[borski]

In Range, David Epstein talks about about NASA and some of their disasters, like the explosion of Challenger. NASA is the entirely encased in specialized knowledge, and has a completely data-driven mindset, with no room for logic. If you can't prove it with data, they wouldn't even consider it. He explains that, “Reason without numbers was not accepted. In the face of an unfamiliar challenge, NASA managers failed to drop their familiar tools... The Challenger managers made mistakes of conformity. They stuck to the usual tools in the face of an unusual challenge.” Even though the mistake that led to the Challenger disaster could have been caught, it was the uniformity of thinking that lead to an organizational blind spot, and that uniformity was to be too focused on data-driven arguments.

There is a famous call prior to the disaster on which engineers had raised the concerns but it was based on intuition and a few cherry picked samples, not a full set of data, and this was the night before the launch. Because of the lack of data, they went ahead with it and we all know the tragedy that ensued. Moreover, other engineers who agreed that there was an issue didn't speak up, because they too lacked the data, and knew that management wouldn't care.