| > It is simply unbelievable that the company was even able to get to the point of diving to such depths with humans aboard. Yes, my impression is that this feels naive, especially if reflects a more general viewpoint of surprise when organizations do negligent things. The law of large numbers combined with human nature seems to statistically all-but guarantee such failures over a few decades. > ... The tacit assumption seems to be that there is an agency, a government, an organization, that would review and approve such endeavors. No. You made that tacit assumption, not the commenter before you. This assumption makes it easy to setup a straw man. > But that's just not how the world works. You can't stop people from going to sea, or sending contraptions to the bottom. It's a very big world, filled with mostly ocean, and plenty of thrill-seekers who will attempt anything half-way reasonable. Even 10% reasonable. You can't stop that... This is a false dichotomy. A more apropos question is how to reduce undesirable outcomes. > ... To get it you'd need a nanny state ... "Nanny state" is loaded language, "... rhetoric used to influence an audience by using words and phrases with strong connotations. This type of language is very often made vague to more effectively invoke an emotional response and/or exploit stereotypes." - Wikipedia > ... that snoops on everyone ... More loaded language. > and steps in to stop you "for your own safety". More loaded language. > It's easy to imagine scenarios where this gets out of hand. Are you using the slippery slope fallacy? I'm not quite sure. Regardless, wise public policy is not exclusively based on such an approach of imagining things getting out of hand. There are better ways. To name just one, scenario planning is a powerful way of combining probabilistic decision-making across potential scenarios. You aren't explicitly stating your political philosophy, but I'd bet it underlies your thinking here. I just hope that you are open to hypothesis-testing and avoiding dogma. ## Useful Responses There is a wide menu of public responses and/or policy instruments available to reduce undesirable outcomes and promote desirable ones. It is an interesting question, I think, not one that should be quickly dismissed. Legally, jurisdiction seems to be a good place to start. Culturally and economically, what motivates such negligent underwater attempts? Maybe it isn't the top problem in the world to solve, but I think too many tech people have a huge blind spots and pretend to know more than they actually do. This example is newsworthy, fun, tragic, and not particularly politically charged, best I can tell. So why not use some good reasoning here and discuss it? |