[SystemSafety] NTSB report on Boeing 787 APU battery fire at Boston Logan

Sun Dec 7 07:31:04 CET 2014

Matthew

Two relevant quotes:

1.  We can know more than we can tell

Philosopher Michael Polanyi argued that computers will never be fully programmable to perform all human tasks because humans do not know how they achieve their higher cognitive skills. We can know more than we can tell. There will never be an algorithm for judgement and common sense.

Conclusion: although there were plenty of experts in the world that could have told Boeing they were going to have a problem, none were employed on the 787. And even if they were, expounding commonsense and pushing it up the line to the people that allocate the capital for proper manufacturing and testing is always a problem.

2 Maybe they were all just sleep deprived

Artificial intelligence researchers have been tinkering with reinforcement learning for decades. But until DeepMind’s Atari demo (it taught itself to play Space Invaders at super human expert level), no one had built a system capable of learning anything nearly as complex as how to play a computer game, says Hassabis. One reason it was possible was a trick borrowed from his favourite area of the brain. Part of the Atari-playing software’s learning process involved replaying its past experiences over and over to try and extract the most accurate hints on what it should do in the future. “That’s something that we know the brain does,” says Hassabis. “When you go to sleep your hippocampus replays the memory of the day back to your cortex.”

Cheers

Les

From: systemsafety-bounces at lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de [mailto:systemsafety-bounces at lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de] On Behalf Of Matthew Squair
Sent: Sunday, December 7, 2014 4:01 PM
To: Mike Ellims
Cc: systemsafety at lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de
Subject: Re: [SystemSafety] NTSB report on Boeing 787 APU battery fire at Boston Logan

John Downer (whose on the list I think) coined the phrase 'epistemic accident' to cover accidents which are due to our knowledge being contingent as much on on theories, and assumptions, as facts. Said theories which may then prove to be not quite good enough. Apologies if I mangle the definition a bit.

I also noticed the NTSB homed in on the need to surface assumptions and make them explicit. Assumptions of course being the epistemic equivalent of  whoopy cushions in engineering. :)

Matthew Squair

MIEAust, CPEng

Mob: +61 488770655

Email; Mattsquair at gmail.com

Web: http://criticaluncertainties.com

Matthew Squair

MIEAust, CPEng

Mob: +61 488770655

Email; Mattsquair at gmail.com

Web: http://criticaluncertainties.com

On 6 Dec 2014, at 2:30 am, Mike Ellims <michael.ellims at tesco.net> wrote:

In the Guardian Gawande states..

" There was an essay that I read two decades ago that I think has influenced
almost every bit of writing and research I've done ever since. It was by two
philosophers - Samuel Gorovitz and Alasdair MacIntyre - and their subject
was the nature of human fallibility. They wondered why human beings fail at
anything that we set out to do. Why, for example, would a meteorologist fail
to correctly predict where a hurricane was going to make landfall, or why
might a doctor fail to figure out what was going on inside my son and fix
it? They argued that there are two primary reasons why we might fail. The
first is ignorance: we have only a limited understanding of all of the
relevant physical laws and conditions that apply to any given problem or
circumstance. The second reason, however, they called "ineptitude", meaning
that the knowledge exists but an individual or a group of individuals fail
to apply that knowledge correctly."

However I think that Gorovitz and MacIntyre argue something very different,
the following is I believe the essence of their argument. I have edited it
because the paper is very long and not the easiest of reads.

  {First they discuss where our traditional views of error come from i.e.
the natural sciences}

For  on  this  view  all  scientific  error  will  arise  either from  the
limitations  of  the  present  state  of  natural  science-that  is,  from
ignorance or  from  the  willfulness  or  negligence  of  the  natural
scientist-that is, from ineptitude. This classification is treated as
exhaustive.
   <snip>
This view of ignorance and ineptitude as the only  sources of error has been
transmitted  from  the pure to the applied  sciences, and hence, more
specifically, from  medical  science  to  medical  practice  viewed  as  the
application  of what  is learned  by  medical  science.
   <snip>

   {they then go on to look at the issue that doctors - and engineers face
dealing }
   { with particular situations, EMPHISIS ADDED below }

Precisely  because  our  understanding  and  expectations  of particulars
cannot  be  fully  spelled  out  merely  in  terms  of  law like
generalizations  and initial  conditions,  the  best  possible judgment  may
always  turn  out  to  be erroneous,  and  erroneous  not  merely  because
our  science  has  not  yet progressed  far  enough  or  because  the
scientist  has been  either  willful  or negligent,  but  because  of  the
necessary  fallibility  of  our  knowledge  of particulars.
  <snip>
The  recognition  of  this  element  of  necessary  fallibility  IMMEDIATELY
DISPOSES OF THAT TWOFOLD CLASSIFICATION  of  the  sources  of  error  which
we have  seen  both  to  inform  natural  scientists'  understanding  of
their  own practices  and  to  be  rooted  in  the  epistemology  that
underlies  that  understanding.  Error  may  indeed  arise  from  the
present  state  of  scientific ignorance  or  from  willfulness  or
negligence.  But  it  may  also  arise  precisely from  this third factor,
which  we have called  necessary  fallibility  in respect  to particulars.

-----Original Message-----
From: systemsafety-bounces at lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de
[mailto:systemsafety-bounces at lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de] On Behalf Of
Peter Bernard Ladkin
Sent: 05 December 2014 11:58
To: systemsafety at lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de
Subject: Re: [SystemSafety] NTSB report on Boeing 787 APU battery fire at
Boston Logan

On 2014-12-05 12:36 , Martin Lloyd wrote:

On 05/12/2014 10:52, Mike Ellims wrote:

Interestingly research suggests surgeons who expect things to go 

wrong and plan for failure have much higher success rates.

Does anyone have a reference to these research results?

Atul Gawande is giving the Reith Lectures at the moment on a closely related
topic, namely how to improve the success rate of/avoid avoidable failures in
medicine. A summary of the first is
http://www.theguardian.com/news/2014/dec/02/-sp-why-doctors-fail-reith-lectu
re-atul-gawande  The BBC page is
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/6F2X8TpsxrJpnsq82hggHW/dr-atul-gawa
nde-2014-reith-lectures

PBL

Prof. Peter Bernard Ladkin, Faculty of Technology, University of Bielefeld,
33594 Bielefeld, Germany
Tel+msg +49 (0)521 880 7319  www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de

_______________________________________________
The System Safety Mailing List
systemsafety at TechFak.Uni-Bielefeld.DE

---
This email is free from viruses and malware because avast! Antivirus protection is active.
http://www.avast.com

_______________________________________________
The System Safety Mailing List
systemsafety at TechFak.Uni-Bielefeld.DE

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/mailman/private/systemsafety/attachments/20141207/821f6b73/attachment-0001.html>