I do safety work, and one of the key concepts is that idiots exist.
Say there’s a something so blatantly, incredibly stupid that only someone in the bottom 0.01% would do it (say, pushing their hand into boiling acid).
If 5 people walk past every hour, you’ll lose the first hand in April on average.
Even if you’re confident that the only people working a task are competent, they will eventually do something idiotic. Someone will have multiple nights with barely any sleep, or work really long shifts, or have a terrible event in their personal life. Eventually, someone will be trying to do their job while not fit for the task.
The concept of idiot proofing can sound derogatory or elitist at times, but the reality is that any one of us could end up being the idiot given bad enough circumstances.
I always design things assuming the user is a complete idiot. This is mostly since I know what I can be like on a bad day.
I recently saw the results of someone else not following this. It cooked a £30k piece of kit, and almost completely scuppered the job. I had even explicitly warned them that the wiring was a danger. “No one would be stupid enough to plug it in like that.” 6 weeks later…
Whenever someone uses the phrase “No one would be stupid enough to…” the universe takes that as a personal challenge,
Oh it does.
I’ve also learnt that when my brain starts to think “this could end badly” to stop and step back somewhere around "could. Generally, by the time I reach "badly " it’s already gone wrong.
Did they use the same style and gender of connector for both power and signal?
They ended up with a gender bender cable. It was supposed to always stay attached to 1 bit of kit. That kit could run on 7-48V. Unfortunately, they unplugged it from the wrong end. When they plugged it back in, they put it into the 2nd power source connector. A 28V lipo was wired directly into a regulated 12V bus. That bus apparently was also connected to internal parts, and wasn’t protected against backflow (defence in depth failure). Magic smoke was lost.
Yep, even the smartest of us are idiots when we’re not on our game, in a hurry or we get complacent. I’m the technical lead for my team, and I still catch myself periodically doing stupid stuff because I’m rushing or multitasking.
There’s a reason I work to automate anything I can to save me from my own idiocy.
Yuuuup. For a pop culture example - the air traffic controller on Breaking Bad
Even it always were the same five people constantly walking back and forth you’ll lose the first hand in April.
Yeah, but you see: I dropped a penny in the vat of acid and in school they thought us about this thing called leidenfrost or something where it does not hurt when you but your hand in acid as long as you are fast enough. So, really, it is the school’s fold for teaching us lies or yours for having some government secret super acid
(…/s)
Yup. Rule of large numbers basically says that even if something is unlikely to happen, a large enough dataset will essentially ensure it happens. As the number of samples increases, the real-world outcomes will approach the expected values. Two die rolls on a d6 won’t always average to 3.5, but a thousand rolls will probably be pretty damned close to the 3.5 average. Something that happens based on a bell curve will approach that theoretical bell curve as more samples are collected.
Imagine a die that rolls a random number from one to a million. Your odds of rolling a 1 are pretty low. Quite literally one in a million. But now imagine that the die is rolled ten trillion times. Chances are very good that a 1 was rolled several times. Even though it only had a 0.0001% chance of happening, it still happened eventually. Because it had a chance of happening, a large enough dataset will essentially ensure it does happen.
This is pretty much how the lotto works. Each individual player only has a minuscule chance of winning. But when there are millions of players, the odds of someone winning are actually pretty good.
That is a man who has been sued because one of his patients made that mistake.
But even that was after he got sued by the guy who got brain ameobas from not boiling it at all.
In his defence – look at society.
I can’t do that, you see I had this eye doctor that…
I see what you did there :)
I don’t know why this popped into my head, though I gotta share:
His Optometrist looks at him and dramatically proclaims, “LOOK AT ME WITH YOUR GOOD EYE!” in an oddly regal tone.
I don’t know either.
