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billswift comments on Open Thread June 2010, Part 2 - Less Wrong
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Many are calling BP evil and negligent, has there actually been any evidence of criminal activities on their part? My first guess is that we're dealing with hindsight bias. I am still casually looking into it, but I figured some others here may have already invested enough work into it to point me in the right direction.
Like any disaster of this scale, it may be possible to learn quite a bit from it, if we're willing.
You are not really going to learn much unless you are interested in wading through lots of technical articles. If you want to learn, you need to wait until it has been digested by relevant experts into books. I am not sure what you think you can learn from this, but there are two good books of related information available now:
Jeff Wheelwright, Degrees of Disaster, about the environmental effects of the Exxon Valdez spill and the clean up.
Trevor Kletz, What Went Wrong?: Case Histories of Process Plant Disasters, which is really excellent. [For general reading, an older edition is perfectly adequate, new copies are expensive.] It has an incredible amount of detail, and horrifying accounts of how apparently insignificant mistakes can (often literally) blow up on you.
In a recent video, Taleb argues that people generally put too much focus on the specifics of a disaster, and too little on what makes systems fragile.
He said that high debt means (among other things) too much focus on the short run, and skimping on insurance and precautions.
Also, Richard Feynman's remarks on the loss of the Space Shuttle Challenger are a pretty accessible overview of the kinds of dynamics that contribute to major industrial accidents. http://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v2appf.htm
[edit: corrected, thx.]
Pretty sure you mean Challenger. Feynman was involved in the investigation of the Challenger disaster. He was dead long before Columbia.