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more_wrong comments on Belief in Belief vs. Internalization - Less Wrong
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This reminds me of the classic industrial accident involving a large, pressurised storage tank. There is a man-sized door to allow access for maintenance and a pressure gauge. The maintenance man is supposed to wait for the pressure to fall to zero before he undoes the heavy steel latches. It is a big tank and he gets bored with waiting for the pressure to vent. The gauge says one pound per square inch. One pound doesn't sound like much so the man undoes the latches. Since the force is per square inch it is several hundred times larger than expected. The heavy door flies open irresistibly and kills the man.
I'm not seeing how the parable helps one be less wrong in real life. In the parable the victim has seen a dog taken by the dragon. If the maintenance man had seen an apprentice crushed in an earlier similar accident the experience would scar him mentally and he would always be wary of pressure vessels. I'm worrying that the parable is cruder than the problems we face in real life.
I don't know more than I've already said about pressure vessel accidents. Is there an underlying problem of crying wolf; too many warning messages obscure the ones that are really matters of life and death? Is it a matter of incentives; the manager gets a bonus if he encourages the maintenance team to work quickly, but doesn't go to jail when cutting corners leads to a fatal accident? Is it a matter of education; the maintenance man just didn't get pressure? Is it a matter of labeling; why not label the gauge by the door with the force per door area? Is it matter of class; the safety officer is middle class, the maintenance man is working class, the working class distrust the middle class and don't much believe what they say?
This is certainly an enormous problem for interface design in general for many systems where there is some element of danger. The classic "needle tipping into the red" is an old and brilliant solution for some kinds of gauges - an analogue meter where you can see the reading tipping toward a brightly marked "danger zone", usually with a 'safe' zone and an intermediate zone also marked, has surely prevented many accidents. If the pressure gauge on the door had such a meter where green meant "safe to open hatches" and red meant "terribly dangerous", that might have been a better design than just raw numbers.
I haven't worked with pressure doors but I have worked with large vacuum systems, cryogenic systems, labs with lasers that could blind you or x-ray machines that can be dangerously intense, and so on. I can attest that the designers of physics lab equipment do indeed put a good deal of thought and effort into various displays that indicate when the equipment is in a dangerous state.
However, when there are /many/ things that can go dangerously wrong, it becomes very difficult to avoid cluttering the sensorium of the operator with various warnings. The classic example are the control panels for vehicles like airplanes or space ships; you can see a beautiful illustration of the 'indicator clutter problem' in the movie "Airplane!":