This Boeing news came at the unfortunate moment when I am facing some upcoming airplane travel, and I 100% had the "dread hypothesis" conversation with Caleb last week. Thank you for helping me name the fear, face it with a wiser perspective, and overcome it!
David, I had a recent conversation with our local superintendent of schools, who bemoaned the fact that so many parents drive their kids to school even though they live within easy walking/biking distance. They remember hearing about the kidnapping and murder of a young boy on his way home from school 50 years ago.
Recent research seems to indicate that as it becomes increasingly rare for kids to engage in activities without adult supervision, it may be contributing to an increase in mental health difficulties:
'All work, no independent play' cause of children's declining mental health
I recently argued with my wife about what age is appropriate for kids to go trick-or-treating on Halloween alone. I thought maybe 12-13, but she insisted that was too dangerous, especially for girls. Of course, in our town of 15,000, there's never been an instance of an abduction of a child going back to its founding in 1850.
Griff, this is a great point. I'm actually just reading an advance copy of Jonathan Haidt's forthcoming book, The Anxious Generation, and he makes this point in great depth. He talks about the "Great Rewiring" of childhood, and how detrimental it is to mental health. Really interesting, and frightening book, and I'll definitely invite him for a Q&A when it's out.
In October 2018, and in March 2019, two 737 Max planes fell down from a blue sky, killing hundreds of people. It was the result of "cost effectiveness" and of prioritizing economy over engineering.
Hi Jacek, I don't think anyone claimed that rare events don't strike twice in that sense. Crashes are rare, not unique. In any case, there is no doubt that Boeing has a problem, which is why the scrutiny is good. But there's still no doubt that flying commercial is safer than driving, and overall has been getting safer for decades. I don't think that fact should in any way lighten the scrutiny on Boeing. Hopefully it will result in even safer air travel.
I agree with this comment, and I think when calculating the risks you have to think about more variables than just "more people have car accidents than plane accidents". We do have some choice about who makes our planes, and which planes we deem safe, and Boeing's behavior and overall culture SHOULD be not just scrutinized, but punished. A brand new plane had a *panel* fly off, not a door, and it wasn't a fluke, it's a systemic issue with these planes. I honestly don't think people are reacting strongly enough, and I'm not happy to chalk it up to an "oopsie" while tempering investigations with an attitude of "in general planes are safe". I agree that its silly to stop flying for fear of another 9/11 incident, I think it's rational to avoid airlines that fly Boeing 737s. I fully support nuance, but am not willing to ignore the clearly unsafe trends with these specific planes.
It has been a huge deal, and I would argue that there are less sensational but commensurate problems with cars constantly, that don't receive nearly as much attention. I don't think I downplayed the seriousness of the situation, but it is exactly this impulse that I think necessitates some statistical context if we are to make good decisions. In any case, I think the rage at Boeing right now is probably a good thing for all of us in the long-term.
Thanks Peder, I'll definitely put it on the list. And I do hope there will be a subsequent "rise" of Boeing, hopefully with some of this scrutiny as impetus.
Hey David, sorry for the very delayed comment. I've been thinking about this one, and it just makes a lot of sense. It reminded me of an idea I heard once. I'v unsuccessfully tried to track down where I saw this, but I once either read or heard some author/intellectual propose a new way to discuss risk: risk units (this name may be wrong). Their idea was everything should be given a score that is just the number of people in one million that die while doing it. So (with made up numbers) if you had a 50 in 1,000,000 chance of dying while bunjee jumping, bunjee jumping would just be referred to as 50 risk points. If dying on a flight is 0.1 in 1,000,000, then it would be less than one risk point. Driving, as you point out, would be higher. With a comparable scale, we could compare risk odds for things are usually hard to compare and subject to a lot of psychological biases: shark attacks vs. heart disease vs. terrorist attacks vs. sky-diving etc. I don't think it would solve the problem completely, but I really think this could go a long way! It does in my mind at least.
Anyway, here's a totally unrelated question I have. I'm sure you saw the news about Sports Illustrated, and I've read a few pieces talking about the state of media more broadly. I know SI was such a key part of your career, and (as an outsider) it seems like journalism has changed so much already since you got out of the business. Do you have any thoughts on SI/journalism? Here's what I'm wondering more specifically: it made me think of the scientist's award-receiving speech you linked to once where they discussed how their groundbreaking research couldn't happen today because of the way research funding works now. Do you think journalism has changed to the point today where your career would've unfolded differently (and more difficultly) if you tried again today? Obviously you couldn't write for SI today, so you'd work somewhere else. But do you think those somewhere else's still exist and are they nurturing careers like SI did for yours 10ish years ago? Maybe I'm being too pessimistic, but I'm interested to hear your thoughts.
Hey Matt, I like the idea of standardized risk units. Reminds me of a concept from economics call the "value of a statistical life." I remember in the one econ course I ever took the professor talking about how much you had to pay someone to work in a job that would increase the risk of on-the-job death by 1 in 10,000. I recall it wasn't that much. That's an aside, and I don't expect or think people should make every decision based purely on the data, but I do think it's helpful to have some awareness of the data for making decisions. ...In any case: SI. I've heard from a lot of people about the obviously bad news, and it made me realize that while I already basically considered SI dead, many other people didn't. Back whenever the brand ownership and editorial operations were separated (and when they tried to sell a brain boosting dietary supplement), to me that was really the end. (Although, I should say, there are still one or two truly great reporters there.) But to your larger point I think the overall trend is disastrous for learning and career progression. I don't know what the right analogy is, but it feels to me as if you sort of took away the Minor Leagues, and also a bunch of the Major Leagues, and replaced with some very fractured landscape of independent ball. The development pipeline is just decimated, so if people are going to "make it" they often have to skip right from college to the pros, which isn't good for them and it isn't good for you either. (Nothing against early 20-somethings at all, but I certainly wouldn't have wanted early-20s me covering a presidential campaign or the tech industry or whatever else. It takes time, and preferably some low-stakes practice, to learn your blindspots.) At ProPublica, most of my colleagues had come from investigative teams at places like the Dallas Morning News, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, Miami Herald, St. Petersburg Times, etc. etc. If those places still have investigative teams, I'm sure they're small and not well resourced. So on the one hand, I think you have some work at ProPublica that is as good as any journalism in the history of journalism. And ProPublica can develop a small number of people to some degree, but the large part of the funnel is mostly gone. ...I started at SI as a temp fact checker, and I was thinking the other day how grateful I am that remote work wasn't an option for me (in the early stages), because I was surrounded every day by people who were better than me, and it's kind of like getting implicitly coached all the time, ya know? (Brian Uzzi at Northwestern did some work showing that implicit learning is actually the main benefit from mentoring.) Anyway, I have a lot of feelings about this, but I think it's not great all around. On the one hand, a young writer can get their opinion out into the world more quickly than ever. On the other hand, a young writer can get their opinion out into the world more quickly than ever. I mean, if a young writer wanted to get to book writing as quickly as possible, would the advice at this point be to cultivate their craft, start by writing magazine pieces, etc., or would it be to try to flame-throw some opinions online, preferably pick a fight with a controversial or famous person, and get good at TikTok? ...oh man, this is such a "get off my yard" rant. But truly I think you've hit on a huge issue, and I think SI aside, it's a bigger catastrophe at the local news level. Not only has that news largely disappeared, which is bad in its own right, it means those development pipelines have disappeared. I'm sprint-typing here, so apologies for typos, and happy to discuss this more.
At the risk of sounding old man-y I myself, I agree! I always love a good sports analogy. The internet has a democratizing effect that I believe is good, but I also think the incentives that come along with it are really skewed. I believe in what you're saying here and what I've heard Cal Newport, Brad Stulberg, and a bunch of other people say a million times: real progress/learning is slow, and it often feels like you're not actually making progress. I'm pretty sure your chapter 4 of Range is all about this. But like you said, on the internet people are incentivized to get attention, and you laid out the best ways to do that. I find it harder still that the internet rewards those people, and that reward/glory/attention/status makes me want to want to be like them. When I get off social media, that desire fades, and I start to desire truer things, like creating something I'm proud of rather than something that gets me attention. I just don't know how we get away from that, you know? And on the newsy side, well, I have no idea how to turn that ship back around. Adam Mastroianni had a recent post that I thought offered a little interesting guidance here, though: https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-slop-school-of-internet-success
I spent 3 years in the aviation sector building a new generation of electric aircraft. One interesting shift in "thought" that happened while working there was that... well... our aircraft at some point will crash. Even if the likelihood of it happening is 10^-9 which is the EASA and FAA certification standard (1 malfunction in 1 billion flight hours. Not flights but hours), given enough flights it WILL happen. The imperative then becomes how do we make sure than when it happens it doesn't kill everyone on board and on the ground. How much safety can you pack into the aircraft to minimise fatalities. The aircraft will malfunction, what happens then?
How many hours does one drive a car before there's a malfunction? Certainly far fewer than 1 billion.
Great article! Fear and illogical reasoning lead to irrational decisions. I fly a lot and always find it interesting to watch the reaction among passengers, oftentimes anger, when flights are delayed due to mechanical reasons. Yes, it's irritating, disrupts plans, etc., but I sure as hell am unfailingly grateful the problem was discovered while we were on the ground and not at 35,000 feet.
David, I've been in the aviation safety field for five decades, including as an air traffic controller at LGA, a licensed airline transport pilot and an accident investigator for FAA.
Several months ago, following a fatal accident in another industry the CEO immediately came out and said, "Safety is our Number 1 priority."
That quote is usually heard following an incident after the media infers there were mistakes or a history of risky practices. Invariably, there is a subsequent quote from someone stating, “We’ve been telling them this for years,” and of course that is followed up by a spokesperson who responds, “We take safety very seriously and will get to the bottom of this.”
Really? It's déjà vu all over again.
I was once told by a supervisor in a major Air Traffic Control facility that, “We have a policy of zero tolerance for risk. We run a no risk operation here” – which was clearly impossible. At a major railroad operator, a system engineer told me, “I design tools to run the trains – I have nothing to do with safety” – yet those tools were part of a safety system. An Airport Operations Manager said, “We don’t have anything to do with safety, we’re just a landlord. The airlines are responsible for safety,” – while airport vehicles drove through restricted aircraft gate areas.
These predictable statements are troubling because they show a disconnect between how these people saw their roles relative to system safety. Their statements begs the question, “How can we manage safety if we’re in denial that risk exists in the first place, and if we don’t understand the relationship between risk, safety, and human nature?”
While flying is still the safest form of transportation ever invented by humans, it is still a very risky activity only made possible by a relentless focus on managing risk. But when we loose that focus and take safety for granted, as Boeing seems to have done, we will start to see the number of headlines we did in the 1990's - and I would prefer not to see that again.
Wow, Tom, what a great comment, and I'm honored to have it here. What you're saying reminds me a lot of some of what I was learning when I was interviewing engineers at NASA and contractors who had worked on Challenger and Columbia projects. Not exactly the same, but in some cases there was sort of siloization of risk thinking. And also what sociologist Diane Vaughan called a "normalization of deviance," in which near misses were not treated as signs of impending disaster. In any case, I hope that this current intense scrutiny means we won't return to decades past. What do you think of the level of scrutiny thus far? Also, I'm not sure the best way to do it, but I'd love to get a few more eyeballs on this comment. If I wanted to, say, paste it below some future newsletter, would you be ok with that? I'm not sure that's the way to go, but would consider it if it sounds like a reasonable idea to you.
David - I support any effort that helps put attention in this area. You can use anything I send you and we can chat offline for more if you wish.
One thing I've seen again and again is that people, organizations, etc., are intrinsically incapable of saying, "We're unsafe," or, "What we're doing can hurt people." It's like admitting you're an unsafe driver - we just can't do it. Because of that, they (people and organizations) go into denial, drop their guard, loose sight of the risk, and unintended things happen.
But then it gets worse. Now surprised, and pressured by external sources demanding to know why it happened and is it fixed yet, they look for the single point of failure to point a finger at and "solve the problem." That's generally the poor person who was the last person in a long line of small mistakes that culminated in tragedy. It's a Catch-22 we simply must break.
Anyway, as I said, this is my 5th decade in aviation and I still work all over the world. We are not unique. Today it's Boeing, tomorrow could be Airbus. Rail has the similar issues while their safety systems are not as advanced as aviation. Medicine is another unique culture. They're still talking about using aviation style checklists but not sure how...
My spouse flies commercially. International wide bodies for over 20 years. I’m actually fearful of flying now in a way I never was in the past. You are utterly correct driving is orders of magnitude more dangerous but seeing things from the inside, what has happened to once great companies - going from a culture of safety excellence to a culture of spreadsheets and now layering DEI into the mix, I’m not as confident as I used to be. With Covid hollowing out an industry that was already facing critical shortages from retirements, I’m not so sure the skies are as friendly as they once were. There have been a ton of near misses and safety incidents that haven’t made the headlines in such dramatic ways. No doubt, the aviation ecosystem is under major stress right now.
You're absolutely right about near misses. Sociologist Diane Vaughan wrote really insightfully about how NASA went through a "normalization of deviance" in the lead-up to a disaster, in which near misses became common and because they didn't end in catastrophe, came to be accepted. Until, of course, finally one deviation did end in catastrophe. It was just a matter of time. It seems like perhaps some air travel companies have had that normalization of deviance, coupled with cost cutting and other factors. My hope is that the current scrutiny will mean we don't have to get to the point of more catastrophes before something changes. So I guess in the short-term I'm hoping for good luck (which isn't reassuring) such that the near misses continue to be near misses and not hits, and in the long-term that they lead to change.
It doesn't make me afraid of flying. I have taken several flights since.
It does make me ask questions about why planes have declined in safety over the past few years, and if it is a trend. It does appear that quality of many products that are publicly or private equity owned is declining, and it is reasonable to ask whether there is a correlation and whether one should be paying attention.
Hey Matt, absolutely. It's not clear to me that, overall, plane safety has declined, and overall major air accidents have declined. But I think the scrutiny is not only warranted but critical, and hopefully it will help forestall future catastrophes.
Hey Matt, still, I think your point is a good one! There is clearly something going wrong at Boeing, and even if overall safety has improved, we should be asking tough questions before it takes multiple catastrophes to prompt a change. So I think we're both on to something;)
Wondering if you've ever thought of writing something similar to the NASCAR chapter you wrote at the end of Range to invite folks into curiously considering these questions. I keep coming back to that chapter and thinking that this is the way we should do engineering ethics case studies. (For those who haven't yet read the book, the chapter tells a fictional NASCAR narrative where all the data and decision making situations paralleled the NASA Challenger disaster).
I categorize that storytelling strategy as a "Nathan story", inspired by Nathan's confrontation of King David in the Bible where he uses a parable to get the point across "you are that man!"
The issues you bring up here about safety, risk, and probability are so often short circuited by our mental heuristics. I wonder if there's a story to be written here using some actual data to help us break us out of our cognitive ruts and see these things in a new light.
Hey Josh, it's interesting that many, perhaps most, of the emails I've gotten so far about this post are suggesting that I'm downplaying the Boeing problem too much. That certainly wasn't my intention. I think it's very serious, I just think it's a good idea also to understand it in context when we make decisions. I don't want people to ignore what's going on, but rather to supplement it. Maybe I should've emphasized that...the sense I get from the messages, which I just skimmed, is that perhaps I didn't validate a lot of anger against Boeing that goes beyond just this incident. So I'll take that as feedback! ....And I'm so glad you brought up that chapter! It was one of my two favorite, although it's also the one chapter that I'm basically never asked about, so I gather it left more of an impression on me than readers;) I want to think more about this comment, though. And also I'm going to go read Nathan's confrontation right now.
Thanks for this David, I feel like I'm constantly trying to explain to my family that they're not going to get eaten by a shark.
Two thoughts about your article:
- We make two errors when we think we're a better-than-average driver. First, there's a 50% chance that we're not, and second that regardless of how good we are, we're on the road with everyone - including really bad drivers. We control only a small portion of the risk.
- If I heard correctly, there hasn't been a fatality on a US airline in 15 years. That alone should drive home how much safer air travel is than driving.
Jeff, thanks for this note. Of course, in the very rare cases that someone does in fact get attacked by a shark, it's cold comfort that it was an unlikely event, but in many cases I think it's the very rarity that makes it so salient, which then leads us to bad decisions. ...This reminds me, when I was an overnight crime reporter for a while, I realized that in some cases people perceived the danger of areas of New York City almost exactly backward because of how we reported on it. If there was a murder in an area where there usually were no murders, it was huge news, and so that stuck in peoples' minds and they would decide that the Lower East Side or wherever was extremely dangerous. Or people would warn me about Central Park. I was the lone crime reporter on duty from midnight to the morning at the NY Daily News for half a year, and I never once reported to Central Park for a crime. Anyway, I certainly don't mean to downplay the severity of the Boeing issue in any way, but that should go into the decision-making stew with some larger context, I think. And I completely agree with you about driving. I understand and also like the feeling of having more agency when I drive, but it's a bit of an illusion given that I'm relying on so many others on the road.
Re: In his book Risk Savvy, which I thoroughly enjoyed, Gigerenzer notes that in the three years after 9/11, 2.5 billion passengers flew on U.S. commercial flights, and “not a single one died in a major airline crash.”
Except the 260 on Nov 12, 2001?! And some smaller subsequent incidents? Absolutely way more deaths from car accidents. But not "not a single one..."
Donald, thanks for mentioning this. I have to take credit for this mistake, not Gigerenzer. He does in fact say in his book that this was from 2002 to 2005, and I paraphrased to "the three years after," so that's my mistake, and I'll update the footnote now (mentioning that you pointed it out). Thank you! ...in terms of the smaller subsequent instances, I think that's why he specified "major airline crash."
Thanks for sharing, and always worth the reminder of the tendency to overreact to the newsworthy/dramatic over the probable. I think there is (somewhat) more rationality in people's behavior than the simple numbers indicate, however, for two reasons.
First, past performance may not be indicative of future results. It often is, and given the orders of magnitude difference between flying and driving, it probably doesn't negate that disparity, but people's concern may be that the airlines have cut corners in production (or, in the wake of 9/11, that airport security is inadequate to the increased attention from terrorists) that would change those percentages going forward.
Secondly, most of us want to feel a sense of agency over our circumstances. In a car, even if we are more likely to die, we feel a sense of agency: we can swerve away from the drunk driver, we can drive carefully, we can control our fate in a way that isn't possible in an airline accident. This may be overestimation of our abilities, or it may be the simple sense that "I'd rather not die like a trapped rat." My biggest gripe with most economic theory is how often it overlooks the real utils that people derive from emotional decisions.
If we were purely statistical optimizers, we'd never buy insurance. The costs of our irrationality are worth considering, but so are the emotional benefits (though they're hard to quantify).
Jacob, these are great points, and I completely agree about "homo economicus." (In a related aside, I was recently interviewing psychologist Barry Schwarz about some of his work showing that the process of making a purchase has a lasting impact on the subsequent experience of the product, which leads people to make what appear to be suboptimal purchase decisions. Actually, though, it's rational in a larger sense given that the experience of the purchase matters. ...as anyone involved in branding clearly knows!) ...In any case, I would argue that our feeling of control in driving is perhaps partly mistaken, since we have to rely on the control of all the other drivers. But again, the feeling matters in and of itself. Just as with purchases, how we feel about the experience is not to be discounted. To your point, there are certainly some ways in which I would rather die than others, and my first gut reflex is that a car accident does sound more appealing than a plane crash. In any case, your point is astute and very well taken, and my hope is that people throw both their own feelings and the statistical context into their decision-making stew.
And the feeling that you have more control in your own hands over what happens (driving). While flying as a passenger, you have (approaching*) none.
*Ok, it makes a huge difference if you’re wearing your seatbelt. At least for avoiding injuries from things that don’t crash the whole plane, like sudden and severe turbulence.
Absolutely, no question that sense of agency is a big part of this. And I don't mean to discount that at all, I just think it's worth considering the stats along with the importance of agency.
Yes, definitely, and agreed. I don’t drive anymore; it’s too much for me. One of my fellow patients in the trauma program, though, was in a train crash and since then can’t stand not being the one in control.
This Boeing news came at the unfortunate moment when I am facing some upcoming airplane travel, and I 100% had the "dread hypothesis" conversation with Caleb last week. Thank you for helping me name the fear, face it with a wiser perspective, and overcome it!
David, I had a recent conversation with our local superintendent of schools, who bemoaned the fact that so many parents drive their kids to school even though they live within easy walking/biking distance. They remember hearing about the kidnapping and murder of a young boy on his way home from school 50 years ago.
Recent research seems to indicate that as it becomes increasingly rare for kids to engage in activities without adult supervision, it may be contributing to an increase in mental health difficulties:
'All work, no independent play' cause of children's declining mental health
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/03/230309101330.htm
I recently argued with my wife about what age is appropriate for kids to go trick-or-treating on Halloween alone. I thought maybe 12-13, but she insisted that was too dangerous, especially for girls. Of course, in our town of 15,000, there's never been an instance of an abduction of a child going back to its founding in 1850.
Griff, this is a great point. I'm actually just reading an advance copy of Jonathan Haidt's forthcoming book, The Anxious Generation, and he makes this point in great depth. He talks about the "Great Rewiring" of childhood, and how detrimental it is to mental health. Really interesting, and frightening book, and I'll definitely invite him for a Q&A when it's out.
"rare and frightening events don’t strike twice"
With Boeing, they do.
In October 2018, and in March 2019, two 737 Max planes fell down from a blue sky, killing hundreds of people. It was the result of "cost effectiveness" and of prioritizing economy over engineering.
See: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/business/boeing-737-crashes.html
and "Downfall: The Case Against Boeing": https://www.netflix.com/watch/81272421
Hi Jacek, I don't think anyone claimed that rare events don't strike twice in that sense. Crashes are rare, not unique. In any case, there is no doubt that Boeing has a problem, which is why the scrutiny is good. But there's still no doubt that flying commercial is safer than driving, and overall has been getting safer for decades. I don't think that fact should in any way lighten the scrutiny on Boeing. Hopefully it will result in even safer air travel.
I agree with this comment, and I think when calculating the risks you have to think about more variables than just "more people have car accidents than plane accidents". We do have some choice about who makes our planes, and which planes we deem safe, and Boeing's behavior and overall culture SHOULD be not just scrutinized, but punished. A brand new plane had a *panel* fly off, not a door, and it wasn't a fluke, it's a systemic issue with these planes. I honestly don't think people are reacting strongly enough, and I'm not happy to chalk it up to an "oopsie" while tempering investigations with an attitude of "in general planes are safe". I agree that its silly to stop flying for fear of another 9/11 incident, I think it's rational to avoid airlines that fly Boeing 737s. I fully support nuance, but am not willing to ignore the clearly unsafe trends with these specific planes.
Also, if panels or doors were flying off cars, it would rightly be a huge deal.
It has been a huge deal, and I would argue that there are less sensational but commensurate problems with cars constantly, that don't receive nearly as much attention. I don't think I downplayed the seriousness of the situation, but it is exactly this impulse that I think necessitates some statistical context if we are to make good decisions. In any case, I think the rage at Boeing right now is probably a good thing for all of us in the long-term.
I'd recommend Peter Robison's "Flying Blind: The 737 Max Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing" for a broader perspective on the 737 Max issues.
Thanks Peder, I'll definitely put it on the list. And I do hope there will be a subsequent "rise" of Boeing, hopefully with some of this scrutiny as impetus.
Hey David, sorry for the very delayed comment. I've been thinking about this one, and it just makes a lot of sense. It reminded me of an idea I heard once. I'v unsuccessfully tried to track down where I saw this, but I once either read or heard some author/intellectual propose a new way to discuss risk: risk units (this name may be wrong). Their idea was everything should be given a score that is just the number of people in one million that die while doing it. So (with made up numbers) if you had a 50 in 1,000,000 chance of dying while bunjee jumping, bunjee jumping would just be referred to as 50 risk points. If dying on a flight is 0.1 in 1,000,000, then it would be less than one risk point. Driving, as you point out, would be higher. With a comparable scale, we could compare risk odds for things are usually hard to compare and subject to a lot of psychological biases: shark attacks vs. heart disease vs. terrorist attacks vs. sky-diving etc. I don't think it would solve the problem completely, but I really think this could go a long way! It does in my mind at least.
Anyway, here's a totally unrelated question I have. I'm sure you saw the news about Sports Illustrated, and I've read a few pieces talking about the state of media more broadly. I know SI was such a key part of your career, and (as an outsider) it seems like journalism has changed so much already since you got out of the business. Do you have any thoughts on SI/journalism? Here's what I'm wondering more specifically: it made me think of the scientist's award-receiving speech you linked to once where they discussed how their groundbreaking research couldn't happen today because of the way research funding works now. Do you think journalism has changed to the point today where your career would've unfolded differently (and more difficultly) if you tried again today? Obviously you couldn't write for SI today, so you'd work somewhere else. But do you think those somewhere else's still exist and are they nurturing careers like SI did for yours 10ish years ago? Maybe I'm being too pessimistic, but I'm interested to hear your thoughts.
Hey Matt, I like the idea of standardized risk units. Reminds me of a concept from economics call the "value of a statistical life." I remember in the one econ course I ever took the professor talking about how much you had to pay someone to work in a job that would increase the risk of on-the-job death by 1 in 10,000. I recall it wasn't that much. That's an aside, and I don't expect or think people should make every decision based purely on the data, but I do think it's helpful to have some awareness of the data for making decisions. ...In any case: SI. I've heard from a lot of people about the obviously bad news, and it made me realize that while I already basically considered SI dead, many other people didn't. Back whenever the brand ownership and editorial operations were separated (and when they tried to sell a brain boosting dietary supplement), to me that was really the end. (Although, I should say, there are still one or two truly great reporters there.) But to your larger point I think the overall trend is disastrous for learning and career progression. I don't know what the right analogy is, but it feels to me as if you sort of took away the Minor Leagues, and also a bunch of the Major Leagues, and replaced with some very fractured landscape of independent ball. The development pipeline is just decimated, so if people are going to "make it" they often have to skip right from college to the pros, which isn't good for them and it isn't good for you either. (Nothing against early 20-somethings at all, but I certainly wouldn't have wanted early-20s me covering a presidential campaign or the tech industry or whatever else. It takes time, and preferably some low-stakes practice, to learn your blindspots.) At ProPublica, most of my colleagues had come from investigative teams at places like the Dallas Morning News, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, Miami Herald, St. Petersburg Times, etc. etc. If those places still have investigative teams, I'm sure they're small and not well resourced. So on the one hand, I think you have some work at ProPublica that is as good as any journalism in the history of journalism. And ProPublica can develop a small number of people to some degree, but the large part of the funnel is mostly gone. ...I started at SI as a temp fact checker, and I was thinking the other day how grateful I am that remote work wasn't an option for me (in the early stages), because I was surrounded every day by people who were better than me, and it's kind of like getting implicitly coached all the time, ya know? (Brian Uzzi at Northwestern did some work showing that implicit learning is actually the main benefit from mentoring.) Anyway, I have a lot of feelings about this, but I think it's not great all around. On the one hand, a young writer can get their opinion out into the world more quickly than ever. On the other hand, a young writer can get their opinion out into the world more quickly than ever. I mean, if a young writer wanted to get to book writing as quickly as possible, would the advice at this point be to cultivate their craft, start by writing magazine pieces, etc., or would it be to try to flame-throw some opinions online, preferably pick a fight with a controversial or famous person, and get good at TikTok? ...oh man, this is such a "get off my yard" rant. But truly I think you've hit on a huge issue, and I think SI aside, it's a bigger catastrophe at the local news level. Not only has that news largely disappeared, which is bad in its own right, it means those development pipelines have disappeared. I'm sprint-typing here, so apologies for typos, and happy to discuss this more.
At the risk of sounding old man-y I myself, I agree! I always love a good sports analogy. The internet has a democratizing effect that I believe is good, but I also think the incentives that come along with it are really skewed. I believe in what you're saying here and what I've heard Cal Newport, Brad Stulberg, and a bunch of other people say a million times: real progress/learning is slow, and it often feels like you're not actually making progress. I'm pretty sure your chapter 4 of Range is all about this. But like you said, on the internet people are incentivized to get attention, and you laid out the best ways to do that. I find it harder still that the internet rewards those people, and that reward/glory/attention/status makes me want to want to be like them. When I get off social media, that desire fades, and I start to desire truer things, like creating something I'm proud of rather than something that gets me attention. I just don't know how we get away from that, you know? And on the newsy side, well, I have no idea how to turn that ship back around. Adam Mastroianni had a recent post that I thought offered a little interesting guidance here, though: https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-slop-school-of-internet-success
I spent 3 years in the aviation sector building a new generation of electric aircraft. One interesting shift in "thought" that happened while working there was that... well... our aircraft at some point will crash. Even if the likelihood of it happening is 10^-9 which is the EASA and FAA certification standard (1 malfunction in 1 billion flight hours. Not flights but hours), given enough flights it WILL happen. The imperative then becomes how do we make sure than when it happens it doesn't kill everyone on board and on the ground. How much safety can you pack into the aircraft to minimise fatalities. The aircraft will malfunction, what happens then?
How many hours does one drive a car before there's a malfunction? Certainly far fewer than 1 billion.
Great article! Fear and illogical reasoning lead to irrational decisions. I fly a lot and always find it interesting to watch the reaction among passengers, oftentimes anger, when flights are delayed due to mechanical reasons. Yes, it's irritating, disrupts plans, etc., but I sure as hell am unfailingly grateful the problem was discovered while we were on the ground and not at 35,000 feet.
David, I've been in the aviation safety field for five decades, including as an air traffic controller at LGA, a licensed airline transport pilot and an accident investigator for FAA.
Several months ago, following a fatal accident in another industry the CEO immediately came out and said, "Safety is our Number 1 priority."
That quote is usually heard following an incident after the media infers there were mistakes or a history of risky practices. Invariably, there is a subsequent quote from someone stating, “We’ve been telling them this for years,” and of course that is followed up by a spokesperson who responds, “We take safety very seriously and will get to the bottom of this.”
Really? It's déjà vu all over again.
I was once told by a supervisor in a major Air Traffic Control facility that, “We have a policy of zero tolerance for risk. We run a no risk operation here” – which was clearly impossible. At a major railroad operator, a system engineer told me, “I design tools to run the trains – I have nothing to do with safety” – yet those tools were part of a safety system. An Airport Operations Manager said, “We don’t have anything to do with safety, we’re just a landlord. The airlines are responsible for safety,” – while airport vehicles drove through restricted aircraft gate areas.
These predictable statements are troubling because they show a disconnect between how these people saw their roles relative to system safety. Their statements begs the question, “How can we manage safety if we’re in denial that risk exists in the first place, and if we don’t understand the relationship between risk, safety, and human nature?”
While flying is still the safest form of transportation ever invented by humans, it is still a very risky activity only made possible by a relentless focus on managing risk. But when we loose that focus and take safety for granted, as Boeing seems to have done, we will start to see the number of headlines we did in the 1990's - and I would prefer not to see that again.
Wow, Tom, what a great comment, and I'm honored to have it here. What you're saying reminds me a lot of some of what I was learning when I was interviewing engineers at NASA and contractors who had worked on Challenger and Columbia projects. Not exactly the same, but in some cases there was sort of siloization of risk thinking. And also what sociologist Diane Vaughan called a "normalization of deviance," in which near misses were not treated as signs of impending disaster. In any case, I hope that this current intense scrutiny means we won't return to decades past. What do you think of the level of scrutiny thus far? Also, I'm not sure the best way to do it, but I'd love to get a few more eyeballs on this comment. If I wanted to, say, paste it below some future newsletter, would you be ok with that? I'm not sure that's the way to go, but would consider it if it sounds like a reasonable idea to you.
David - I support any effort that helps put attention in this area. You can use anything I send you and we can chat offline for more if you wish.
One thing I've seen again and again is that people, organizations, etc., are intrinsically incapable of saying, "We're unsafe," or, "What we're doing can hurt people." It's like admitting you're an unsafe driver - we just can't do it. Because of that, they (people and organizations) go into denial, drop their guard, loose sight of the risk, and unintended things happen.
But then it gets worse. Now surprised, and pressured by external sources demanding to know why it happened and is it fixed yet, they look for the single point of failure to point a finger at and "solve the problem." That's generally the poor person who was the last person in a long line of small mistakes that culminated in tragedy. It's a Catch-22 we simply must break.
Anyway, as I said, this is my 5th decade in aviation and I still work all over the world. We are not unique. Today it's Boeing, tomorrow could be Airbus. Rail has the similar issues while their safety systems are not as advanced as aviation. Medicine is another unique culture. They're still talking about using aviation style checklists but not sure how...
But that doesn't mean we give up.
My spouse flies commercially. International wide bodies for over 20 years. I’m actually fearful of flying now in a way I never was in the past. You are utterly correct driving is orders of magnitude more dangerous but seeing things from the inside, what has happened to once great companies - going from a culture of safety excellence to a culture of spreadsheets and now layering DEI into the mix, I’m not as confident as I used to be. With Covid hollowing out an industry that was already facing critical shortages from retirements, I’m not so sure the skies are as friendly as they once were. There have been a ton of near misses and safety incidents that haven’t made the headlines in such dramatic ways. No doubt, the aviation ecosystem is under major stress right now.
You're absolutely right about near misses. Sociologist Diane Vaughan wrote really insightfully about how NASA went through a "normalization of deviance" in the lead-up to a disaster, in which near misses became common and because they didn't end in catastrophe, came to be accepted. Until, of course, finally one deviation did end in catastrophe. It was just a matter of time. It seems like perhaps some air travel companies have had that normalization of deviance, coupled with cost cutting and other factors. My hope is that the current scrutiny will mean we don't have to get to the point of more catastrophes before something changes. So I guess in the short-term I'm hoping for good luck (which isn't reassuring) such that the near misses continue to be near misses and not hits, and in the long-term that they lead to change.
Human nature basically.
It doesn't make me afraid of flying. I have taken several flights since.
It does make me ask questions about why planes have declined in safety over the past few years, and if it is a trend. It does appear that quality of many products that are publicly or private equity owned is declining, and it is reasonable to ask whether there is a correlation and whether one should be paying attention.
Hey Matt, absolutely. It's not clear to me that, overall, plane safety has declined, and overall major air accidents have declined. But I think the scrutiny is not only warranted but critical, and hopefully it will help forestall future catastrophes.
So I looked and safety has actually improved. So yes I agree with you ;)
Hey Matt, still, I think your point is a good one! There is clearly something going wrong at Boeing, and even if overall safety has improved, we should be asking tough questions before it takes multiple catastrophes to prompt a change. So I think we're both on to something;)
New post, new comment. I'm sure you're shocked!
Wondering if you've ever thought of writing something similar to the NASCAR chapter you wrote at the end of Range to invite folks into curiously considering these questions. I keep coming back to that chapter and thinking that this is the way we should do engineering ethics case studies. (For those who haven't yet read the book, the chapter tells a fictional NASCAR narrative where all the data and decision making situations paralleled the NASA Challenger disaster).
I categorize that storytelling strategy as a "Nathan story", inspired by Nathan's confrontation of King David in the Bible where he uses a parable to get the point across "you are that man!"
The issues you bring up here about safety, risk, and probability are so often short circuited by our mental heuristics. I wonder if there's a story to be written here using some actual data to help us break us out of our cognitive ruts and see these things in a new light.
Thanks for another thoughtful piece!
Hey Josh, it's interesting that many, perhaps most, of the emails I've gotten so far about this post are suggesting that I'm downplaying the Boeing problem too much. That certainly wasn't my intention. I think it's very serious, I just think it's a good idea also to understand it in context when we make decisions. I don't want people to ignore what's going on, but rather to supplement it. Maybe I should've emphasized that...the sense I get from the messages, which I just skimmed, is that perhaps I didn't validate a lot of anger against Boeing that goes beyond just this incident. So I'll take that as feedback! ....And I'm so glad you brought up that chapter! It was one of my two favorite, although it's also the one chapter that I'm basically never asked about, so I gather it left more of an impression on me than readers;) I want to think more about this comment, though. And also I'm going to go read Nathan's confrontation right now.
Thanks for this David, I feel like I'm constantly trying to explain to my family that they're not going to get eaten by a shark.
Two thoughts about your article:
- We make two errors when we think we're a better-than-average driver. First, there's a 50% chance that we're not, and second that regardless of how good we are, we're on the road with everyone - including really bad drivers. We control only a small portion of the risk.
- If I heard correctly, there hasn't been a fatality on a US airline in 15 years. That alone should drive home how much safer air travel is than driving.
Jeff, thanks for this note. Of course, in the very rare cases that someone does in fact get attacked by a shark, it's cold comfort that it was an unlikely event, but in many cases I think it's the very rarity that makes it so salient, which then leads us to bad decisions. ...This reminds me, when I was an overnight crime reporter for a while, I realized that in some cases people perceived the danger of areas of New York City almost exactly backward because of how we reported on it. If there was a murder in an area where there usually were no murders, it was huge news, and so that stuck in peoples' minds and they would decide that the Lower East Side or wherever was extremely dangerous. Or people would warn me about Central Park. I was the lone crime reporter on duty from midnight to the morning at the NY Daily News for half a year, and I never once reported to Central Park for a crime. Anyway, I certainly don't mean to downplay the severity of the Boeing issue in any way, but that should go into the decision-making stew with some larger context, I think. And I completely agree with you about driving. I understand and also like the feeling of having more agency when I drive, but it's a bit of an illusion given that I'm relying on so many others on the road.
Re: In his book Risk Savvy, which I thoroughly enjoyed, Gigerenzer notes that in the three years after 9/11, 2.5 billion passengers flew on U.S. commercial flights, and “not a single one died in a major airline crash.”
Except the 260 on Nov 12, 2001?! And some smaller subsequent incidents? Absolutely way more deaths from car accidents. But not "not a single one..."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_accidents_and_incidents_involving_commercial_aircraft_in_the_United_States
Donald, thanks for mentioning this. I have to take credit for this mistake, not Gigerenzer. He does in fact say in his book that this was from 2002 to 2005, and I paraphrased to "the three years after," so that's my mistake, and I'll update the footnote now (mentioning that you pointed it out). Thank you! ...in terms of the smaller subsequent instances, I think that's why he specified "major airline crash."
Thanks for sharing, and always worth the reminder of the tendency to overreact to the newsworthy/dramatic over the probable. I think there is (somewhat) more rationality in people's behavior than the simple numbers indicate, however, for two reasons.
First, past performance may not be indicative of future results. It often is, and given the orders of magnitude difference between flying and driving, it probably doesn't negate that disparity, but people's concern may be that the airlines have cut corners in production (or, in the wake of 9/11, that airport security is inadequate to the increased attention from terrorists) that would change those percentages going forward.
Secondly, most of us want to feel a sense of agency over our circumstances. In a car, even if we are more likely to die, we feel a sense of agency: we can swerve away from the drunk driver, we can drive carefully, we can control our fate in a way that isn't possible in an airline accident. This may be overestimation of our abilities, or it may be the simple sense that "I'd rather not die like a trapped rat." My biggest gripe with most economic theory is how often it overlooks the real utils that people derive from emotional decisions.
If we were purely statistical optimizers, we'd never buy insurance. The costs of our irrationality are worth considering, but so are the emotional benefits (though they're hard to quantify).
Jacob, these are great points, and I completely agree about "homo economicus." (In a related aside, I was recently interviewing psychologist Barry Schwarz about some of his work showing that the process of making a purchase has a lasting impact on the subsequent experience of the product, which leads people to make what appear to be suboptimal purchase decisions. Actually, though, it's rational in a larger sense given that the experience of the purchase matters. ...as anyone involved in branding clearly knows!) ...In any case, I would argue that our feeling of control in driving is perhaps partly mistaken, since we have to rely on the control of all the other drivers. But again, the feeling matters in and of itself. Just as with purchases, how we feel about the experience is not to be discounted. To your point, there are certainly some ways in which I would rather die than others, and my first gut reflex is that a car accident does sound more appealing than a plane crash. In any case, your point is astute and very well taken, and my hope is that people throw both their own feelings and the statistical context into their decision-making stew.
And the feeling that you have more control in your own hands over what happens (driving). While flying as a passenger, you have (approaching*) none.
*Ok, it makes a huge difference if you’re wearing your seatbelt. At least for avoiding injuries from things that don’t crash the whole plane, like sudden and severe turbulence.
Absolutely, no question that sense of agency is a big part of this. And I don't mean to discount that at all, I just think it's worth considering the stats along with the importance of agency.
Yes, definitely, and agreed. I don’t drive anymore; it’s too much for me. One of my fellow patients in the trauma program, though, was in a train crash and since then can’t stand not being the one in control.