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by smartscience 1706 days ago
As a species I feel we need a means to overcome this problem within organizations, and demonstrate convincingly to others that we have done so. Chernobyl and Fukushima were also both created by a culture of deference to higher-ups. The anti-nuclear crowd were wrong about the science, but may have had a point once you consider human fallibility.
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> Chernobyl and Fukushima were also both created by a culture of deference to higher-ups

Chernobyl suffered from compounding of reactor and test design flaws and human error. Fukushima suffered from (retrospectively) insufficient risk assessments, which resulted in a design meeting a rare event beyond it design limit sooner than expected.*

I'm unaware of a human society, in fact any animal society, where politeness does not involve some degree of deference. So saying these accidents were caused by a culture of deference is essentially meaningless without some more "who, what, why, how" and importantly 'how much' and 'compared to what'.

From the IAEA report: "This common mode failure reached a scale considerably beyond that usually addressed in the assessment of BDBAs. [ed: beyond design basis accident]". https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/AdditionalVol...

https://www.coursera.org/lecture/intercultural-communication...