dspeyer comments on Rationality Quotes August 2014 - Less Wrong

8 Post author: RolfAndreassen 04 August 2014 03:12AM

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Comment author: arundelo 05 August 2014 05:19:21AM 26 points [-]

That's why I'm skeptical of people who look at some catastrophic failure of a complex system and say, "Wow, the odds of this happening are astronomical. Five different safety systems had to fail simultaneously!" What they don't realize is that one or two of those systems are failing all the time, and it's up to the other three systems to prevent the failure from turning into a disaster.

-- Raymond Chen

Comment author: dspeyer 05 August 2014 09:24:34PM 8 points [-]

Correlary: if you're running a system for which five simultaneous failures is a disaster, monitor each safety system seperately and treat any three simultaneous failures as if it were a disaster.