process, or some other such legal technicality.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
There'll always be some doom-monger complaining about something. Remember the stories about all the evidence that showed the WTC attacks were imminent? Well there was plenty the week before, and a month before, and so on.
Monday morning quarterbacks can always find something, because 1) they know there's something there and 2) they know what to look for.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Or that critical O-rings might crack and fail in very cold weather launches.
It's a good idea, but possibly not; I'm not being indecisive.
Well there are 2 kinds of right.
engineering right, "it's right cause it actually works"
There is political 'right', "it's right cause I say so",
I'm from Scandinavia, one of the biggest cultural differences that I notice in my day-to-day work with people from other cultures is that people from other cultures tend to have a lot harder time admitting that they were wrong. They see this as some kind of defeat, and the really stupid ones keep pushing their idea even though they know it's bad. Here, people won't look down on people admitting that they were wrong, instead you will get "respect" for acknowledging that you were wrong and taking corrective action. This kind of open attitude is a necessity if you want to see innovation instead of fear...
Good old VonNeumann's paper title may have best expressed the goal: "Probabilistic logics and the synthesis of reliable organisms from unreliable components"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_computing
Why is the "BP manager" currently out on a yacht at some annual event instead of sat in court, desperately defending himself
Same reason the Union Carbide guy, who killed tens of thousands of people in Bohpal, is living off his life in luxury in the U.S: The system is made by the rich. for the rich.
You can't take the sky from me...
Kathryn Schulz's book makes a great case for understanding why being wrong is so intrinsic to being human...unfortunately, and ironically, she's got it 180-degrees-wrong.
Where she fails is her conclusion: it's not that BEING WRONG is what makes us so successful, adaptive, and smart. It's the 'trying again to be right' bit.
Being wrong is easy. Being right is much, much harder, and probably requires trial and error. But if you're satisfied with being wrong, you don't keep trying. While the idea that 'being wrong is human' is all nice and friendly, ACCEPTING being wrong without any sense of negative consequence is staggeringly, blindingly stupid. Without gradations of consequence (ie more and more serious consequences for more and more serious failures), life doesn't even make sense.
"Schulz recommends that we respond to the mistakes (or putative mistakes) of those around us with empathy and generosity and demand that our business and political leaders acknowledge and redress their errors rather than ignoring or denying them. "
Sorry, but that's just stupid. This is the same sort of touchy-feely crap that's infected modern American public schools. "It's ok, little Timmy, you just keep trying to figure out what 2+2 is. You're still a valuable and precious little snowflake."
Why should Timmy ever bother to figure out 2+2 if he never NEEDS to get it right? Whether it's reward-based or something more simple like shame, there MUST be a disincentive to be wrong. Anything else is simply asinine.
So you send your husband out to get dinner; instead of buying food for your children, he spends the money on porn and beer. Ah well, you should respond with generosity and empathy, right?
Can you imagine if her methodology was followed? "It's ok BP, we all know that drilling for oil is hard work, and can "It's ok, Mr President. You just spent well over a $trillion on an ostensible economic rescue plan, but aside from simply not working, it pretty much all ended up in your friends' and political allies' pockets. We won't be angry, we won't even be annoyed. We'll respond with generosity and empathy. Perhaps you could take another $trillion from our kids' and grandkids' future and try again? Maybe this time you'll succeed?"
-Styopa
"Interesting way of looking at our failures" - by RogueRat (1710322)on Monday June 21, @08:24AM (#32639272)
It is, and it works... in fact?
Well, IF you or anyone else here reading has taken "DISCRETE MATH" (a requirement of a Computer Science degree usually)? You'll have realized this!
(As its INDUCTION section(s) show you that you may ONLY get a CLOSE APPROXIMATE of an answer, but it's one that's "close enough" for practical purposes, in the real world (because the weight of some terms & their deviations aren't as "heavily weighted" when it comes down to where "the rubber meets the road" is all & thus, they do NOT "adversely affect" the results required as far as accuracy needed...)).
APK
P.S.=> Also, as far as "mistakes" go, & learning by them? Heh, I agree, it's a GOOD thing (in that those are the kinds of mistakes you hopefully only RARELY repeat, if @ all, in having learned from your mistakes)...
(Addtionally: Sure, the historians always are fond of saying "Those who do not know history, & its mistakes, are bound to repeat them" however, it's also QUITE HILARIOUS how often we always repeat those same mistakes, all throughout history too, eh??)... apk
Campaign contributions, manager and the prosecutor went to the same school, etc.
And the alternative to such a system is... ?
One thing I know, and that is that I am ignorant...
Sure, assuming you notice your errors in the first place and that depends on what you want to believe or are focused on. http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=how-we-fool-ourselves-over-and-over-10-06-19
...every time he makes a mistake. It's just one example of his divine imperfection in action.
If "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" and "it was beauty that killed the beast" then "please stop staring at me".
You're making the right point, but you're pinning the blame on the wrong people. Engineers are numbers people with (usually) a thorough understanding of probability-based risk assessment. Managers are often clueless about probability. The conversation goes something like this:
...
Engineer: You shouldn't do this. It's highly likely to blow up in our faces.
Manager: Oh? How sure are you? How likely?
Engineer: Very likely.
Manager: So you're sure this will fail?
Engineer: No, just that it's very likely to fail.
Manager: So you're not sure?
Engineer: Nothing is 100% certain.
Manager: Well if you're not sure this will blow up, what's the problem? Let's go ahead and do it.
Engineer:
The problem is that hyperbole and exaggeration is the norm when arguing or making claims outside of engineering and science circles (sales is the epitome of this, and the reason most engineers and scientists hate marketing). And when an engineer reports the risk in probability-based engineer-speak, many manager types tend to interpret it as the engineer not having much faith in in his calculations/estimations/conclusions.
The correct solution is to train managers to understand probability-based risk assessment so they can properly make the go/no-go decision based on the information their engineers feed them. Asking the engineer to change his speak to something the manager understands (go/no-go) is essentially bumping down the decision-making power to the engineer. Not necessarily a bad idea, but probably beyond the scope of his duties.
Or deliberately ignoring your own engineers saying, "This is a bad idea. The wellhead will blow out."
Nobody said that, and if they thought it they had the authority and the duty to stop the operation. I work as a contractor for BP, and they pound it into your head over and over that everyone has the authority and obligation to stop a job if they think it is unsafe. It is one of BP's eight "Golden Rules" of safety. Everyone on-site - BP employee or not - has this authority and duty, it is a condition of employment for BP and all its contractors. If there were engineers who believed the wellhead would blow out because of the course they were taking, they should be held liable for the deaths of their coworkers, because it was their job to stop it, especially if management thought the job was safe.
To be clear, blow outs happen. They are a fact of life in the oil industry, and to think you will be able to prevent them 100% of the time is idiotic. From what I've heard so far, most everything that happened on that rig was within industry standards, and while hindsight makes it clear there were some serious mistakes there, those mistakes were not at all obvious at the time.
That's why they invented Blow-Out Preventors, they are specifically designed to prevent exactly this type of catastrophe, and they are installed on every single well in the gulf (and any other off-shore rig). This is where the real problem happened. It seems that the combination of pipe and BOP were not conducive to actually sealing the leak, and this is a serious error. The cost issue is somewhat of a red herring. The three easiest ways to get funding at BP for a project are safety and compliance issues, environmental issues, and production issues, in that order. Among these, BP will try to get the most "bang for their buck" on any given project. This usually means completing the task at the lowest possible cost. That's where it bit them this time - the low cost option is normally fine, but obviously under 5,000 feet it is not acceptable. That was not known before hand (though most companies do go with the more expensive option in this case, just to be safe), and in fact the US Government signed off on everything BP, Anadarko, Haliburton, and TransOcean did every step of the way. BP did nothing without approval from regulators, which is how all oil fields operate. Everything must be in compliance, and everything at the DeepWater rig was (at least according to MMS at the time).
As always happens after a catastrophe, industry standards will be changed, and the initial blow out will be less likely. This will always be their though, and the BOP's are designed to stop that.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
...this makes even more sense. First separate social and asocial learning. Both benefit from errors- since errors create variation (as does deductive logic). Both are essential for new ideas to be formulated and spread throughout our population.
Regardless of how variation in ideas is formed- there are selective pressure (you pay for your mistakes and the better new ideas are adopted).
This is all consistent with older ideas- such as Karl Poppers philosophy of science and evolutionary game theory.
Art and science aren't as far apart as we may think- the selection parameters are simply different.
There is one. The head of Sanlu -- the Chinese company in center of the tainted-milk powder scandal of 2008 -- was sentenced to life in prison. Maybe wee should adopt their system?
So that makes married men smarter then married women ? Because they are wrong the whole time ?
Well, in theory that is the system that is in place in most Western countries. I'd venture a guess that in most cases, it's not in the interests of the people in charge to have justice run its course properly.
The other thing that one would need to consider is, despite what everyone said, who is at fault? Was it an accident? Or was it on account of negligence or evil intent? (Or stupidity as the article says...)
Not just referring to the BP case specifically there, but in general. Things like that are IMO difficult to determine conclusively.
One thing I know, and that is that I am ignorant...
"I have not failed, I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."
Given everything I'm hearing about BP's higher than average safety violation problems, I know they may talk the talk, but apparently they do not walk the walk.
Companies SAY things all the time that they really do not mean.
For example at my company we have three status rankings for projects.
GREEN
YELLOW
RED
In three years, for projects which were cancelled, which were late, which were horrible failures, guess which status rankings were NEVER USED.
I foolishly used yellow once and the reaction was strong. I said it was yellow because it was going to miss its date and needed more resources.
Not a good idea.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
As an engineer, I would honestly rather upper management to be as far away as possible, that's how the real work gets done. Show me an engineer that wants a CEO breathing down their neck and I'll show you an average engineer that wants to brown nose with management. Also what is a CEO supposed to do? What in his background would leave you to believe that other than signing 20 BILLION dollars into escrow for repairs/claims that he would be more effective at the scene? I'm not a fan of big business, but people are just looking for a reason to crucify him. I don't go to BP, that's what I do to show my disapproval.
You told me, but you didn't convince me.
Actually, had they told anybody, the job would stop. Every employee has the authority to stop a job - any job. There aren't some jobs that some people can stop and some jobs that other people can stop, anybody can stop a job for safety on a BP rig (or any BP facility). That gets pounded into your head day from day 1 - if you see something that you think is unsafe, you stop it, and everybody gets together and double-checks the plan and makes sure they haven't missed anything that would make it unsafe.
There are practical limits, of course. For example, if I'm not involved in a job and I have no idea if it's safe or not because I'm not qualified enough to know the difference, then I have no business stopping a job. I still have the authority to stop it, but I won't stop a job because I have no idea what's involved. However if I'm involved in a job and I feel unsafe, I will absolutely stop the job.
By the same token, management may be pushing to get a job done a certain way (they always want to use the low cost option), but if they aren't qualified to know what is safe and what isn't they obviously aren't going to stop the job for safety. However, if you are qualified to know if it's safe, and you think it is not safe, you MUST stop the job. If you're working on a job and you feel unsafe, you MUST stop the job.
All it took was for one person to say "This doesn't seem safe, we need to stop the job" and the job would have stopped right then and there. The fact that it didn't means either nobody said to stop the job, or there was a serious breach of BP policy.
In other words, all of this "If they had just listened to the engineers" stuff is either complete bullshit (as in, never happened), or criminal mis-management at the rig level. This is not the kind of decision that happens further up the chain. There is a very real possibility that there was a local culture to ignore safety concerns in spite of BP policy, in which case the ones responsible actually are the people on the rig. Not Tony Hayward, not the President of BP Americas, but the rig management and possibly one level above them (if only for putting such people in a position of authority).
I do think there is a real problem with BP's management culture which makes accidents more likely. They have a tendancy to move managers around from position to position, and they tend to stay at one place for no more than two years. The idea is to get a "broad understanding" of oil field operations as well as the corporate side. This means if they are ever going to get a top-level manager, they can't keep them in one place for very long. This leads to serious inconsistencies in management of a particular facility/rig. They also tie bonuses directly to how much of your budget was left over each year. This creates a perfect storm for accidents due to poor maintenance, as the easiest place to cut is the maintenance budget (safety & compliance and production always gets funded). I believe this is why BP has the worst record for environmental accidents in the industry by a huge margin. How that directly relates to this spill is going to be subtle, though. I would definitely name it as a contributing factor.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Or deliberately ignoring your own engineers saying, "This is a bad idea. The wellhead will blow out."
If there were engineers who believed the wellhead would blow out because of the course they were taking, they should be held liable for the deaths of their coworkers, because it was their job to stop it, especially if management thought the job was safe.
Hold it. It was management who was pushing pushing pushing to get that well pumping ASAP, and management who told operators that 2 instead of 3 concrete plugs would be sufficient. It as also management who did not ensure both batteries in the BOP were functional/charged. For you to throw this all on engineers when there are numerous reports of management forcing an unsafely accelerated schedule is ludicrous and shows that you are less than impartial on the topic.
To be clear, blow outs happen.
To be clear: blow outs can be prevented if standard safety procedures are not bypassed.
That is where I take issue with the claims in the parent article. It assumes all humans are interested in being intelligent and learning from mistakes. That is far too optimistic a view. The article actually says 'Once we recognize that we do not err out of laziness, stupidity, or evil intent...' But people DO err out of those reasons (I equate greed with 'evil intent' when the person knows their actions has a significant likelihood to harm/kill others, which is exactly what happened in BP's case.) It would be a major mistake to assume nobody in the future will put greed ahead of safety and make a mistake via that incorrect choice. This repeating pattern is not a sign of intelligence.
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
So you're even more wrong than you think.
So is that an insult or a compliment?
but I soon realized I was mistaken!
I work as a contractor for BP, and they pound it into your head over and over that everyone has the authority and obligation to stop a job if they think it is unsafe. It is one of BP's eight "Golden Rules" of safety. Everyone on-site - BP employee or not - has this authority and duty, it is a condition of employment for BP and all its contractors.
Let me guess, the 1st Golden Rule is:
If you disrupt the flow of oil &/or money, you will immediately be known as a "former" contractor for BP.
Seriously, they have an army of cubi dwellers who make their safety procedures look good on paper, the managers are trained in seminars to make it look good on-site by parroting all the correct lines, the reality, as in all corporate, is: no matter how unsafe, dangerous or hugely wasteful a project, you better get on board and be a team player or you will no longer be on the team. Period.
Imagination drew in bold strokes, instantly serving hopes and fears, while knowledge advanced by slow increments...
There is no reward for admitting you're wrong. Politicians are often wrong. Politicians only do things for rewards. Therefore Politicians will will never admit they were wrong.
And the alternative to such a system is... ?
Socialism (except that the rich pay people to kill/kidnap the good socialists, so it's a theoretical solution).
You can't take the sky from me...
Wrong...
By the corporations... For the corporations.
Welcome to the new boss same as the old boss.
They actually make and handle the same chemical as the Bhopal spill terrifying close to where I live (which admittedly when you understand how nasty the stuff is, makes for a pretty wide area). I personally know they guys who manufacture the pipelines through which it flows in that plant (they have local fabricators produce it). After the Bhopal spill they drastically reduced the amount of it stored on site -- instead since it's an intermediate product they use smaller storage tanks and shut down the stuff down the line from it when that unit goes down for maintenance.
Methyl Isocyanate is an evil, evil chemical that will one day kill a large swath down the Kanawha River valley.
How about one where your capacity to be punished is not somehow connected to your wealth and connections, though I have no idea how you'd manage that. That's one of the issues I've always had with corporate personhood -- if something cannot be punished for it's transgressions proportionately to if were a person, it should not be granted the rights thereof.
This kind of inductive reasoning to reach conclusions probabilistically is probably key to achieving the holy grail of artificial intelligence. Using a metaphor for a minute - turning the active camera to point at the output screen creates some self-awareness issues that I can imagine absolutely require imperfect inductive reasoning for the intelligence to function.
Otherwise it could get stuck in an endless recursive loop in any number of ways - not the least of which could be "Why am I here?"
At least - this is how I justify why so many people insist there must be a God in charge of things.
The disconnect between this concept and most people's thinking explains why scientists and engineers rarely advance well into management and politics.
- As a scientist or engineer, it is acceptable - even required! - to incorporate new data and adapt your thinking, even reach different conclusions.
- As a manager or politician, such behavior reflects weakness or lack of principle, sometimes called "flip-flopping".
In my experience the latter approach seems to be the *typical* perspective of normal people (non-engineers), who would rather "stay the course" and "finish what they started" even when they openly admit that they would have chosen differently now. The contrapositive concept of "what did he know and when did he know it", with the understanding that someone who chose badly may have made a reasonable decision based on the information available AT THE TIME, is often displayed pro forma and then trampled upon.
Actually, the primary form of reasoning that humans use is "abductive inference", of which induction is a special case.
What really amazes me is how many people in AI miss out on this fact. I saw a talk recently where someone implemented an AI algorithm that be explained as using "Occam's Razor". In essence, his algorithm was reasoning to the simplest explanation. If you use "simplest" as a proxy for "likeliest", then you have classical abduction. He had apparently never heard of abductive inference, and this meant that he missed out on a lot of the formalisms that had been developed to implement abductive inference engines. I hope he looked into it, because he could really improve on his work.
Well... forgetting to check Wikipedia before publishing is just an error of these scientists. According to the theory, they are still genius despite of this error. It is in fact a proof of their theory. No? They just publish something "new" by making an error.
That's the sort of answer that I was expecting... This isn't the place for a debate as to the pros and cons of Socialism though. It suffices me to say that I'm opposed to it.
One thing I know, and that is that I am ignorant...
I'm not sure what you mean there by "corporate personhood"... perhaps it's something I just know by another name?
One thing I know, and that is that I am ignorant...
"I'm not afraid of being wrong... at least not as much as others seem to be." - by erroneus (253617)on Monday June 21, @08:39AM (#32639394) Homepage
Ahem (cough *BULLSHIT*, cough): Then why are YOU avoiding a response to this -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1681772&cid=32556164
(Hmmm??)
APK
P.S.=> For someone NOT "afraid of being wrong" as you stated? Why on earth are you avoiding disproving what was written in the URL in response to yourself (you, the "senior & superior" one in computing as you stated rather clearly there no less vs. myself)...??
Instead of ADMITTING YOUR BLATANT ERRORS & STALE/OUT-OF-DATE INFORMATION IN THE FIRST URL ABOVE? Well, you attempted to LIBEL myself BOTH here -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1692272&cid=32639458 and here, yet again ->
So, please: Take your self-righteous, LYING b.s. & outright falsehoods here, + libel in the 2 urls in this p.s. section which show you are TOTALLY AFRAID of responding in the 1st URL above in the main body of my reply above...
Please: Quit the lying, & put your money where your MOUTH is, & disprove what I wrote in that FIRST URL above then (which put your outright erroNEOUS b.s. to rest, quite easily)... apk
And your experience for a statement like this is.... ?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I actually do believe you. Could have something to do with being British and therefore not really caring a great deal about the spill and not wanting to see somebody crucified for being personally responsible.
But your argument would be a lot more convincing if you could show that low power BP employees have used safety concerns to stop the job, many times, and that those people have continued working at the company. I don't know if that's reasonable, but examples would help a great deal, because it's very easy to believe that yes, the management make a big deal out of stopping the job, but in reality, if management tell you that the job is safe and will not be re-examined, and you insist on bringing it up anyway, you will be fired or your job will be made as awful as possible to force you to quit. That's the kind of thing corporate doesn't bat an eyelid at doing.
Haha ,,, well, this is organizational process failure exactly because they did not learn lessons from problems a hundred years ago. We need to be reminded of this constantly so that we can actually build social systems which reinforces fast acknowledgment and investigation of errors. Unfortunately hiding errors are rewards. BP and TransOcean and Halliburton will fall over themselves to prove they were not at fault, without anybody really getting to the root cause. Because there is a lot of money at stake! How to fix this and still have a fair justice system is a difficult and unsolved problem. David Hume's theory is a long way from practice in modern society. The author of the article might not have had the intention of proclaiming new theory but rather that in the modern society people have real problems applying the theory.
They actually make and handle the same chemical as the Bhopal spill terrifying close to where I live
Lets hope they're not relying on an Invisible Hand to keep it in the pipes!
You can't take the sky from me...
"The trouble with most people is that that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than their minds." - Walter Duranty, (1884-1957) British journalist, New York Times Moscow bureau chief
"Five percent of the people think; 10 percent of the people think they think; and the other 85 percent would rather die than think." - Thomas Edison, American inventor
"What is the hardest task in the world? To think." - Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882, American author, poet, and philosopher
"What luck for rulers that men do not think." - Adolf Hitler, Chancellor of Germany from 1933
Being wrong is great. It opens up a huge selection of possibilities that always being right just doesn't have available.
Looking forward to reading the book. Though I do wish it was written in iambic pentameter.
First off, politicians do not often make errors. Most of the time they appear to have made a mistake, they have instead made a calculated decision to promote a fallacy in order to achieve a political goal. They are not driven by a need or desire to be right, they are driven by votes and money. Nor do they fail to recognize that humans are fallible. We just had the historical example of Congressman Joe Barton "apologizing" to BP for making a "legitimate mistake".
Second, induction is not an error generator. It is a method of logical manipulation of the facts to reveal new facts and, being logical, is a means of avoiding error. The errors attributed here to induction are not the result of the method but of the interpretation of the result of the method. But humans don't often use induction. They use intuition. They guess. They make decisions because they saw someone else make the same decision the same way (but they fail to see that the situations are not identical, and applying the same transform to different inputs is not guaranteed to give the same output).
Third, this is not really new information. Injection of errors (noise) is a means of destabilizing locally stable but perhaps not optimal results in artificial neural networks, allowing the network to cascade into better solutions. Hell, it even works to increase the stability and strength of base metal, in which case it's called sintering.
And then there's the fact that most of human progress is the result of people doing things randomly, and those things that seem right becoming popular, while those that seem wrong are avoided.
On the scale from random to logical, I'd intuit that humanity is about 5% of the way there.
Your description of the process mirrors that of contract companies hired to build nuclear reactor sites. They have to adhere to strict measurements every step of the way when putting together a secure building designed to handle radioactive materials and energy production. It's okay to fudge a few inches on that 2x4 or a few inches on a concrete pour when it comes to building a house, but you CAN'T fudge even half an inch on the framework of a reactor shell or it could easily kill everthing within miles of a leak. Builders are held to very high standards based on that.
"Courage is being afraid to do the Right Thing, and doing it anyway."
The legal treatment of corporate entities as "people."
Hmmm...
Am I to understand that you mean the same sort of legal status where if a business for example goes bust then the owner(s) assets aren't at stake, as opposed to the man whose business goes down and then he subsequently loses his house and his car etc. ? I an economics class in high school that covered this sort of thing but I don't remember it really.
Even so, if the corporate entity is treated this way, the entity itself doesn't actually DO anything, all its actions are due to those actual humans that operate inside it... Surely they should be held to account for their actions? I'm not entirely sure of the way the legal system works in the US, I'm assuming you're from there, I'm not.
One thing I know, and that is that I am ignorant...
Actually, had they told anybody, the job would stop. Every employee has the authority to stop a job - any job. There aren't some jobs that some people can stop and some jobs that other people can stop, anybody can stop a job for safety on a BP rig (or any BP facility). That gets pounded into your head day from day 1 - if you see something that you think is unsafe, you stop it, and everybody gets together and double-checks the plan and makes sure they haven't missed anything that would make it unsafe.
Heh; yeah; that's the official policy in lots of companies. But I've worked a number of places where, when I asked around to find the people who had done that, I quickly learned that those people no longer worked there. It doesn't take a genius to make the right inference from this.
It also doesn't take a genius to understand that if something does go wrong, you were present, you'll be one of the people taking the blame for the problem.
The old-timers just grin and say something like "So you've finally figured out how it all works around here."
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
A link between inductive reasoning and mistakes is not disclosed at all.
In theory any contractor could have stopped the project. In practice however... well, you saw what happened.
For the record, proceeding after your cementing job has failed it's pressure test doesn't follow any standard of which I am aware, what set of standards are you looking at?
Check this letter for a few things BP and friends could have done to prevent this. http://www.offshoreinjuries.com/media/pdfs/06-14-10_Ltr_from_Congress_to_Hayward.pdf
Every accident is preventable.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
That's an easy one ... he's a billionaire. They do what they like.
Here in Australia, we are having a similar sort of issue with the Iron Ore billionaires. Similar dismissive attitude being exhibited.
.
Probably for the same reason the President was fundraising for Barbara Boxer's campaign, hosting an Earth Day celebration (irony!), going to Wall Street to push the Wall Street bill, golfing in Asheville, hanging out in Iowa and Missouri for no apparent reason, and attending another DNC fundraiser before finally visiting Louisiana.
I'm pleased to hear that you were able to charge, convict, and sentence the CEO of BP with criminal negligence already with next to no evidence, Mr. Columbo. It's a good thing that this only happened in the frightening socialist nation of your mind, instead of the real world where (for now) when bad things happen we try to fix them first, then take time to find out what happened and make sure it doesn't happen again.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
It's a system that works great, as long as you're not the one thrown into prison without being allowed to mount a defense (if you're even allowed a trial).
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I hear dot dot dot is morse code for "you're an idiot."
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Even so, if the corporate entity is treated this way, the entity itself doesn't actually DO anything, all its actions are due to those actual humans that operate inside it... Surely they should be held to account for their actions? I'm not entirely sure of the way the legal system works in the US, I'm assuming you're from there, I'm not.
It usually doesn't work-out that way in the USA, at least not when senior executive(s) of a large corporation are involved. They claim they are only acting on their fiduciary responsibility to their Board of Directors and the shareholders. The Board of Directors may act like they disapprove but will rarely do anything to punish the "rogue executive(s)" unless there is significant public outrage, even then if they do get rid of the executive(s) there will still be severance packages (colloquially known as "golden parachutes") and people with similar MOs are hired to replace the former executive(s). The some individual share holders might actually want to do something both to punish wrong doers and prevent the situation from happening again. However, ownership can be so diffuse that it would take thousands of people, plus investing firms and retirement funds, to get a large enough percentage of shareholders to enforce any course of action on the Board and thus the leadership of the corporation.
Of course, if there is solid evidence the public might get some level of satisfaction from the courts... That is if the former executive(s) respective lawyer(s) don't get it thrown-out or convince at least one juror that they nothing less then a full confession from their client to convict them of anything greater than a misdemeanor. Such is life in these United States...
Humans use recurrent neural networks, just like about all animals and quite a few insects. Now you can think what you want about neural networks, especially recurrent ones, which are far from well-understood, but :
They do not reason. Not at all. They predict and imitate.
We create a 4-dimensional approximation of the situation surrounding us (including parts of the future and past, which are -both- predicted inaccurately) and respond based on that. And how do we construct the response to a specific situation ? We imitate what we've seen others do.
At no point does the system worry about correctness, logic, or even statistics. We do not follow any manner of logic, except through imitation (notice how you can trace just about everything humans do -including maths- to a single (or at best a few) "fathers" of science. Algebra, the style of doing it that we all know, with long stories of logically valid proofs in a sequence can be traced back to one book, one teacher, one point in time where it started. Everything else is constructed by imitating the behavior pattern that produced that single book.
And a simple observation can put all our delusions of logical rationality aside : the fact that things have causes and consequences : it took fully developed human minds somewhere areound 170 000 years to realise that some things have causes and some things have consequences, and that they're connected. 170 000 years.
Which means that no matter how much this article admonishes us to do so with respect to our own or others' wrongness we won't. At least, not on any scale.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
As an engineer, I would honestly rather upper management to be as far away as possible, that's how the real work gets done. Show me an engineer that wants a CEO breathing down their neck and I'll show you an average engineer that wants to brown nose with management. Also what is a CEO supposed to do? What in his background would leave you to believe that other than signing 20 BILLION dollars into escrow for repairs/claims that he would be more effective at the scene? I'm not a fan of big business, but people are just looking for a reason to crucify him. I don't go to BP, that's what I do to show my disapproval.
You could say something similar about a certain President with his "boot on the neck" of BP looking for "who's ass to kick".
Funtime Candy Wow! - my plan for eventually conquering Japan.
That gets pounded into your head day from day 1 - if you see something that you think is unsafe, you stop it...
And you never get any promotion for the rest of your time there...
HR departments of all major companies push this message. It is not the reality. They say this only for liability reasons -- any screw-up is YOUR fault, peon. If you didn't report it, it is YOUR fault, not the company's.
...I work as a contractor for BP, and they pound it into your head over and over that everyone has the authority and obligation to stop a job if they think it is unsafe.
So, if things go wrong, it is YOUR fault, and not BP's. You get to take their blame.
Managers are clueless.
FTFY
CAPTCHA- CULPABLE, and Im not joking, that was the CAPTCHA
Humans are a race to which one mistake weights much more than 1000 successes, too.
The political issue at hand is this: Should the government allow people to make irrational decisions when the mistakes can be costly or deadly? There is a movement called "soft paternalism" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_paternalism) that basically argues that many people are making irrational decisions, so the government should gently nudge them into making rational ones. There are many books promoting this idea, including Nudge, The Paradox of Choice and Free Market Madness.
This sounds all nice and wonderful until you realize that it's ultimately politicians and bureaucrats that is deciding what is "rational" for a person to spend their money on -- like they're such great role models :p
After 40 years in engineering, I am reasonably sure the solution involves rocket propelled grenades.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
I actual British people were involved, it could involve a cultural difference. When we say "I think that is a bad idea" we mean "If you do that, there will be widespread death and destruction, but you will get the blame, not me!". Its the equivalent of an American saying "Hold it right there, Bud!"
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
If we all arrive at the conclusion that its ok to make errors, then the learning value of errors disappears.
But seriously now, only ignorants try to make something simple appear complicated, that whole big wall of long worded text can be summarized to 4 small words: To Err Is Human
So she didn't actually say anything.
I know exactly what you mean!
I do computer science and the number of people on my course who think they are better than you if they start talking about something technical. They get really smug and condescending. Even if you know what they are talking about - I just keep my knowledge to myself and try learn anything I don't.
I figure if you have so little going for you as a person, like lack of hygiene, narcissism, arrogance and rudeness then the only way to reinfoce your heightened superiority is to look down on people.
Just remember who is more likely to be getting some, as that is ultimately the 'game' that matters.
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
Only if he is caught smoking pot.
"Lately, I seem to have picked up the ire of a presumably older, more mature, more experienced and professionally published writer who fancies himself as always right." - by erroneus (253617) on Monday June 21, @08:18PM (#32647888) Homepage
2 things:
#1, I am not a "professional writer", but instead a many time internationally published software engineer. Learn to read.
#2, You've only "picked up the ire" of someone you said a lot of nasty things about here -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1681772&cid=32544428 that I proved QUITE untrue, and when you screwed up on Windows in statements you made here, after YOU said you were "the senior in computing" vs. myself also no less, here -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1681772&cid=32556164
Well, you brought this on yourself.
(Anyone can read those url's & judge for themselves - so your further "b.s." here isn't doing anything more than exposing yourself as a b.s. artist to others here is all...)
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"Sometimes these types are a bit frightening with their obsessive behavior." - by erroneus (253617) on Monday June 21, @08:18PM (#32647888) Homepage
Yea, ok - again:
A.) Care to show us your PHD in Psychiatry to your name/credit, & license to practice Psychiatry, to go along with that "snap prognosis" of yours there, Dr. Quack?
B.) Care to show us your analysis of myself, from a formally administered professional environs also??
(Oh, that's right: YOU DON'T HAVE ANY OF THOSE ITEMS TO YOUR CREDIT HERE (nor I wager do you actually possess a degree in CSC, or CIS/MIS either)).
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"As a Texan, I have kept my defensive arms at home... hope I never have to use them." - by erroneus (253617) on Monday June 21, @08:18PM (#32647888) Homepage
"GOSH", what's THAT supposed to mean - & do you REALLY *THINK* YOU'RE THE ONLY PERSON WITH "DEFENSIVE ARMS"? Wake up.
Plus - All you have been asked here is just to "face the music" when you yourself stated you were not afraid to admit you are wrong, and wrong you are, especially here -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1681772&cid=32556164
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"I know it's off topic, but has anyone else had to deal with such obsessive and aggressive followers? Are they best left ignored?" - by erroneus (253617) on Monday June 21, @08:18PM (#32647888) Homepage
Oh, that's simple enough: Don't try to "get the better of" YOUR betters & especially with what has been shown as TOTAL B.S. ON YOUR PART here -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1681772&cid=32556164 ...
(Especially via the means you used in all sorts of snide insinuations directed MY way & more in that URL above, along with a tidal wave of humoungous technical mistakes on your part, in that URL above!)
APK
P.S.=> Above all else here: Don't try to "play innocent" of your b.s. here, because your own words are captured in those URL's above, as well as your gigantic technical mistakes you made shown here -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1681772&cid=32556164 (especially after you claimed to be "my senior" in both age AND in technical skills on computers also), but most of all, when you claimed here "you are not afraid to be wrong" & yet you will do ANYTHING to avoid facing the statements I made here http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1681772&cid=32556164 and, disproving them on YOUR part to show I am wrong (when I
BP's chairman is a Swede. The CEO is British. Not very fucking likely either of them went to school with some redneck, is it?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
>>>And the alternative to such a system is... ?
Revoke all corporate licenses. That would weaken the ability of the rich to consolidate wealth, and eliminate "limited liability" so that CEOs are directly responsible for any deaths/harm they cause.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Hey! It looks like oriental philosophy just arrived to /. ... what's next, your ego isn't you?
4 - A robot may not masturbate, except where such action would conflict with the Second Law.
>>>Every employee has the authority to stop a job - any job.
Wow you're a naive' fuck. About the same as I was when I was fresh out of college, said I refuse to do something because it will cost 10 times more than my solution, and the boss said if I don't do it, then he'll find someone else who WILL do it.
I spent about a day running that through my head, and then decided to keep my job. The circuit card cost 10 times more than it should have, and was eventually thrown-out, but at least I still had an income to pay my bills.
NO employee has an authority to stop a job.
He merely has the authority to be employed. Or fired.
That's it.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
>>>Takes credit for success, and passes blame for failure? It's the only way to get into the Fortune 100 C*O offices that I'm aware of.
I knew I shoulda been a business major.
They're the ones with real power.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
>>>>>Or deliberately ignoring your own engineers saying, "This is a bad idea. The wellhead will blow out."
>>
>>Nobody said that
I've heard the Emails read-out over the radio. I could probably find the actual emails with a google search. The engineers DID warn management, but management refused to listen. They ignored the safety concerns and pushed forward anyway.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
+1 insightful.
That's pretty devious of Corporate. Tell people they have the right to stop unsafe procedures, which also means they have the right to take the blame if they remained silent (either voluntarily, or because the boss threatened them with firing).
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Mistakes are OFTEN made because of laziness or stupidity. Everyone should try to do their best, and doing their best means avoiding any mistake possible. If people thought things through more and weren't so lazy and impatient, they wouldn't make 3/4 as many mistakes.
Revoke all corporate licenses. That would weaken the ability of the rich to consolidate wealth, and eliminate "limited liability" so that CEOs are directly responsible for any deaths/harm they cause.
The disadvantage to that though is that it would discourage many people from taking the risks involved to start / run such businesses. That, I think, would cause a lot of problems.
The article does make some suggestions and makes comparisons with the airline industry, and the measures that they've taken to prevent things from going wrong. Perhaps a restructuring of the "limited liability" principle would help.
One thing I know, and that is that I am ignorant...
True scientists celebrate failure.
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga