Thought for the day

[unixronin]

There are a lot of very sharp, bright people out there.

Unfortunate corollary¹:  There are a lot of depressingly stupid people out there.

[1]  Thanks to the law of averages.

Comments

[bikergeek.livejournal.com]

Without "stupid", how would we know "smart" when we saw it?

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Well, there is that, yes. Though I usually find brilliance is self-evident even among the "merely bright".

[guppiecat]

If it weren't for the stupid people, the smart people would have to work a LOT harder.

One good measure of intelligence is how many people you can get to do your work for you. ;)

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Heh. That's an interesting perspective. :) I'm not sure I wholly agree with it, but it's an interesting one.

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

Poppycock. If we didn't have to keep the stupid fuckers occupied with something to stop them setting the curtains on fire, we could just automate all that bullshit.

[wyrdling.livejournal.com]

and spending our time putting out the curtains. and everything else that got damaged in the process. and trying to design foolproof curtains, and...

...rather than actually getting something progressive accomplished. cleaning up other people's messes is just treading water.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

"It's hard to make anything foolproof, because fools are so ingenious."

See also:
"Any time you think you've finally made something idiot-proof, the Universe comes up with a better idiot."

Personally, I think the safety-ninny culture in the US is breeding the human race for stupidity.

[wyrdling.livejournal.com]

i can't disagree with you.
the problem with not attempting to make things foolproof when given reasonable evidence of human foolishness is then you become liable to litigation :P

skinning your knees as a toddler teaches you not to fall down.
or, well, i watched my son learned to walk and realized that throwing your hands up to catch yourself when you fall is a learned reflex, as his many early cranial scrapes attest. make the entire world soft enough and no one would learn to do that any more....

[novel-tharkun.livejournal.com]

While there are reasons to agree with the idea that things should be left with failure allowed, sometimes making things as tight as possible is good sense. Especially if the result of someone else's failure is your loss of time, effort, or any accountability penalty.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Things should work properly, and work safely when properly used. However, there is such an infinite variety of stupidity available that you can't possibly take precautions against every possible idiotic misuse or abuse of something, and I think trying to do so has adverse consequences in the long run for everyone except the product-liability lawyers. There should be some sort of reasonable-man test — "No reasonable man would try to start a chainsaw while holding it between his knees by the cutting bar", for example. Something to prevent liability lawyers from making manufacturers pay through the nose because the customer did something utterly bone-headed.

[novel-tharkun.livejournal.com]

Ah, you're working in the specific domain of consumer-product finish. Even there one could argue otherwise, however. For instance, in the domain of computers and their use how do we restrict properly such that it lies within the responsibility of a user to sufficiently harden or monitor their computer for data security and prevention of allowing others to take it over and use it as zombie (please excuse wrong terminology, this is not my area of expertise) against others, while at the same time accepting that most software & hardware components are now complex enough to potentially have unforeseen holes, and the interaction of large amounts of software created by separate parties engenders more areas of likely undocumented issue and damaging vulnerability?

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Ah, you're working in the specific domain of consumer-product finish.

Well, no. I'm not. I'm talking about everything from reaching under the deck of a running lawnmower to clear the discharge chute, to trying to use an electric drill in the swimming pool, to jumping a snowmobile off a forty-foot cliff while dressed in flaming newspapers because it sounded like a good idea at the time, to the recent idiot who used a .22 pistol to "drill" a hole through the wall of his home and shot his wife in the process. We encourage people to behave in the most stupid ways imaginable because we try to eliminate all the adverse consequences of being stupid. We try to insulate our children from all possible danger from the cradle to the grave, with the result that they grow up unable to assess risk, unable to act safely when danger threatens, and remain in key mental ways children all their lives.

Hazard due to egregious misuse of otherwise perfectly sound products simply lends itself to some of the easiest examples, and then brings up the compounding vice of the idiot suing the manufacturer of the product for failing to both anticipate said idiot's particular brand of idiocy in advance and warn said idiot in self-luminous letters at least three inches high that — for example — "severe harm or injury may result" if you stick your head into a running wood-chipper to see where the blockage is.

[novel-tharkun.livejournal.com]

Whereas I'm thinking of two areas:
1) Where hazard or mistake can occur due to large quantities of knowledge being needed to handle complexity.
2) Where the result of someone else's folly is your pain.

In the first, as I attempted to say with the computer example above, systems tend to grow to points where assuming average or reasonable knowledge is still not sufficient to allow strict control and thus "foolproofing" which an expert might consider a downgrade of experience is necessary.

In the second, well I can't think of a good example of the second at the moment. I have one specific to work that caused me to go on this tangent last night, but it's not something for this venue, and I'm not certain it's truly fitting for the topic. *shrug*

Regardless, I agree that there are many instances in life where this society's trying to make things idiot-proof or create specific warnings against unreasonable acts has reached the bottom and began (begun?) to dig. On the other hand, there are instances where not trying to disambiguate every erroneous possibility, or restrict from happening every error, is contraindicated since the errors can have consequences that outweigh the work input.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Ah, I see. You're considering both inadvertent user error due to inadequate understanding, and conscious acts resulting from complete failure to think through one's actions. When you say "the result of someone else's folly is your pain", I suspect it would be true to say that this is not so much a case of direct stupidity as of negligence on the other person's part. (Granted, that negligence may be stupid in its magnitude.)

There are situations and applications where a "zero defects" standard is critical. They are surprisingly rare. There are very few situations in which a potential defect, if the possibility is anticipated, cannot be provided for via a safety device, an adequate engineering margin of safety, a failover device, or some other technological precaution. The deadly defects, in this case, are the unanticipated ones — perhaps because a system is too complex to fully predict its behavior in edge cases, perhaps because the properties of a material or device are not fully understood. (For example, the extensive use of kapton as lightweight insulation in aerospace applications, based on its known extremely good resistance to high temperatures, except that nobody knew that above a certain critical temperature it becomes a conductor, since — having never suspected the possibility — no-one ever thought to test for it.) The problem is that, by definition, unanticipated failure modes cannot be predicted, and so it's impossible to guarantee that you're prepared for them all. (Example: United Airlines flight 232. The DC-10 had three completely separate, fully redundant control systems. McDonnell-Douglas apparently never considered the possibility that a catastrophic failure of the tail engine could simultaneously disable all three.)

The thing is, these cases really resolve not to simple stupidity, but to failure to manage (and/or perhaps to fully grasp) overwhelming complexity.


[I think this is the sort of thing you mean. I'm not 100% certain.]

[novel-tharkun.livejournal.com]

I'm doing wonderfully well at expressing myself of late. This thread a seeming proof in itself.

You are correct, I'm including mistakes of inadequate knowledge, intentional acts, and careless error.

I'm thinking not of situations where zero tolerance is the necessary criterion. But instead of areas where the result of a lack of foolproofing causes frustration. The examples I can come up with lead mostly to annoyance, not to pain. For instance, I dealt today with what I swear was a 0 degree of freedom regulation for sampling. This large level of restrictions, while likely leading to superior results, also lead to a wonderful threat of several million dollars in fines for the inability to obtain it, for the inability to meet o'erweening criteria.

I feel like I'm writing the nonsense poetry I enjoyed as a child. "I am not certain quite / that even now I've got it right." Or clear. But I'll refrain from arguing longer. I think we're largely if not almost entirely in agreement that the level of foolproofing and liability addressure has long since passed the reasonable. But I find the response that all foolproofing is unworthy a goal as almost knee-jerk and thus wrong.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

But I find the response that all foolproofing is unworthy a goal as almost knee-jerk and thus wrong.

Ah, see, now I never said one shouldn't make reasonable efforts to make things foolproof. Just that when you make all reasonable efforts to make something foolproof, and someone still manages to screw up through some truly impressive feat of total boneheadedness, the correct response is not for a crowd of lawyers to run up and offer to sue people, but for everyone to ask "Well, what'd you go and do a damn fool thing like that for?" And yeah, when you have a regulation that specifies how something is supposed to be done to such a degree of detail that it becomes impossible to actually comply with the regulation in question, then it's time to scrap the regulation, do it over, and fire the nitpicking idiot who drafted it.

[brownkitty.livejournal.com]

Murphy's Addition to Unfortunate Corollary: Sometimes there is overlap between these two groups, and it is possible that the overlap approaches complete.

[otherbill.livejournal.com]

-nods-

Even the smartest people are stupid at times.

[n5red.livejournal.com]

And too many of the really stupid ones have MBAs are are attepmting to use them.

[house-pundit.livejournal.com]

Graham's law: If the average IQ is 100, half the people you meet are walking around with double digits.

You're doing it wrong

[attutle.livejournal.com]

"Graham's law: If the average IQ is 100, half the people you meet are walking around with double digits."

You've made multiple errors:

1. You're confusing average with median. Depending on the distribution, more than half could be on either side of the average.

2. Even if it were a balanced distribution with median at 100, some of the population would be at exactly 100. This means there would be less than half on either side.

3. Graham's law states that the rate of diffusion of a gas is inversely proportional to the square root of its molecular weight.

:-P

Re: You're doing it wrong

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

1. You're confusing average with median. Depending on the distribution, more than half could be on either side of the average.

Well, yeah, technically speaking. But the majority of the studies seem to say we are looking at pretty much an ideal Gaussian distribution in this case.

And I think you're referencing different Grahams. :)

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Sturgeon's Law applies to people, too.

[micheinnz.livejournal.com]

GodDAMN.

I should NOT be reading this when I'm attempting to get a classful of 2nd and 3rd year Medical students through a set of tests!

[lwj2.livejournal.com]

Ruthless use of a bull-whip should do the job. The ones that bleed can be patched up by the ones that are a bit faster.

:)

[wyrdling.livejournal.com]

the problem is the stupid ones that think they're smart. a lot of the people with noticeably low IQs are really sweet. just don't let them keep mice for pets. but they don't get into power and think they know better than anybody else what should be done....

[micheinnz.livejournal.com]

They don't? Have you seen the US President lately?

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

The key words there were "a lot of". :)

[wyrdling.livejournal.com]

(yes, i was careful about that ;)

[wyrdling.livejournal.com]

i think he's a hair or two above the severely disabled i'm describing. a prime example of the danger of "stupid enough to think they're smart" :P

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Compounded by the fact that he doesn't believe it's possible for him to be wrong or in error. I utterly cannot comprehend the kind of mind-set that it takes to dismiss physical reality as irrelevant compared to faith that one is doing the right thing.

[wyrdling.livejournal.com]

i think it simply requires the incapacity to recognize that any reality exists beyond one's own perceptions/personal theatre.

i've known enough people like that to recognize that it happens. not that i can still logically understand why anyone would want to live breathing their own smoke but it sure seems like they enjoy it.

[ithildae.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, far too many of both groups have been educated beyond their intelligence.

[fatcook.livejournal.com]

Way too many people confuse education with intelligence and/or common sense. Our local government for instance.